“I guess we don’t bring them kids back no more,” Biggs says. “I always said with the kids around, there’s going to be some shit like that. The kids are the ones who brought him over here, the little terrorist bastards.”
The rest of the soldiers gather in the living room (or the morale welfare and recreation area, MWR, as it’s called), where at night they watch DVDs and play the video game Rockstar.
“Everyone knows what just happened,” Hilt says to the group. “A suicide bomber at the front gate blew himself up. A couple things are going to happen: The kids that typically hang around were walking with the guy prior to detonating. They won’t be coming back here. The mission is going to be off. Hey, what typically happens after one bomber?”
“Another one,” the soldiers answer in chorus.
“There are body parts all over the place, all through the district center,” Hilt says. “Doc, we got plenty of rubber gloves? We’re going to get some and do a police crawl across the DC. If you find fingers, any of that stuff, don’t touch it. Call for one of the HIIDE guys. We might be able to get it to hit on the HIIDE system.”
Hilt pauses and then adds, “Pictures. Do not be taking pictures of friggin’ body parts. You’ll get in a lot of trouble if you try to take pictures of body parts home. We got really lucky. Stay vigilant.”
The soldiers pull on rubber gloves and go outside and begin walking slowly over the gravel, looking for pieces of the bomber. One soldier scrapes up a chunk of flesh with a shovel.
“Mmm, pancakes,” he says. “Why the fuck couldn’t they have used a car bomb? I don’t mind cleaning up after car bombs. Everything’s burned up.”
They dump the body parts in a clear plastic garbage bag. The bomber’s legs are still there near the gate, intact from the knee down. His legs are hairy. He was wearing white high-tops with a yellow stripe. The scalp is on the ground next to a Hesco barrier, a blood-wet mop of black hair.
Staff Sergeant Daniel Smith spots a blackened finger hanging off the concertina wire, and Sergeant Aaron Smelley, who’s in charge of identification, takes it and places it on the portable HIIDE machine and presses hard to get a scan. After a few tries, he gets a reading, but the fingerprint doesn’t match any known terrorist in the database. Smelley carries these memories with him, like last month, when they had to pile the bodies of seven dead insurgents into a truck. The insurgents had been killed by an attack helicopter. The troops take pictures. There’s one of Smelley kneeling down over a body. The face of the body is pale. There’s a bloodstain behind the head, making the grass red. Smelley takes the picture home with him—his friend texts me it years later. This is what fucked Smelley up, he writes in the text.
The Afghan police bury the leftover body parts a few hundred meters away from the base in a small cemetery. They place a pile of rocks on top to mark the grave, then lay the bomber’s yellow-striped high-tops next to the rocks. This is shrugged off as some kind of Muslim tradition, but who knows. Later that afternoon, two Afghan men from one of the nearby villages come to look at the gravesite. As they start to walk away, one of them turns back, picks up the high-tops, and takes them for himself.
That night, wild dogs bark and fight over the bits of flesh that flew so far from the base they were missed during the cleanup. The soldiers are under orders to kill the dogs.
I called room service at the Palm at four thirty A.M. I ordered a pack of Marlboro Reds, whole-grain cereal, a grapefruit, eggs, a bread basket, and an iced coffee. I turned off most of the lights and I turned on the television. I found a music channel, some version of MTV, and I turned up the volume. Lady Gaga’s song “Telephone” came on.
Two hours later, I stumbled through airport security back at DXB. I looked up at the departures monitor. The monitor listed names of unfamiliar capitals, places where slim guidebooks devoted a warning to something called “civil unrest.” Mashhad, Dhaka, Shiraz, Erbil, Kabul, Baghdad, Bishkek, Kandahar, Karachi, Khartoum… I found the Kabul flight leaving at noon. The airport lounge was filled with mostly Americans and Europeans. The smaller smoking lounge, just outside the gate, overflowed, cigarette fumes escaping from the disgusting Plexiglas cell. The Americans lined up at the desk with Harley-Davidson jackets, North Face fleeces, military-issued rucksacks in digital green camouflage or tan, mustaches and tattoos and buzz cuts, a few with a U.S.-issue government ID hanging around their necks in canvas badge holders with inscriptions like OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM and U.S. EMBASSY BAGHDAD. The Europeans wore suits and skinny jeans. The Afghans, too, had a few seats on the flight.
PART III
AFGHANISTAN
30 A SHORT HISTORY OF A
HORRIBLE IDEA
1950–2010, ALGIERS, SAIGON, WASHINGTON, DC, BAGHDAD, AND KABUL
In the mid-1950s, a thirty-seven-year-old French officer named David Galula spends two years fighting rebels in Algeria. The rebels are trying to overthrow the colonial government that has ruled the country since the 1840s. The French will lose to the rebels in 1962.
Galula learns a few valuable lessons, though: that Arabs have a “notorious inability to organize,” an observation which he apologizes for (“I sound no doubt terribly colonialist, but it’s a fact”); that there isn’t a good doctrine for him to follow to fight the insurgents; and, by the time the French get around to figuring out how to fight them, the war has already been lost. (“Too little too late,” he’ll write. “France was always several steps behind the demands of the situation on the military front.”) He writes two books about his experience, one called Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958, written in 1962, and another called Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, written in 1964.
If America hadn’t entered Vietnam, Galula’s work would have been left in the dustbin of history. Galula is part of the school of French military officers associated with guerre revolutionnaire. The school’s ideas are completely discredited in France. Losing three consecutive wars will do that to the military class: getting steamrolled in World War II, then getting decimated at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, and, finally, losing Algeria in a massively humiliating defeat, ending with the exodus of one million Frenchmen from North Africa.
Rather than accepting defeat, Galula’s contemporaries in the military blame the French government for wimping out. A group of French officers form a secret terrorist organization, called the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, or OAS, which is linked to a number of fascist groups, like Franco’s Falangists in Spain. An OAS sympathizer tries to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle and fails. The fascists in OAS promote the same kinds of theories Galula likes to write about. They’re also implicated in the brutal torture regime France conducted in Algiers, which makes their counterinsurgency ideas “tainted,” according to one writer.
Unable to find work in France, the French counterinsurgency gang discovers a receptive audience in America. Under President John Kennedy—concerned with figuring out ways to counter communist revolutions—the United States foreign policy and military establishment catches their first bout of counterinsurgency fever. From 1960 to 1963, there’s an “explosion of interest” in COIN, writes Ann Marlowe, an analyst who’s written the most definitive account of Galula’s life. In 1960, Galula attends the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1962, Vietnam War architect General William Westmoreland gets him a research position at Harvard, where he becomes friends with Henry Kissinger. Galula lasts a year in Cambridge before another American counterinsurgency expert—General Edward Lansdale, a man darkly parodied in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American—tries to help him get a job at Mobil Oil company. Galula’s career never quite takes off in Washington, though there’s evidence of his thinking in some of the Vietnam War’s biggest debacles and boondoggles, including the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program (CORDS; his book Pacification in Algeria will be cited in a previously classified USAID study laying out the principles for the program) and the controversial Phoenix Program, whi
ch assassinates more than twenty thousand suspected Vietcong sympathizers. (One of the American minds behind the Phoenix operation, Nelson Brickham, would carry Galula’s other book around Vietnam, pushing it on his friends.) Galula returns to Paris in 1964.
Over the next eight years, the United States military adopts a variety of counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam, such as physically separating the local population from the insurgency in the strategic hamlet program, which required the forcible removal of peasants from their villages. After leaving over three million Vietnamese dead and 58,195 American soldiers killed, the United States withdraws from Southeast Asia, failing to accomplish its goals of defeating the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. After the war ends, counterinsurgency becomes anathema in American military circles. The backlash, according to historian Andrew Birtle, was due to the fact that COIN had been “overblown and oversold.” In 1984, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger pens what is seen as official repudiation of the U.S. strategy in Vietnam. The doctrine states the U.S. should only get involved in conflicts with limited engagements, clear exit strategies, and use overwhelming force. A decade later, Weinberger’s policy is updated and enshrined by General Colin Powell—himself a Vietnam veteran—in what becomes known as the Powell Doctrine.
By the 1990s, counterinsurgency has been definitively replaced by a new fad of the moment, Revolution in Military Affairs, or RMA. RMA calls for using technology, not troops, to fight our future wars. Even General David Petraeus—the father of the modern counterinsurgency movement, which will find inspiration in Galula’s theories—promotes technology over boots on the ground, writing a paper in 1997 called “Never Send a Man When You Can Send a Bullet.” During the 2000 election, avoiding sending American troops to perform nation-building missions is conservative dogma, leading then-candidate George W. Bush to say that he wouldn’t do “nation-building.” His national security advisor Condoleezza Rice would say that “We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.” When both the wars in Afghansitan and Iraq begin, they are premised on this idea of high technology, low risk—quick, deadly, and as few American troops on the ground as possible, as was the case in the first Gulf War.
It’s the decision in 2003 to invade Iraq that eventually leads to the revival of counterinsurgency within the U.S. military. A number of the military officers and advisors associated with COIN—those COINdinistas—would later say they had serious reservations about the invasion. McChrystal tells me he didn’t think Iraq was a “good idea” because the country didn’t really pose a terrorist threat; Petraeus would famously ask during the invasion, “Tell me how this ends?” hinting at his own suspicions. Military officials in Baghdad claim in April 2003 that there will only be a few thousand Marines in Iraq by the end of the summer, and plan to start bringing the troops home. On the ground, an insurgency is quickly taking root, though few commanders will admit it—and it takes three more years before units begin to uniformly apply principles to counter it.
As in the early sixties, the Americans find another foreigner to help them craft their theories. This time, it’s an Australian by the name of David Kilcullen. Kilcullen gets flattered in a series of media profiles and becomes a top advisor to General Petraeus. Like Galula, he’ll write two books (The Accidental Guerrilla and another just called Counterinsurgency) making the case not just for counterinsurgency in Iraq, but COIN in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and number of other possible countries over the decades to come. (Kilcullen, too, views the decision to invade Iraq as “fucking stupid.”) Kilcullen’s most formative experience, he writes, is from a few months he spent in West Java in the 1996. Armed with time in Indonesia, he’s embraced by a cadre of American officers who want counterinsurgency to become the dominant force shaping U.S. military policy. One of these officers, John Nagl, writes another book that fuels the COINdinista revolution, called Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, about the British colonial war in Malaya.
What happens next is now part of the movement’s legend. Horrified by the disaster in Iraq, a group of savvy young colonels and generals spends a year in Fort Leavenworth in 2006 under the tutelage of David Petraeus, writing a brand-new counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24. The book is downloaded 1.5 million times in a month. It references David Galula’s experience in Algeria forty-two times. Galula’s experience—a French captain who commanded only 120 men in a lightly populated rural area in a North African country sixty years ago—becomes the model for America’s new war planners.
The manual performs a rather impressive sleight of hand: tying counterinsurgency to the War on Terror. The vast majority of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is not against any combatant who poses a threat to the United States homeland. But to justify the tremendous outlay of resources and lives it requires to enact a counterinsurgency plan, the theorists claim that COIN, somehow, is an effective way to deal with transnational terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. That this is patently false does not give the movement much pause. A RAND study, “How Terrorist Groups End,” commissioned in 2008, explicitly points out that the best way to defeat terrorist networks is not through military force, but through law enforcement. The authors looked at 648 terrorist groups that were active from 1968 to 2006. In 40 percent of the cases, policing is “the most effective strategy,” with local intelligence and police agencies able to able to penetrate and disrupt the terror groups, while 43 percent reached a political accommodation with the government. The study states: “Military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of the cases,” and that military force has not “significantly undermined [Al-Qaeda’s] capabilities.”
After completing the new manual, Petraeus gets picked to return to Iraq to put his revamped theory to the test. He asks for twenty thousand more troops and gets them, increasing the overall number of forces in Iraq to a hundred fifty thousand, or a 15 percent increase. What follows is eighteen months of brutal fighting, at the cost of over one thousand American lives, and over ten thousand Iraqis killed. Behind the scenes, McChrystal, operating his own Phoenix-like Special Ops program, wipes out “thousands,” according to McChrystal’s deputy, Major General Bill Mayville, noting that “JSOC was a killing machine.” Violence does, however, eventually decline, and Petraeus—and counterinsurgency—is able to take credit for creating the conditions for a face-saving withdrawal. COIN, it appears, is finally vindicated. The surge becomes a modern military myth, one eagerly embraced in Washington by those in the media and political world who’d been complicit in starting the Iraq War.
A closer inspection of the surge myth reveals a murkier set of factors. One of the major turning points in the war is in Anbar province, when local tribal leaders decide to turn against Al-Qaeda. This starts happening a year before Petraeus returns to command and has little to do with American military strategy. Analysis crediting the turnaround in Anbar usually ignores the reason why Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was able to establish a foothold there in the first place: American bungling for the first three years of the war. The tribal leaders welcomed Al-Qaeda to fight the American occupiers, but then realized they’d made a significant tactical error. Al-Qaeda in Iraq eclipsed the American occupation in brutality and stupidity—as one tribal leader would say, he would have “worked with the devil” to beat Al-Qaeda. The tribal leaders realized that they weren’t just fighting the Americans—the new Shiite-led government in Baghdad was also keen to wipe them out. Faced with the brutality of AQI, coupled with a sectarian cleansing campaign originating from the highest levels of the new government in Baghdad, the tribal leaders, mainly Sunnis, make a desperate play: They tell the Americans that for the right price, they’d partner with them. American soldiers start to hand out bags of cash to insurgents—about $360 million spent in just one year. Overnight, former enemies who had killed Americans for three straight years became “freedom fighters.” (“They are true Iraqi patriots,” as one American general will describe his former enemies.) We find a way to buy off the enemies we’d created by i
nvading—the strategy is akin to digging a hole in the desert, then filling the hole with cash and dead bodies and calling it a victory.
In Baghdad, the sectarian cleansing campaign had already taken its toll. Over 1.5 million refugees flee the country, and neighborhoods that were once ethnically mixed have been almost entirely cleansed. The COINdinistas strive to prove the surge strategy is an enlightened form of combat—“graduate level of war,” as FM 3-24 calls COIN—but the reality on the ground is dark and not very reminiscent of graduate school. Petraeus and his allies decide to team up with a Shiite Islamist government, picking the majority’s side in a civil war. The Americans themselves round up tens of thousands of young Iraqi males. The Iraqi army and police, fully funded and trained by the U.S. military, conduct a campaign of torture and killing, assassinating suspected enemies and abusing Sunnis with electric shocks and power drills, with entire units being used as death squads. The Sunnis respond in kind. The American response to this campaign, as The New York Times would later note, was an “institutional shrug.”
In the end, the surge proved extremely flawed: Its justification, to allow the Iraqis breathing room to set up a multiethnic government, doesn’t work. The Shiite government, even after violence drops to only three hundred Iraqi civilians getting killed a month in 2009—as opposed to three thousand a month in 2006—continues to go after the Sunnis. The Shiites now have an even greater edge: The names and biometrics of Sunni insurgents who had temporarily allied themselves with the Americans are easily accessible to the new Iraqi government.
None of this really matters, though, in Washington, DC, a reality of which Petraeus is acutely aware. As he’d written earlier in his career, it’s not what happens that matters; it’s what policy makers think happens—the key is “perception,” he writes And the perception in Washington is that the surge is a triumph. Though a political failure in Iraq, it proves a political success in Washington.
The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Page 19