The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  Even under ideal conditions, the U.S. military projected it would take several years before the Afghan army could operate on its own. In the field, Afghan battalions partnered with U.S. troops, but the Americans did most of the fighting. U.S. combat advisers and mentors embedded with Afghan units to provide guidance, but often found that the Afghans lacked basic combat skills and needed constant retraining.

  Maj. Christopher Plummer, an infantry officer, arrived at U.S. headquarters in Kabul in 2005 to coordinate training and fielding for the Afghan army. After hearing frequent complaints about the Afghan troops’ poor marksmanship, he visited the Kabul Military Training Center to observe recruits on the firing range.

  “Of course, it was no surprise to anybody that I came back with a report which said that these guys couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn at ten meters,” Plummer said in an Army oral-history interview. Out of 800 recruits in basic training at the time, only eighty passed the marksmanship test—yet they were all permitted to graduate anyway. “They were just going through the motions,” he said.

  At first, the Pentagon outfitted the Afghan army with Russian-made AK-47s: a simple, easy-to-use and largely indestructible rifle. Many Afghans were familiar with the weapon, but instead of taking careful aim they used a method that U.S. military advisers ridiculed as “spray and pray.” Afghan soldiers often wasted all their ammunition during a firefight without killing anyone, forcing U.S. troops to come to their rescue, according to Maj. Gerd Schroeder, a roving firearms instructor who deployed to Afghanistan in 2005.

  Schroeder once took an Afghan battalion to a firing range near Kandahar for remedial work. A believer in teaching by example, he stabbed a watermelon with a long stick and jammed it in the ground. “You say, ‘Okay, Mr. Afghan Soldier, shoot that watermelon,’ and he’d just shoot from the hip at it,” leaving the fruit unscathed, Schroeder said in an Army oral-history interview.

  Then Schroeder asked a U.S. soldier to demonstrate. “And he’d put a bullet right through the watermelon—one round.” The lessons gradually sunk in. “Before that they had no comprehension of marksmanship at all,” he said. “They’d just throw as many rounds as they could downrange and see if they hit something.”

  Some Afghan soldiers were veteran fighters who performed well in battle. But when bullets started to fly, many Afghans got caught up in the moment and forgot their training, said Lt. Col. Michael Slusher, a Kansas National Guard officer who embedded with an Afghan unit. “They go out and they run right into the fire,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “It’s kind of crazy because the [enemy] will sit in those defensive positions and just let these guys run right up on them. They’ll run right up the side of the mountain after them, shooting all the way and yelling. They’re brave little dudes but that’s not the way we want to do business.”

  Maj. John Bates, another National Guardsman who served as an embedded trainer, praised his Afghan company as a “crack outfit” that had fought cohesively for three years. But some basics were hard to learn. Bates said U.S. advisers had to teach Afghans the concept of taking care of their own weapon instead of just grabbing one that was handy.

  “We actually wrote their names on the weapons so the first sergeant could walk down the row and see that that was their name on the weapon,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. Another revelation for the Afghans was that uniforms came in a variety of sizes, and left shoes were shaped differently from right shoes. “We’d get a shipment of boots in and these guys had never had their feet measured so they didn’t know what size boot they were,” Bates said.

  Not that it mattered with the defective footwear they often received. “The first day, halfway through the mission, the sole of the boots come completely off,” he said.

  Teaching the Afghans to drive military vehicles was another adventure. “It was all either full gas or full brake, one or the other,” said Command Master Sgt. Jeff Janke, a trainer with the Wisconsin National Guard. “If they crashed something, there wasn’t any responsibility for it. Their thinking was, ‘the [trainer] should bring me a new one. This one is broke.’ ”

  During spring 2004, Maj. Dan Williamson, a trainer with Task Force Phoenix, needed to show Afghan soldiers how to operate a 2.5-ton cargo truck with a six-speed manual transmission. He found an out-of-the-way spot on a military base near Kabul where nothing could be sideswiped. First, the Afghans tried to learn how to drive a straight line forward and a straight line back, with U.S. instructors in the passenger’s seat and interpreters clinging to the sideboards. Then they practiced turns on an oval dirt track.

  “These guys were a menace to society,” Williamson said in an Army oral-history interview. “They’d let go of the steering wheel, grab the gear shift with both hands and look at the gear shift, not the road. They couldn’t seem to get it into gear and the trucks would be going all over the place.” The sideboard-riding interpreters, he added, had to be “stout of heart.”

  As the Afghan army expanded, the United States went on a building spree to construct bases and barracks for their partners. Projects adhered to U.S. specifications, but the Western designs often left the Afghans bewildered.

  One U.S. military official said in a Lessons Learned interview that the Afghans mistook urinals as drinking fountains. Sit-down toilets were another hazardous novelty. “[We] realized that the commodes were being broken because the soldiers were trying to squat on them like they usually do, or the soldiers were getting hurt as they slipped off and whacked their knee into the wall,” Maj. Kevin Lovell, an officer with the Army Corps of Engineers, said in an oral-history interview.

  Towel racks didn’t last long either. The Afghans tied and twisted their wet laundry around the towel rod to wring out the water, ripping the racks out of the wall. They draped soggy clothes over electric heaters, causing them to short-circuit. Such problems could have been averted, Lovell said, “if we would have had a little bit less hubris, thought how these guys normally live and provided a construction to that standard.”

  The American-designed kitchens and chow halls also didn’t translate well. Afghans preferred to cook communal meals in a huge pot over an open flame, boiling rice, meat and other ingredients in a single stew. “They stand there in their bare feet and they use a giant spoon to move the rice around. It wasn’t very clean,” Maj. Matthew Little, another Army Corps of Engineers officer, said in an Army oral-history interview.

  On one base, Afghan cooks relocated their indoor fire away from contractor-installed air vents without realizing what the vents were for. “The entire kitchen would fill up with smoke. It would spill out into the dining area and the beige walls would turn black,” Little said. “You’d walk in there and you had to wash your uniform after.”

  In another instance, he said an Afghan army leader asked to dig an open trench along the kitchen floor so the cooks could throw their waste into it and “just have it wash downstream into the drainage system. Kind of like a river, I guess, or a small creek that might be in the West in the olden days.”

  U.S. combat advisers and trainers gave Afghan soldiers mixed reviews on the most important issue: their willingness to fight. Some praised their dedication and determination, while others complained of laziness and indifference. Given that the U.S. war strategy depended on the Afghan army’s performance, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to the question of whether Afghans were willing to die for their government.

  Absenteeism was a chronic problem. After boot camp, soldiers usually received several days off before they had to report for duty at a new location. Many collected their first paycheck and disappeared. Others showed up, but without their uniform, gear or weapon, having sold them for extra cash. Large numbers of soldiers reported sporadically or late. No Afghan battalion operated anywhere near full strength, which only intensified the pressure to recruit and train replacements.

  Maj. Charles Abeyawardena, a strategic planning officer with the Army’s Center for Lessons Learne
d at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, arrived in Afghanistan in 2005 to interview U.S. combat advisers and senior Afghan officials about their experiences. As an aside, he decided to ask low-ranking Afghan soldiers why they had enlisted. He said their responses echoed those usually given by American troops: it’s a solid paycheck, I want to serve my country, it’s an opportunity to do something new with my life.

  But when he followed up by asking whether they would stay in the Afghan army after the United States left, the answers startled him. “The majority, almost everyone I talked to, said, ‘No,’ ” Abeyawardena said in an Army oral-history interview. “They were going to go back and grow opium or marijuana or something like that, because that’s where the money is. That threw me for a complete loop.”

  As difficult as it was to train the Afghan army, the attempts to create a national police force produced an even bigger debacle. Germany agreed to oversee police training in early 2002, but quickly became overwhelmed. The German government invested insufficient money in the program, struggled to find German cops willing to go to Afghanistan to serve as trainers and confined those who did to a peaceful zone in the north. Eventually, the United States intervened and took over the bulk of the responsibility.

  From 2002 to 2006, the Americans spent ten times as much on police training as the Germans but performed no better. The State Department outsourced the program to private contractors, who collected big fees but delivered poor results. Training for police recruits was brief—often just two to three weeks—and their pay was abysmal.

  Partly because they earned so little, many police officers morphed into shakedown artists who extorted bribes from the people they were supposed to protect. “They’re so corrupt that if your house gets robbed and you call the police… the police will show up and rob your house a second time,” Maj. Del Saam, a National Guardsman who worked with the Afghan security forces, said in an Army oral-history interview.

  Pentagon officials complained that the State Department’s dismal police training program was undermining the war strategy. In February 2005, Rumsfeld forwarded a confidential report to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the Afghan National Police, or ANP. The report was titled, “ANP Horror Stories” and described how most of the police were illiterate, underequipped and unprepared.

  “Please take a look,” Rumsfeld wrote in a snowflake accompanying the report. “This is the Afghanistan National Police situation. It is a serious problem. My impression is that these two pages were written in as graceful and noninflammatory a way as is humanly possible.”

  By summer 2005, the U.S. military took over most of the responsibility for training the police. While the Pentagon had more resources and personnel to throw at the problem than the State Department, it couldn’t untangle the knot of expectations that Washington had created.

  On one hand, the United States and its allies wanted to impose a Western-style system of law enforcement to maintain stability and order. On the other, the Pentagon wanted the Afghan police to fight insurgents, much as the army did, and trained the police as a paramilitary force. Either way, the notion of a uniformed police officer carrying a badge and a gun to enforce the laws of the state was a foreign concept to most Afghans, especially in rural areas.

  Major Saam of the National Guard said Afghans were accustomed to settling disputes differently. “If you have a problem, you don’t go to the police. You go to the village elder,” he said. “He makes up the rules as he goes. There’s no rule of law. If he likes you, he’s going to say, ‘Hey, this is really good.’ If he doesn’t like you, he’s going to say, ‘Give me some goats or sheep or we’ll have you shot on sight.’ ”

  In such situations, tribal or religious codes of conduct that had been in place for generations usually determined the outcomes. Inserting police officers into the equation stirred disruption and trouble.

  “They have a hard time picturing what we’re trying to do with the police forces. They don’t understand how it fits into their culture,” Saam said. “Americans are trying to force something on them that we understand, but that they can’t visualize.”

  It was a mistake the United States would repeat again and again.

  CHAPTER SIX Islam for Dummies

  As the U.S. military settled into Afghanistan, it mobilized Special Forces teams to carry out operations to influence the emotions, thinking and behavior of ordinary Afghans and their leaders. Known as psychological operations, or psy-ops, the tactics were a longstanding form of unconventional warfare to shape popular opinion in favor of American objectives and sap the enemy’s will to fight. Green Berets and military contractors on psy-op teams studied foreign cultures so they could exploit religious, linguistic and social nuances to their advantage.

  But the psy-op specialists and other soldiers who parachuted into Afghanistan were operating in the dark. Years after the war started, the U.S. military still had almost no uniformed personnel who could speak Dari or Pashto fluently. Few troops possessed even a remote grasp of Afghanistan’s history, its religious customs or tribal dynamics.

  When Maj. Louis Frias, an officer with the 8th PSYOP Battalion from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, deployed to Afghanistan in July 2003, he prepared by reading the paperback Islam For Dummies on the plane ride over. He taught himself a couple phrases in Dari but garbled them so badly that Afghans pleaded with him to stick to English. “I felt like a dork,” he said in an Army oral-history interview.

  Frias led a small psy-ops team that worked out of the U.S. embassy and distributed radio scripts and posters to build support for democratic principles and the Afghan security forces. But the team’s biggest project was developing a comic book. The idea came from a soldier Frias met in the chow hall who suggested it as a way to manipulate the minds of Afghan youth. So the psy-ops team decided to design a comic book about the importance of voting, centered around a story about kids playing soccer because, as Frias put it, “soccer is such a big thing in Afghanistan.”

  In the comic, a bunch of kids from different tribes and ethnic groups are kicking the ball around when a wise old man appears with a rule book. A symbol of the new Afghan constitution, the rule book not only dictated how children were supposed to play the game, but also laid out a novel process for picking a team captain—by voting.

  “We had all the kids saying they would be the leader and the wise old man would come in and say, ‘You need to vote for one person to be the leader of the soccer team,’ ” Frias said. “That was the story of our comic book.” The team showed drafts of the comics to children hanging out at bazaars and the kids provided “good feedback,” according to Frias.

  But the project ran into bureaucratic hurdles and delays. Diplomats at the U.S. embassy and military commanders in Kabul and Bagram all insisted on reviewing the illustrations. “Everybody wanted to have their say in it,” Frias said. By the time his six-month tour of duty ended and he returned to Fort Bragg, the comic book still hadn’t been printed and he never got to see the final version. “I was told it went into production,” he said. “What I don’t know is what type of effect it had.”

  A second psy-ops team based at Bagram also seized on soccer as a propaganda medium. Starting in 2002, the Bagram team distributed more than 1,000 soccer balls featuring the black-red-and-green Afghan flag and the phrase “peace and unity” in Dari and Pashto. The balls became a hit with youth around the country and the psy-ops team judged the program a huge success.

  Others had their doubts. Army Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya, the commander of U.S. forces at Bagram from 2005 to 2006, came across the soccer balls one day and decided to conduct an experiment. He took a couple of balls on a trip to Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan. When a crowd of kids gathered around his Humvee, he rolled out one of the soccer balls. As the children happily kicked it around, Kamiya noticed that none of them bothered to look at the flag or the “peace and unity” phrase etched on the balls.

  Upon his return to Bagram, he advised the psy-ops crew to rethink the
ir tactics and use common sense. “I said, ‘Look, guys. Our job in Afghanistan is not to train the next Afghan Olympic soccer team, okay?’ ” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “The soccer ball is a means to convey the message. It is not the message.”

  But instead of abandoning soccer propaganda, the psy-ops warriors recommitted to it. They designed another ball featuring the flags of several countries, including Saudi Arabia, whose flag depicts the Koranic declaration of faith in Arabic script. Expecting the new items to be highly popular, psy-ops teams distributed the soccer balls widely and even dropped them from helicopters—only to trigger public protests from angry Afghans who thought putting holy words on a ball was sacrilegious.

  “To have a verse of the Koran on something you kick with your foot would be an insult in any Muslim country,” Mirwais Yasini, an Afghan member of parliament, told the BBC. The U.S. military was forced to issue a public apology.

  The psy-ops teams were not the only ones who struggled to comprehend Afghanistan. Cultural ignorance and misunderstandings vexed U.S. military units for the entirety of the war, hampering their ability to conduct operations, collect intelligence and make tactical judgments. Most troops deployed to the war zone for six to twelve months. By the time they started to become comfortable in their surroundings, it was usually time to go home. Their untutored replacements repeated the cycle, year after year.

  Troops were supposed to receive a smattering of instruction in Afghan languages, customs and cultural dos and don’ts before they left the United States. But at many military installations, officers said such training was worthless or tailored for the larger masses of troops headed for Iraq, based on the misguided assumption that people in all faraway Muslim countries were the same.