So shortly after arriving in Wardak in January 2009, several of the brigade’s company and platoon commanders began asking local landowners (khans) and village chiefs (maliks) in their sectors for any information about the Taliban, in return for which they promised to build schools or dig water wells. The village elders politely rejected the requests, telling the American officers that their predecessors had made similar promises but had never delivered. And they were not about to get fooled again.
There are literally hundreds of stories just like this, where in remote villages across Afghanistan young American field commanders were being denied access to basic ground-level intelligence about the Taliban because of the broken promises made by their predecessors. Because of our own obduracy, the American soldiers in Afghanistan had become, in the words of the current commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General David H. Petraeus, “an army of strangers in the midst of strangers.”
So Colonel Haight’s brigade had to start from scratch to build a sense of trust amongst the local Hazara tribesmen. Seemingly small acts of kindness went a long way toward building up a sense of goodwill among the villagers. Taking a page from the Green Berets’ toolkit, U.S. Army commanders in Wardak found that offering free medical checkups was a very effective way to build goodwill and trust. Showing a degree of concern for the welfare of the village’s all-important livestock herds was another. One army lieutenant, who grew up in sheep-herding country in central California, proved to be an effective intelligence collector because he took the time to sit down with village elders to discuss the diseases that were afflicting the local goat and sheep herds. The officer arranged for a veterinarian to visit the village and inoculate the village’s sheep herds. Within a matter of weeks, the village elders were feeding the lieutenant’s platoon with tidbits of information about what the Taliban were up to around the village.
The field commanders found that the most effective way to build trust and generate intelligence information at the same time was to spoil the village children, who invariably ran out to greet the troops because they had learned long ago that the soldiers brought gifts. The rule of thumb was that every child got a toy, usually a soccer ball, as well as whatever chocolate or other candy the soldiers had received from home.
Army commanders refer to this as “Hershey Bar Diplomacy,” because spoiling the village children is an incredibly effective icebreaker. Villagers who were overtly hostile or suspicious when an American patrol entered their village relaxed and became friendlier in a matter of minutes when they saw the smiles on the faces of their children. Almost always, a village elder came out to exchange greetings with the troops, and if everything went right, the patrol commander was invited to sit down for tea to discuss local issues. If all went well after that, the intelligence began to flow.
As gratifying as the Wardak experience may have been, there were parts of Afghanistan that were far more hostile environments than Wardak Province.
Fifty years ago, French historian Bernard Fall described the doomed French military stronghold of Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam as “Hell in a very small place.” This moniker aptly describes the Korengal Valley in southeastern Afghanistan, which a number of American field commanders have said was by far the worst place they ever served in.
Located in the heart of Kunar Province, the desolate Korengal Valley, dubbed the “Valley of Death” or alternatively the “Valley of Fire” by the American troops, does not even appear on most maps of Afghanistan. It is only a flyspeck, only a half mile wide and six miles long, the equivalent of the length of the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The valley’s 4,500 inhabitants, known colloquially as Korengalis, are not Pashtuns. Like the Hazaras to the north, the Korengalis are a separate ethnic group who speak their own language and have a distinct culture, reinforced by centuries of self-imposed isolation from the outside world.
According to Afghan government officials, Korengalis are the Afghan equivalent of hillbillies. They live in a dozen or so impoverished villages set high up on the walls of the valley’s steep and bare mountainsides, eking out a living through subsistence farming and by smuggling timber out of the valley to Pakistan. Intensely clannish, they make no secret of the fact that they dislike outsiders, so much so that even their kinsmen from neighboring valleys know better than to visit.
The outright hostility of the Korengalis to whichever government happens to be in power in Kabul is legendary. The Soviets never dared enter the valley during their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even the Taliban had the good sense to leave them alone when they ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Since the American invasion, the Korengalis have resisted all attempts by the U.S. Army to bring them into line and refused to accept the legitimacy of Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul. In short, the Korengalis wanted nothing to do with the outside world. When the U.S. Army established a permanent presence in the Korengal Valley in 2004, many Korengalis joined the Taliban overnight.
The fierceness of the Korengali resistance to the U.S. military was intense. Many of the American officers and enlisted men who served in the Korengal Valley honestly believed at the beginning of their tours that these illiterate peasants, armed with nothing more sophisticated than their family’s vintage AK-47 assault rifle, would turn tail and run when they came face-to-face with American superiority in numbers and firepower.
But between 2004 and 2010, six different U.S. Army and Marine Corps battalions tried and failed to quash the Korengali Taliban, despite the fact that they never numbered more than a couple of hundred fighters at any one time. During this six-year period, forty-two American soldiers were killed in the Korengal. To give an idea of the fierceness of the fighting: One U.S. Army unit, the thousand-man 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, lost eighteen men killed and over one hundred men wounded in the Korengal between June 2008 and June 2009.
U.S. Army intelligence officers now admit that they failed to fully comprehend the enemy they were fighting because they were never able to penetrate the veil of secrecy surrounding what the Taliban were up to in the valley. Unmanned drones were not of much use except when the Taliban came out into the open to slug it out with an American patrol. SIGINT was a vitally important tool to warn American commanders of impending attacks but next to worthless on high-level Taliban plans and intentions because the Korengalis usually sent this type of information by a sophisticated courier network that ran down the full length of the valley, which of course the SIGINT intercept operators could not access.
Four former or current-serving army intelligence officers who served in the valley confirm that they never got any viable intelligence information about the Taliban from the valley’s inhabitants because, as it turned out, the Korengali villagers were the Taliban. A series of classified reports written in 2008 and 2009 by army intelligence officers at Forward Operating Base Blessing, the headquarters of the U.S. Army battalion responsible for guarding the Korengal Valley, revealed that virtually every family in the valley was involved with the Taliban to one degree or another.
Entire villages in the Korengal were known to be completely “bad.” Sergeant Major Dwight Utley, a Green Beret who served four tours of duty in Afghanistan with the 3rd Special Forces Group, recalled a particular sweep that his “A team” conducted in the village of Korengal at the southern end of the valley. Utley’s team searched all the houses in the village, only to discover that all the men had mysteriously disappeared. As the Green Berets were leaving the village on the only road through the valley, they were ambushed by Taliban guerrillas. It was the villagers showing what they thought of the U.S. Army. According to Utley, “We now knew where all of the males in the village were, 400 meters away from us on the other side of the valley engaging us with machine guns and RPGs.”
And those Korengali elders who were not active Talibs steadfastly refused to provide any intelligence information to the Americans, abiding by a strict code of silence that would have impressed even
the fiercest of American Mafia dons. According to Captain Mike Moretti, who commanded a company of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment in the Korengal Valley in 2009–10, “The people here have an incestuous relationship with the Taliban. I may be speaking to an elder whose brother or son is a fighter. He’s not going to give me information that is going to enable me to kill his family member.”
The experience in the Korengal raises a fundamental question for American commanders and intelligence officers. The problem was succinctly put by Matthew Hoh, a former State Department political adviser in Zabul Province: “How do you separate the insurgency from the population, when the population is the insurgency?” The short answer is: you can’t. That fact, more than anything else, explains why the U.S. military failed to subjugate the Korengal over a span of six years. As it turns out, the people we were trying to save did not want to be saved. They just wanted us to go away.
With virtually all of the valley’s inhabitants actively or passively assisting the Taliban, it should come as no surprise that the Taliban had a better intelligence network in the Korengal than the U.S. military did. The Taliban had spies everywhere, including many of the villagers who did manual labor on the four American bases in the valley, who routinely provided insurgent commanders with advance notice of all U.S. Army patrols and combat sweeps through the valley.
This became apparent in 2008, when the army low-level voice intercept team at the Korengal Combat Outpost at the head of the valley intercepted Taliban walkie-talkie transmissions warning a village farther down the valley that an American patrol was on its way. The Taliban commander ordered the immediate evacuation of all of the village’s women and children, and the village’s men were to “prepare for battle.” According to an army intelligence officer stationed in the Korengal at the time, “My battalion’s intelligence officer said that if there were women and children in the village, the Taliban almost always would not attack. These were their wives and children. But if ICOM [walkie-talkie] chatter indicated that the women and children were running into the hills, then we knew that an attack was imminent.”
Not only did the Taliban’s spy network make surprising the insurgents next to impossible, it also meant that the Taliban usually surprised the U.S. troops. According to an intelligence officer with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, “Finding the Taliban in the valley wasn’t hard. Eight times out of ten, they found you before you found them.”
Within days of General McChrystal taking command in Afghanistan in June 2009, the Pentagon began putting pressure on the general to provide a clear-cut victory to show that President Obama’s Afghan surge was working.
The problem was that the understrength and badly overextended U.S. forces in Afghanistan were having difficulty defending the territory they were responsible for, much less going on the offensive against the 27,000 Taliban guerrilla fighters they were now up against.
In fact, all over Afghanistan, the Taliban had the momentum. On September 8, 2009, several hundred Taliban guerrillas ambushed a hundred-man patrol of Afghan troops and U.S. Marine advisers outside the village of Gangjal in Kunar Province, killing five marines, eight Afghan troops, and an interpreter. Less than a month later, on October 3, 2009, three hundred Taliban fighters attacked an exposed army base in Nuristan Province called Combat Outpost Keating, killing eight U.S. troops and wounding twenty-two others. On October 24, 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that Khost Province, located just to the south of Kunar Province, which the Pentagon only a few months earlier had heralded as “an American success story,” was now largely controlled by the Taliban despite the presence of 2,400 American troops in the province.
The attack on the Keating outpost was the last straw. In late October 2009, McChrystal decided to cut his losses and pull U.S. troops out of all the isolated outpost areas in Nuristan and Kunar provinces in eastern Afghanistan that, in his staff’s opinion, were not worth fighting for. The hardest decision that General McChrystal had to make was whether to abandon the Korengal Valley or not. It took several months, but in the end McChrystal concluded that the valley was a lost cause. The Taliban were too deeply embedded among the valley’s inhabitants, and the cost of rooting them out had proven far higher than what the bleak valley was worth in terms of blood and treasure.
On April 14, 2010, the U.S. Army pulled all of its troops out of the Korengal as part of what General McChrystal described as a “strategic redeployment of forces.” Many army commanders vehemently disagreed with McChrystal’s decision to abandon the Korengal. An angry U.S. Army officer, who served two tours of duty in the Korengal with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, voiced an opinion shared by many of his fellow officers: “For years we were told that the Korengal was the anchor of our defense, and that it had to be held at all costs. Then one day, we get a directive telling us that we had to abandon it because some shithead in Kabul decided that holding the valley was no longer essential to the war effort. What a load of bullshit!”
For all the anger felt at abandoning the Korengal, there was also some relief. An army helicopter pilot from the 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade involved in the evacuation of the army’s main firebase in the valley, known as the Korengal Outpost, recalled that as his Black Hawk helicopter took off from the base, the troops onboard his chopper took up the iconic 1965 rock anthem made famous by the English band the Animals, singing at the top of their voices, “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.”
Within hours of the U.S. Army pulling out of the Korengal, the Taliban emerged from the shadows. In an act designed to embarrass the U.S. military, the Taliban smuggled in an Al Jazeera film crew from Pakistan to document their victory. U.S. commanders in Kabul were crestfallen when the Al Jazeera videotape was posted a few days later on YouTube for all to see. It was a suitably bitter end to the U.S. Army’s experience in the Korengal.
For the past decade, Helmand Province has been a cancer that the U.S. and NATO forces have never been able to cure. Located in southwestern Afghanistan, Helmand is the largest of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces, roughly equal in size to Ireland, with a population estimated at 1.4 million people. Lawless and unruly even in the best of times, Helmand has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most dangerous places in all of Afghanistan. Even Afghan government officials in Kabul dread going there, with one senior official indelicately referring to the Helmandis as “brigands and outcasts” during a 2009 interview.
Today, more than twenty-five thousand U.S., British, and Afghan troops hold the area around provincial capital Lashkar Gah, all of the major towns, and a few large firebases scattered around the province. The Taliban control virtually everything else. The Taliban remain so omnipresent in the province’s rural areas away from the populated areas that soldiers have taken to calling the hostile and desolate countryside outside the gates of their firebases “Talibanland” or “Hajiville”—“Haji” being one of the many derogatory terms that U.S. soldiers use to refer to the Taliban.
A common theme heard from American and British soldiers who have served tours of duty there is that Helmand was far rougher than anything they had previously experienced in Iraq. The statistics back them up. Since 2006, more Taliban attacks have occurred in Helmand than in all other Afghan provinces combined. More American and British soldiers have died or been wounded in Helmand Province since 2001 than in any other province in Afghanistan.
A morbid sense of humor has cropped up among soldiers who have served there. One sharp-witted Marine Corps infantryman who pulled a tour of duty in Helmand in 2008 had a T-shirt made up when he got back to the United States that read “I visited Helmand Province, and all I brought back was a case of PTSD,” a reference to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Just as in the Korengal Valley, the hostility to the presence of American and British troops in Helmand is palpable. Part of the reason for the hostility is that, like in the Korengal Valley, virtually every family in the province is connected in one way, shape, or form
with the Taliban. When U.S. Marine Corps combat units first arrived in the Garmsir District in the southern part of the province in the spring of 2008, they discovered that all fifty Pashtun tribes in the district were connected to the Taliban to varying degrees, with a declassified Marine Corps report admitting that “everyone is somewhat associated [with the Taliban] if they live here.”
But perhaps more than anything else, what allowed the Taliban to thrive in Helmand was that corruption was more pervasive there than in Kabul, and opium poppy cultivation, heroin trafficking, smuggling, and organized crime dominated the province’s political and economic landscape. The bazaars and teahouses of Lashkar Gah were filled with Taliban operatives, drug lords, crime bosses, smugglers, corrupt government and police officials, spies, gunmen for hire, arms merchants, thieves, and confidence artists of every sort and variety. In 2009, the province’s governor, Gulabuddin Mangal, one of the very few Afghan governors with a reputation for honesty, told the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry, that there was a “complete lack of security in the provincial capital,” admitting that “narcotics traffickers operating with impunity lived within 100 meters of the police station in the capital.”
Outside the city limits of Lashkar Gah, the Taliban guerrillas operated openly, periodically attacking Afghan army or police checkpoints just to remind everyone that they were still there. To make the point, my guide took me to the bank of the Helmand River and told me matter-of-factly that if I wanted to find the Taliban, all I had to do was cross the bridge to the other side. “You will not have to look long. They will find you,” he said ominously. Afghan intelligence officers told me that they knew that dozens of Taliban agents kept close tabs on everything that went on in the city of Lashkar Gah. “There are no secrets from the Talibs,” one officer told me.
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