The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  In 2005, Maj. Daniel Lovett, a field artillery officer with the Tennessee National Guard, reported for pre-deployment training at Camp Shelby, a sprawling base in southern Mississippi that dated to World War I. During cultural awareness class, the instructor opened the PowerPoint presentation by saying, “All right, when you get to Iraq.” Lovett interrupted to say his unit was headed to the other war, but the instructor responded: “Oh, Iraq, Afghanistan. It’s the same thing.”

  The indifference exasperated Lovett, who had been assigned to serve as an adviser to the Afghan army and hungered for insights. “Our mission was all about cultural awareness,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “Our mission was all about developing personal relationships… so we have legitimacy and credibility with the people we were trying to work with. I’ll tell you that was tough. It was a tough job. Were we prepared to go and do that? I’d have to say that at the time, absolutely not.”

  Training at other bases usually was no better. Army Maj. James Reese, tapped to serve with a Special Operations task force in Afghanistan, said instructors at Fort Benning, Georgia, tried to teach his class Arabic—widely spoken in Iraq, but a foreign tongue in Afghanistan—instead of Dari or Pashto. “The training overall,” he said, “was a waste.”

  Maj. Christian Anderson said the training at Fort Riley, an Army post on the plains of Kansas, “was horrible” and did nothing to prepare him for the task of advising an Afghan border police unit. Just from a geographic perspective, he thought the pre-deployment tactical training was foolish.

  “I would say actually train your personnel as they’re going to fight. Afghanistan has a lot of mountains, right? Tora Bora, Hindu Kush, all this stuff—mountains,” Anderson said in an Army oral-history interview. “Afghanistan doesn’t have swamps so why are we training [units] at Fort Polk, Louisiana? Why were we training… at Fort Riley where it’s as flat as a dinner table?”

  The lessons that did address the cultural peculiarities of Afghanistan, as opposed to Iraq, were often outdated or downright laughable.

  Maj. Brent Novak, a West Point faculty member who served as a guest instructor at a military academy in Kabul, attended pre-deployment training at Fort Benning in 2005. He had to sit through classes on surviving nuclear, chemical and biological attacks—even though such threats were nonexistent in Afghanistan. Afghan culture received only a cursory mention.

  One PowerPoint slide at Fort Benning warned against giving anyone a thumbs-up sign because Afghans regarded it as a rude gesture. “When I got there, though, kids were giving me the thumbs-up and I was like, ‘Geez, are these kids flipping me off?’ ” Novak recalled in an Army oral-history interview. After enduring a flurry of upright thumbs, the clueless American asked an interpreter what he had done to cause offense. The translator patiently explained that a thumbs-up meant “good job” or “way to go.”

  In retrospect, officers said they wished someone had just taught them good Afghan manners: build personal relationships, learn a few words of the language, resist yelling or blowing your stack and accept offers to drink tea.

  Army Maj. Rich Garey, who led a company of soldiers in eastern Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, said it took him a while to learn to slow down. “We’d come in like gangbusters, track down the village elder and ask him where the bad guys were. We were always told there weren’t any bad guys there, even though we were very close to the Pakistan border,” he said. “There were obviously bad guys out there, but we didn’t go about it the right way to get that information.”

  In another Army oral-history interview, Maj. Nikolai Andresky said he regretted not learning more about the basic rhythms of Afghan society before he deployed in 2003 to train Afghan soldiers. It finally occurred to him that he needed to work at the Afghans’ pace instead of expecting them to adapt to American ways of doing business.

  “If you would have told me that there wasn’t such a thing as a one-hour meeting in Afghanistan, I wouldn’t have believed you. After having been there, I know that’s true. There is no such thing. If you have a meeting, it has to be at least three hours,” Andresky said. “They start off by thanking Allah and then they basically thank everyone between Allah and them in the chain of command. Every speaker does that, so if you cut that out you’d probably save two hours. I just wished I had a better understanding of the culture.”

  U.S. troops, usually in a hurry, found it challenging to suppress their impatience and bite their tongues. “Time to Americans is very important,” Maj. William Woodring, an officer with the Alaska National Guard, said in an Army oral-history interview. “Time over there, though, means nothing. We’re trying to force them to do things on our time which to them, they don’t understand. A lot of them don’t have watches and can’t even tell time. We’re trying to force them to leave for a mission at a certain time and they can’t understand why. ‘Why do we have to leave at that time?’ ”

  As an institution, the U.S. military stressed the importance of showing respect for Islam, the official state religion of Afghanistan, where about 85 percent of the population was Sunni Muslim. But the systemic lack of cultural and religious education meant some U.S. soldiers held stereotypical or prejudicial views of the Afghans.

  “Theirs is a culture of dishonesty and corruption that seems prevalent in Muslim cultures going back thousands of years,” Maj. Christopher Plummer, who served in 2005 as the training and fielding officer for the Afghan army, said in an Army oral-history interview.

  Others saw Islam as intolerant and concluded it was impossible to bridge differences. “In the Islamic world, it’s either my way or death. Everybody that’s not a Muslim is an infidel, according to their Mohammed,” John Davis, a retired Army officer who served as a mentor to the Afghan Defense Ministry, said in an Army oral-history interview. “We have to overcome the religious aspect of that, but the religious aspect is tied into the Taliban, who say they are trying to maintain a purist, fundamentalist Islam approach and control of the country, and they want to get rid of the infidels.”

  Yet many troops developed a more nuanced outlook. While Afghans strongly identified as Muslim, Thomas Clinton, a Marine major, noticed that did not necessarily mean they were deeply devout. “They’re just like any other religion in America,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “You have ultra-extreme Catholics, Baptists, Protestants, and then you have other guys who say they were raised a certain religion but don’t go to church anymore.” Of the young Afghan soldiers he trained, he said only a few prayed five times a day or went to the mosque regularly.

  With the notable exception of Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American who served as ambassador for almost two years, most U.S. diplomats were also in unfamiliar territory. Because the U.S. embassy was shuttered from 1989 until 2002, hardly any had visited Afghanistan before the U.S. invasion.

  The State Department counted numerous regional experts in its ranks who had served in other parts of South and Central Asia, but not many volunteered to go to Kabul. To fill the void, the post was backfilled by a combination of Foreign Service rookies and oldsters lured out of retirement.

  “The embassy itself was a very, very small, very junior organization with an extraordinarily limited number of people who did not have a tremendous amount of experience,” Lt. Gen. David Barno, the U.S. military commander from 2003 to 2005, said in an Army oral-history interview. Like the troops, diplomats typically served short rotations of six to twelve months before moving on. As a result, veteran wisdom at the embassy was perpetually in short supply.

  Many Afghans found the cultural disconnect just as jarring, especially those from rural areas who rarely glimpsed the outside world and never watched American television or Hollywood movies. The sight of armor-plated U.S. troops dressed in camouflage, with reflective eyewear wrapped around their faces and wires protruding from their heads, could evoke the extraterrestrial.

  “For probably 90 to 95 percent of the Afghans that I interfaced with, we might as well have been aliens,
” said Maj. Clint Cox, an Army officer who served in Kandahar. “They thought we could see through walls with our sunglasses.”

  Maj. Keller Durkin, who deployed twice to Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division, said it was tough to make a good first impression with the Afghans. “One of the things I firmly believe is that if you look at an American all kitted-up for war, we look astonishingly like the stormtroopers from Star Wars, and those might not be the best people to go try and win hearts and minds,” he said in an Army oral-history interview.

  Maj. Alvin Tilley, an African-American soldier, recalled passing through villages where people had never encountered a person with black skin before. “The kids looked at me like, ‘Oh my God. What is that?’ They’re rubbing their faces and I asked my interpreter what the kids were doing and he said, ‘Oh, they think your color comes off.’ ”

  A city dweller back in the United States, Tilley said he was just as stunned by the sight of so many primitive mud huts without power or water. “You go there and you think you’re going to see Moses walking down the street,” he said. “That was more of a culture shock than anything.”

  Among the places that conjured Old Testament imagery for U.S. soldiers was Uruzgan province in south-central Afghanistan. Ringed by mountain ranges and desiccated terrain, Uruzgan blazed hot in summer and froze over in winter. Farmers eked out a living by tending plots of drought-tolerant opium. Home to conservative Pashtun tribes, the province’s most famous son was Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s one-eyed spiritual leader.

  Army Maj. William Burley, a civil-affairs team leader, delivered humanitarian aid to Uruzgan’s rural Shin Kay region in 2005. He said destitute villagers there had few water sources and were so isolated that it was common for young people to marry their first cousins.

  “I hate to say it, but there was a lot of inbreeding. The district chief had three thumbs,” he said in an Army oral-history interview.

  As a Special Forces officer, Burley was exempt from the Army’s normal grooming standards, so he grew as much facial hair as possible to fit in with the locals. “It would have been a serious cultural faux pas for me not to have had a beard,” he added. “They were able to grab my chin, and in their culture, if you can grab the beard you can trust the guy.”

  Other trust-building exercises were harder for the Americans to embrace. Throughout the country, tribal elders and Afghan military officers demonstrated their friendship and fidelity by walking around, hand-in-hand, with other men. U.S. troops had to accept the gesture when offered or risk offending their hosts.

  “For an American male, walking through town holding the hand of another man? Yeah, it’s—” said Army Maj. Christian Anderson, the officer who trained the Afghan border police, pausing for the right word before trailing off. “But I did it because it’s kind of insulting not to do it.”

  From an American perspective, it could be hard to tell when the practice was platonic or when it might represent something else. Homosexuality was banned by the Taliban and considered taboo among adults, but it was not uncommon for Afghan men of means to commit a form of sexual abuse known as bacha bazi, or boy play.

  Afghan military officers, warlords and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. U.S. troops referred to the practice as “man-love Thursday” because Afghan pederasts would force boys to dress up or dance on Thursday evenings before the start of the Afghan weekend. Although American soldiers were sickened by the abuse, their commanders instructed them to look the other way because they didn’t want to alienate allies in the fight against the Taliban.

  Major Woodring, the Alaska National Guard officer, said man-love Thursday came as a shock when he embedded with the Afghan army for a year as a trainer. “Just understanding the whole lifestyle of the Afghans” was a challenge, he said. U.S. soldiers had a hard time reconciling how Afghan men could hold extremely conservative views about women, yet flirt with other men and flaunt having sex with boys.

  “You really have to put your feelings aside and understand that this is not your country,” Woodring said. “You have to accept what they do and don’t interject your personal feelings about their culture. Looking at women is forbidden. Even if a young 17-year-old stares at a woman he can be killed for that. We weren’t taught any of that, though, in any of our training. You need to understand that people might hit on you.”

  When it came to being propositioned, risk factors included a youthful appearance and a clean shave—traits that applied to most U.S. troops (nearly 90 percent were men).I

  Maj. Randy James, an aviation intelligence officer, recalled a tense encounter in 2003 when an Afghan man approached a baby-faced male American soldier in his unit and declared, “You’re my wife.” Luckily, the incident didn’t erupt into violence.

  “It didn’t get out of hand; nothing bad happened,” James said in an Army oral-history interview. “But it just wasn’t a happy moment for him or anybody else around.”

  I. Women played a critical role in the war, with many serving in combat roles. As of August 2020, fifty-five female U.S. troops had been killed in Afghanistan and more than 400 wounded, according to the Defense Department.

  CHAPTER SEVEN Playing Both Sides

  By 2003, as the Taliban and al-Qaeda escalated their hit-and-run attacks on U.S. and allied forces, there was no mystery about where the guerrillas were coming from. They had regrouped on the other side of Afghanistan’s 1,500-mile border with Pakistan.

  Most hid in Pakistan’s remote Pashtun tribal areas that historically had resisted the authority of government officials in Islamabad and, before them, British colonial viceroys. For insurgents, it was the perfect refuge, walled off by mountains and deserts. It was also beyond the reach of the U.S. troops, who were forbidden from crossing into sovereign Pakistani territory.

  For U.S. forces stationed along the border, the restrictions tied their hands in a never-ending game of cat and mouse. But there was a more fundamental problem: Whose side were the Pakistanis on, anyway?

  The answer became abundantly clear on April 25, 2003, a sunny spring day, when a dozen heavily armed men dressed in black walked past the Pakistani town of Angur Ada, altitude 7,400 feet. The gunmen disappeared into the scrub pines along a ridge on the Afghan side of the border. About four miles away, at a tiny U.S. Army outpost called Firebase Shkin, then-Capt. Gregory Trahan, a company commander with the 82nd Airborne Division, was reading a book in his hooch.

  It had been a quiet day at Shkin, named after a nearby Afghan village and positioned strategically near a border checkpoint in Paktika province. The firebase was perched on a hillside so the roughly one hundred U.S. troops stationed there could look out for Taliban infiltrators sneaking over from South Waziristan. The square-shaped firebase covered a dirt patch half the size of a football field. Along with watchtowers on each corner, the compound was protected by three-foot-thick ramparts of dried mud, triple-strand concertina wire and rock-filled blast walls known as HESCO barriers.

  Trahan and his soldiers from Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion had been at Shkin for six weeks and had settled into a routine of conducting patrols. After lunch, a soldier ducked into Trahan’s quarters to say he was needed in the tactical operations center. The captain put his book down to find out what was going on.

  A CIA Predator drone orbiting overhead had glimpsed the gunmen dressed in black. Intelligence analysts presumed they were hostile. Trahan figured they might be the same guerrillas who had fired 107mm rockets at Shkin several days earlier from a hilltop hugging the Afghan side of the border. The rockets had come close enough to shatter windows, though no one was hurt. He knew the insurgents would be difficult to catch but decided to try anyway.

  Trahan organized a patrol of about twenty U.S. soldiers and twenty allied fighters from a local Afghan militia and rolled out in a convoy of Humvees and trucks. They checked in at the border-control station and stopped at a few nearby homes, but none of the l
ocals reported seeing anything.

  “From the time we left until the time we searched these few homes, about an hour and a half had passed—and I was ready to pack it in, thinking this was all a dry well,” Trahan said in an Army oral-history interview. Dusk was approaching, but he decided the patrol should scout out the spot where insurgents had launched rockets from the last time. “It was on some hilly terrain but we could get vehicles up there,” he said.

  As the patrol climbed the winding dirt track up the hill, one of the trucks broke down. The other three vehicles kept going to the top. The patrol dismounted and moved out slowly in three directions. Scrub vegetation and dips in the terrain obscured their fields of vision. Leading one group, Trahan spied a campsite with canteens of water, burlap bags and a cache of 107mm rockets. Suddenly, the air erupted in a fusillade of small-arms fire. “It seemed that we were completely encircled by it and I had no idea where it was coming from,” he said.

  As the Americans and their Afghan allies scrambled for cover, the enemy pinned them down from several directions with AK-47s, grenades and at least one heavy machine gun. Trahan dodged a grenade, but AK-47 rounds hit him once in the helmet, grazing his skull; twice in the right leg; and once in the left leg. As he was struck, other soldiers saw a red mist spray out from behind his body.

  The U.S. troops radioed for help and requested howitzer fire from the base at Shkin so they could try to escape the ambush. It was risky given that enemy fighters had closed to within thirty feet of their vehicles.

  The shelling worked, forcing the attackers to back off and giving the patrol a chance to regroup. By the time they gathered the fallen and rolled back down the hill to safety, seven Americans had been badly wounded.

  Trahan survived, but two would later die: Private Jerod Dennis, a 19-year-old from Antlers, Oklahoma, a one-stoplight town where he had graduated from high school ten months earlier; and Airman First Class Raymond Losano, a tactical air controller from Del Rio, Texas, who had just celebrated his 24th birthday at Shkin and left behind a pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter.