American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  Insurgent activity in the area fell, including the emplacement of deadly roadside bombs, as the armed tribesmen, their families, and residents as a whole grew more confident in reporting Taliban activity. Information traveled rapidly by word of mouth through the tribe and its web of connections, creating a swift and robust early warning network against potential attacks. Jim often said he had not one checkpoint but four thousand—they were the four thousand pairs of eyes and ears of the population in Mangwel and surrounding areas. Tips from local people and sources began flowing in by cell phone. Jim gave some villagers phones and small payments to report on insurgent activity, helping him to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Meanwhile, gunfire rang out from the range next to the qalat and the explosions from mortars fired by Jim’s team thundered down the valley, in a warning to insurgents who might challenge the tribe and their American comrades. The Mohmands, already relatively unified, were emerging as the strongest tribe in the area under the alliance of Noor Afzhal and Jim.

  The Taliban, led by Abu Hamam, was caught off guard by the rapid spread of arbakai in the district and immediately tried to disrupt it. The insurgents had influence outside the Mohmand area such as in the village cluster of Kawer, along the stretch of road known as Zombieland where they had frequently placed bombs. In February, Jim received a report that insurgents had placed another bomb there. He found the bomb booby-trapped with a grenade, which he detonated by throwing a rock at it, the blast perforating his eardrum. Unlike Mangwel, Kawer was not unified by one strong tribe, giving the Taliban more opportunities. A U.S. military patrol from COP Penich killed four of Hamam’s fighters in Kawer in February, angering the insurgent leader. The arbakai commander in Kawer, a taxi driver named Gujar, was said to be playing both sides. The Taliban thought he tipped off the Americans who killed its fighters, and Jim believed he was involved in placing the bomb that injured him. One day, when Gujar was returning from the city of Jalalabad, the Taliban attacked, shot him dead, and took off with his body. Gujar’s force of eighteen men quickly disbanded. Jim drew an early lesson from that failure: go in hard, fast, and big with the arbakai. But apart from the setback in Kawer, the arbakai in Khas Kunar District stood their ground against threats from the Taliban.

  The security gains in Mangwel translated into economic and development opportunities. The arrival of Jim and his team brought the community badly needed jobs, not only for the arbakai but for workers on the qalat and laborers performing development projects in the village. Umara Khan had been working for the past six years serving tea at a girls’ school, paid between 1,800 and 3,500 rupees a month. Others had worked as security guards or police far from Mangwel. Most were unemployed and survived on farming and day labor. The team launched projects to refurbish and dig wells, improve irrigation and water systems, build retaining walls, increase the supply of electricity, put in streetlights, and provide school supplies and better corn seed.

  Hearing life in Mangwel was changing for the better, dozens of families that had fled from the village to Pakistan during the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan began moving back to their homes and farms. Attracted by the improvements in security and the creation of jobs, they started to invest in repairing some of the scores of qalats damaged and gutted during decades of war.

  Meanwhile, elders from other clans of the Mohmand tribe began descending on the qalat in Mangwel from villages and valleys nearby and across the region, asking Jim to bring the local defense program to their areas. Seventy-five elders arrived from the neighboring Sarkan valley, a highland area just behind Mangwel. The Sarkan clan was the one that had a blood feud with Mangwel, with three killed from each village since the 1930s. Sarkan was locked in a land dispute with Mangwel when Jim first arrived there in 2003. The Sarkan elders remembered Jim, who had thrown his weight and a threat of violence behind Noor Afzhal and Mangwel in the conflict. They wanted first to make amends to Jim, and then to work with him to create tribal police in their area.

  Other elders came calling all the way from Khewa, Kama, and Goshta districts, as much as a two-and-a-half-hour drive south in northern Nangarhar Province. The Khewa elders appealed to Jim to bring arbakai to their area, complaining there were no Afghan security forces or government presence in the district on their side of the river. They invited him to visit and discuss the program, and he agreed to go, the next day.

  The enthusiasm in rural communities for tribal and village security forces was tangible, indicating that the program had potential well beyond Mangwel. What was less clear to Jim was the ability of the U.S. military and Afghan government to support a rapid expansion of the program. The view emerging from the ground, living with Afghans in a qalat, was increasingly at odds with that of the military and government establishments—sometimes dangerously so.

  The next morning, Jim, Noor Afzhal, and several arbakai and U.S. soldiers dressed in Afghan garb headed down a rocky dirt road in two Hilux pickup trucks toward Khewa. Ish was driving. As they traveled, two U.S. military attack helicopters flew by overhead, then banked and turned back. Apparently one of the pilots wanted to check out what looked like a group of armed Afghans. “They are circling,” Ish said. Suddenly, one of the helicopters fired a 30 mm cannon into an adjacent hillside. “Hold!” Jim said. The trucks screeched to a halt. “Everyone get out and put your guns down!” Jim said. He pulled out a reflective panel to signal to the pilots that they were friendly forces. Pfc. Miah Hicks jumped out one back door and Noor Afzhal the other. Umara Khan bailed off the back of the truck. The choppers circled once more and left.

  The team traveled on to Khewa, where the tribal elders were gathered in a traditional council, or jirga. “We are very interested in arbakai, we have many men willing to join,” said one of the leading elders, Ustad Ghafoori, a vice chancellor of Nangarhar University. Other elders agreed, as they spoke back and forth, drinking tea and eating sweets. They told Jim they would move forward. “We are at your service,” he said as the team prepared to leave.

  Jim turned to Miah as they walked to the trucks. “It’s a hundred times more dangerous now than it was on the way here,” he said. He was mainly concerned about protecting Noor Afzhal. After they traveled a little ways, he stopped both trucks in a dip in the road. “Get in the other vehicle,” Jim told Noor Afzhal, having him switch from the white truck to the black one. But when the threat came, once again it was not from insurgents.

  A U.S. Kiowa helicopter came into view and flew close to the trucks. A second later, it fired a rocket into a nearby ridgeline. It was unclear whether the rocket was a test fire. Jim stopped the trucks and threw out a green smoke grenade to signal they were friendly forces. “The Americans are the most dangerous people on the battlefield,” Jim said as he returned to the truck, “by far.”

  The men of Tribe 33 frequently traveled disguised as Afghans, and the ability to slip in and out of towns and cities in low-visibility operations was critical to skirting insurgent attacks. Even on the street, the Americans were regularly mistaken for Afghans. Justin went on a mission with Jim, Ish, and some arbakai and stopped in a town outside Jalalabad. An Afghan man approached to shake hands with the arbakai and then greeted Justin exactly the same way in Pashto, not realizing he was foreign. Yet ironically, the more they blended in, the more vulnerable they became to strikes by their own U.S. comrades. Looking like Afghans caused other problems. Jim and his team sometimes had difficulty gaining access to U.S. bases. And once Jim was angrily confronted as he washed his hands in the men’s room of COP Penich by a U.S. Army private.

  “What the hell are you doing in here by yourself?” the private yelled at Jim.

  Jim looked at him.

  “If I see you in here again by yourself,” the private continued, “I’m gonna kick your ass!”

  In one move, Jim stepped to about six inches from the private’s face, and replied in perfectly good English.

  “Hey, buddy, first thing: I will stomp the living fuck out of you,” he said slowly.

 
Then Jim pulled out his military ID card, which he happened to have in his front pocket because Penich guards had lately started to hassle him at the gate.

  “Number two, you cock-sucking motherfucker, get at attention!” Jim said.

  The private, by then blanching, snapped to.

  “Third. I should beat the shit out of you anyway, because the only reason you are treating me this way is because you thought I was an Afghan,” Jim said. He turned and walked out.

  He told the private’s first sergeant about the incident, and the private was relegated to guard duty—at least temporarily.

  Such incidents increased the sense of alienation Jim and his men felt from their conventionally minded military peers. The more they dispensed with their Army uniforms, flak vests, and armored vehicles and integrated themselves into Afghan life, the more they grasped what their true mission was, how uniquely they were executing it, and how divorced their operations were from the enemy-obsessed, highly kinetic, door-kicking approach of other military units in Afghanistan.

  “We are doing something 180 degrees different than other people,” said Mitch after a walk around Mangwel one spring day. “I like the fact that we can walk outside and immediately when we get to town five or six people greet us and invite us to have chai and go into their qalat. We are not walking around with weapons and a crapload of armor. We are showing them we are not afraid of what happens, or of them,” he said. “We try to be as close to them as we can.”

  Drew, the machine gunner, felt the same way. “If they were doing this all over Afghanistan, the war would be over,” he said. “This works. It’s something you have to see to believe. It’s a different kind of warfare. Sometimes you use bombs and bullets, and sometimes you need another method—relationships.”

  All sorts of people began arriving at the qalat seeking aid and protection. An old, nearly blind man who had lived in Mangwel his entire life and was struggling to support his family came and found Jim, who gave him a job handling trash. “You are the only person who cares about me,” the man said, his cloudy eyes welling with tears. Chevy, an eleven-year-old boy whose father had been killed by the Taliban and whose mother was ill, rode a bicycle several miles to the qalat and was taken in by Jim to wash clothes and do other chores. A man from the contested village of Kawer, Fazil Rahman, was transported to the qalat deathly ill with an infection from a gunshot wound. A security guard who had helped defend the Special Forces camp inside the U.S. military base in Jalalabad, Rahman had been shot in the back by the Taliban when responding to an ambush near his village. He fled to Pakistan, and the Taliban burned down his house. Jim asked the U.S. military to send a helicopter to evacuate Rahman and provide medical care—but the answer came back no. “I might as well order a goddamn aircraft carrier to sail up the Konar River,” Jim fumed. Eventually Jim prevailed and Rahman was taken to a U.S. military hospital, but it was too late and he died a few days later. Jim supported Rahman’s widow and children for months in Mangwel until other male relatives arrived to care for them.

  Such actions spoke far more loudly to the local people, and did far more to counter the insurgency, than killing any number of Taliban.

  One day Jim was stopped on the main road in Mangwel by an old man.

  “I am praying for you,” the man said simply. “May God bless you for what you are doing.”

  Jim, a non-Muslim and so by definition an infidel to Muslims, had never been told such a thing by an Afghan, and was moved almost to tears.

  Not long after that, Jim and Ish were on a walk when a girl of about twelve approached them on a footpath beside a field. The girls in the village had been largely invisible since the Americans moved in. But this girl did not turn away or hide. As she passed by she looked at Jim and addressed him in Pashto.

  “My uncle, how are you? It is good to see you,” she said.

  CHAPTER 18

  IN MARCH 2011, AS Jim and his team forged ever closer ties with the tribe, I landed in Jalalabad, capital of the eastern Afghanistan province of Nangarhar, on another trip to cover Jim’s story. There were just four months left before President Obama’s Afghanistan troop surge clock ran out. The small propeller plane descended past fields and mud-brick houses and skimmed over the teeming streets of the city of nearly a million people. An ancient crossroads some ninety miles east of Kabul on the main trade route between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Jalalabad was exotic, much like a beautiful woman with a scarred face. No stranger to war, the city had fallen prey in recent years to suicide bombings and other sensational attacks by Taliban insurgents. Violence had escalated in Jalalabad, as it had in Kabul and other major cities. Ten years into the conflict, it was more dangerous than it had been on day one. Militants were staging complex attacks with bombs, rockets, and rifles. Many of the biggest strikes were aimed at killing Americans on the city’s massive U.S. military base—the one at which I had just landed.

  The plane taxied down the landing strip on Jalalabad Air Field, located inside Forward Operating Base Fenty. Once a Russian base, the sprawling facility spanned an area the size of twenty football fields and was surrounded by high, reinforced concrete walls and dirt-filled barriers topped with barbed wire. I was able to fly directly onto JAF because of a gaping security loophole that Jim and I had figured out how to exploit. To be honest, the loophole wasn’t that big—we just had the brazenness to use it. But we both knew it could close at any time. Would it happen this trip? If military authorities found out I was slipping under their noses, Jim’s entire mission could come to a crashing halt.

  I unzipped the top pocket on my backpack, checked my passport and official DOD “letter of authorization,” and mentally rehearsed my cover story. I was a U.S. Defense Department contractor, providing educational aid as well as outreach to rural Afghan women. It was all technically true—but just a glossy veneer, enough to appease a casual inquiry by a base security officer. If anyone dug deeper into what I was doing in Afghanistan, we’d have a problem. To buy my air ticket on DFS Middle East, the expensive charter service that flew contractors onto JAF, I had to submit a required form with passenger details such as my name and passport number. The form also had a required section on “badge details” with boxes labeled Option 1 and Option 2. Option 1 asked for specifics of my military, DOD, or contractor badges, of which I had none. Option 2, however, simply asked the purpose of my visit and my “contact person” on base. Bingo. I listed Jim’s rank, name, and phone number, and got my ticket. Once I arrived at JAF, though, I had to get to Jim before anyone else got to me.

  The flight attendant opened the aircraft door. I put on my sunglasses, readjusted the flowing blue Afghan scarf around my face, and smoothed my embroidered tunic and pants. Complicating the operation, I had to step off the plane dressed as an Afghan woman. On a military base full of Americans, it would have been better to wear a T-shirt and khakis. But once Jim met me, we were heading directly into Jalalabad, where I had to blend in as an Afghan. I walked down the steps of the plane to the runway, picked up my duffel bag from a pile of luggage unloaded from the plane’s belly, and began hoofing it across the runway to the air terminal with the other passengers. Heat waves rose from the tarmac, and sweat dripped down my neck under the scarf as I walked. Just then, I saw a middle-aged soldier in a crisp uniform and a cap rapidly approaching. I gripped my bag and looked ahead. The soldier seemed to be headed straight for me. I scanned the area for Jim and spotted him in the distance, waiting for me at the flagpole in front of the terminal as planned.

  “Ma’am,” the soldier said, blocking my way.

  “Yes?” I said, my heart beating faster.

  “Need help with that bag?” he asked with a southern twang, breaking into a smile.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to stay calm.

  We walked side by side, chatting, until we were almost to the flagpole. Jim, wearing a white Afghan tunic and pants with a plaid scarf around his neck, was watching us.

  I stopped, and as if on cue, Jim stepped forwa
rd.

  “Thanks, bro,” he said, addressing the soldier. “I’ll take it from here.” He took my bag from the soldier, who looked surprised but said nothing.

  I followed Jim quickly down a dusty gravel road to his white Toyota Hilux pickup truck—the same model favored by the Taliban. He swung my duffel into the truck bed and opened the back door for me.

  “Hop in,” he said.

  I slid in and spotted on the seat a leather holster with the 9 mm pistol Jim had taught me to shoot. He’d also taught me to fire both his rifles and use grenades. I put the pistol in my lap, where it was ready but out of sight.

  Jim got in the front passenger seat, his AK-47 rifle propped against the dashboard.