by David Loyn
4
THE HEART OF THE BEAST
As the sun of civilization rose above the hills, the fair flowers of commerce unfolded and the streams of supply and demand, hitherto congealed by the frost of barbarism, were thawed.
—Winston S. Churchill on the effect of road-building, 1897
METAPHORICAL BULLETS
In 1897, Britain, then controlling India, fought a war on the Afghan frontier to push a road north to Chitral. As a young war correspondent, Winston Churchill saw the road as bringing civilization, opposed by those who depended on the “ignorance and credulity” of the tribes.1 Just a few miles away on the other side of the mountains on the same frontier in Kunar, 109 years later, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Cavoli echoed Churchill’s “fair flowers of commerce” when he noted “surplus crops are growing and being sold” on new roads being pushed through remote valleys. A road that opened up the Kunar provincial capital, Asadabad, to the main ring road to the south for the first time led to the opening of two savings banks and the establishment of the National Solidarity Program, the main Afghan government development initiative. But Churchill would have been surprised by the challenges Cavoli faced to secure support to push these roads through.
Cavoli’s commander was Colonel John W. “Mick” Nicholson, on the first of six tours connected with Afghanistan, culminating as the commander of Resolute Support in Kabul ten years later. He was distantly related to another General John Nicholson, a British commander pacifying tribes on the other side of the same frontier in the 1850s.2
In 2006, Nicholson was determined to turn the dial toward counterinsurgency for the deployment of 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain, in Task Force Spartan. This entailed a four-part plan—secure the people, separate them from the enemy, help them choose their own leaders, and connect them to the government.3 But Nicholson had trouble standing up the political and development support he needed. He had political advisers who could describe what was going on but who had no capacity to build government at a local level, and development advisers who opposed his plans to build a road.
To the military, this is a moral question, particularly if engaged in counterinsurgency, fighting not just to kill terrorists but win over the population. To separate the terrorists from the people, they needed to offer improvement—roads, schools, clean water, and better government. The year before, in the same area of operations, trying to bring development behind their military maneuvers, the commander of 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne, Task Force Devil, Colonel Pat Donahue, and his deputy Lieutenant Colonel Mike Fenzel, found themselves facing “staggering gaps in communication, cooperation and collaboration between various agencies.” USAID officials in the field worked on contracts with “no explicit provisions for cooperation”: their “bureaucratic necessities proved universally frustrating.”4 Colonel William B. Ostlund, commander of 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, Task Force Rock, later in the same region questioned why he could expend “millions of dollars on ordnance in an afternoon with no questions asked,” but to spend thousands on development needed an agreement that could take weeks. “Dollars are nonlethal effects,” he wrote, “metaphorical bullets.”5
This was more than a turf war between different Washington silos for control. If America wanted to deliver a difference in Afghanistan beyond chasing al-Qaeda, the approach needed coherence. USAID relied on the military for security in the field but took a principled stand against being enmeshed in their agenda. USAID funding was neither coordinated with the military effort nor building a resilient state. Instead, too much American cash went into the parallel warlord economy, making life harder both for the international military presence and the Afghan state. It took until 2009 to reach an agreement that USAID would assist in development programs for what was called hot stabilization.6 But it came with a stern warning that humanitarian assistance “must not be used for the purpose of political gain, relationship-building, or winning hearts and minds.”7
There are three sections to the Afghan frontier to Pakistan—a mostly mountainous region that hosts one-fifth of the world’s terrorist groups. “This is where the war started,” said Nicholson. “The heart of the beast of al-Qaeda.”8 The most intense firefights were in the northernmost—“N2K” running from Nuristan through Kunar and Nangarhar down to the Khyber Pass. South of the Khyber Pass is “P2K”—Paktika, Paktia, and Khost. In these two sections, the frontier runs down impenetrable mountain ranges, which is why the few wider areas for movement, like the Pech Valley, are strategically important. In the southernmost section, wrapping round the bottom of Afghanistan to Kandahar and Helmand, the border is in many places an ill-defined line in the sand of the desert.
Nicholson knew that the “Pashtun tribes don’t think much of the border.” With close family links, the people ignored the legal border. His solution was to focus on the tribes. “If there’s infiltration occurring in an area, we don’t look at it as a border problem, we look at it as a tribal problem. So we’ll go to the elders of that tribe and say look, you are allowing enemy, bad people, to transit your area and attack your government. And you need to stop it.”9
As so often in the long war, the government on the other side of the frontier made the job of U.S. soldiers far harder. In 2006, Pakistan negotiated a peace deal with the tribes of North Waziristan, across the frontier from P2K, a hotbed of Islamist militancy and the main support network for Jalaluddin Haqqani, responsible for some of the most murderous suicide bomb attacks in Afghan cities. The peace deal had several conditions that were problematic for American forces on the other side—not least the reduction of Pakistani patrols and removal of checkpoints. As cross-border attacks increased Nicholson’s response was to engage the elders on his side. The risks were obvious. Three days after one well-known elder signed a contract for business with the American forces, his body was found near the border, with a note pinned to it as a warning.
KORENGAL
Nicholson and Cavoli did succeed in building roads both north and south, connecting the capital of the east, Jalalabad, to Kunar’s provincial capital, Asadabad, then pushing west through the wide, flat, densely populated Pech Valley, some funded by USAID and some by military CERP money. After a visit, the counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen said the achievement was not the fact of the roads but the process of construction—engaging the local tribal leadership, employing people, increasing their incentive to protect the road, connecting people to government, and limiting the space for insurgents. This was “political maneuver as a counterinsurgency technique,”10 fulfilling what he saw as a “moral obligation” to defend people who have made “the dangerous choice to side with the government.”11
Nicholson’s focus on road-building and governance did not mean there was less fighting. During his fifteen months in command, he dropped 75 percent of the bombs dropped across the whole country in this small corner of the northeast. The war in the mountains was becoming as intense a daily firefight as in Helmand at the same time. The area would see some of the biggest losses of American life in single incidents in the long war. The first casualties came in April 2005 before the push of troops into the valleys, when nineteen special operators were killed in a valley whose name, Korengal, would become notorious. A four-man SEAL team was ambushed and killed, and fifteen others died when a rescue helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade.
The Korengal Valley is only a few miles long, winding south from the Pech Valley between very steep wooded hillsides. The Korengali people live in stone houses, built against the hillsides. They speak a different language from the people of the Pech Valley, running east-west, and from those in the Waigal Valley, a longer deep valley running north. Fighting in these steep valleys north and south of the Pech was as tough as any in the war. Without enough forces, soldiers set up small outposts on peaks, but there was always a higher slope. In 2007, Captain Dan Kearney led Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team to a hill that had been in Taliban hands overlooking the Korengal combat ou
tpost, and they lived there for fifteen months, calling the new setup of tents and wooden huts Restrepo, after Private First Class Juan “Doc” Restrepo, the platoon medic, killed in the first days of their tour. Kearney said in Restrepo, the feature film about their deployment, that they felt “like fish in a barrel.”12 They filled huge Hesco canvas and wire baskets with earth from inside the base, shovel by shovel, to form their only defense. They came under daily attack and found Pakistani cell phone numbers painted onto rocks for potential local recruits to call.13
There were mysteries behind every stone. General David McKiernan, who commanded ISAF from 2008 to 2009, knew that the nature of the landscape—deep, wooded ravines and high snow-peaked mountains—bred a people suspicious of their neighbors in the next valley, let alone young foreigners from seven thousand miles away. “It is Hatfields and McCoys times a hundred,”14 he said, comparing it to nineteenth-century clan wars on the West Virginia / Kentucky border. “There are languages that are spoken, dialects in the east, that are not understood outside that local tribal clan area.” Among the people living in the Waigal are two tribes named after the different cheese they produced—determining the ways they managed their dairy cattle and competed for use of pasture.15 And that was where America’s problems began. Since education in this mountain fastness was limited, translators tended to come from the cities and lacked nuanced knowledge to deal with local complexity at this granular level.
After the Taliban fell, “everybody was supporting the Americans,” according to the governor of Nuristan province, Muhammad Tamim Nuristani. But as elsewhere in Afghanistan, the focus in the early years of the war on chasing terrorists led to people naming their enemies as supporters of al-Qaeda, using air strikes to settle old feuds. “Whether information was wrong or right they gave $100,” and animosity grew as the bombs fell. “Because of that we lost opportunity in the first three years to do anything,” said Nuristani.16 By the time Nicholson’s Task Force Spartan arrived, separating the people from the insurgents, in particular in the Korengal Valley, was a hard task.
To deny space to the enemy, Nicholson put troops into 120 small combat outposts, typically with twenty to fifty Americans, alongside as many Afghan troops. But there were never enough to dominate the ground for counterinsurgency; he had one brigade where there would be fifteen in Iraq. Nor did he have enough other capability in other areas like helicopters or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). And he was facing a dramatic increase in the number of insurgents using the mountain trails that laced the frontier region. “In 2006,” according to Ron Neumann, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, “infiltration into Afghanistan increased several fold.”17 Pakistani forces turned a blind eye to the traffic across the frontier when they did not actually support it. In this respect more than any other, there was a direct parallel with Vietnam, where America faced an enemy with seemingly limitless supplies of fighters and weapons across a land border.
BATTLE OF WANAT
The worst U.S. losses in the east came after Nicholson’s time. In July 2008, nine Americans died in a determined assault on a new U.S. base at Wanat in the Waigal Valley. The lead-up to the incident is disputed, but the officer who had first opened up the Waigal under Nicholson, Lieutenant Eric Malmstrom, could see when he left in 2007 that he had been like a player in a “Greek tragedy,” where the very presence of U.S. troops was causing people to get hurt. “The people had turned cold. They wanted us out of their lives.”18 In an incident nine months before the Wanat assault, six Americans and two Afghan soldiers died in an ambush after a local security chief was fired. After this incident, the troops of Chosen Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, “no longer gave the Afghans the benefit of the doubt,” according to a draft of a report by contract army historian Douglas Cubbison. The final report issued by the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is a sanitized version that did not include this line. In one of the interviews that did not make it to the final version, a soldier tells Cubbison that after the ambush there was no longer any interaction with Afghan civilians or security forces. “They didn’t come near us and we didn’t go near them.”19
The incident that provoked the attack was the destruction of two trucks by Apache helicopters. The trucks were moving out of an area where Chosen Company were pulling back from three remote bases to a new site at Wanat, farther down the valley. The governor of Nuristan, Tamim Nuristani, said nineteen people died, including the family of the owner of the land leased for one of the bases. The convoy was full of civilians leaving the area because, Nuristani said, they were warned by U.S. soldiers that fighting might break out as the bases were closed. The immediate army inquiry in Afghanistan found “insufficient evidence” that there were civilians on board the convoy, and pressure was successfully put on President Karzai to fire Nuristani as governor. But the task force intelligence officer, Captain Benjamin Pry, told Cubbison that he believed there were civilians on board the trucks, and insurgents forced their way among them.
When Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom arrived in Wanat to scope a site for a new base, on his first meeting with elders in Wanat, they handed him a list of names of those killed in the convoy. Four days later, with the new base still in a rudimentary state—as local construction workers had not arrived in time to build defenses—it was assaulted on all sides by a well-planned and coordinated dawn attack with hundreds of RPGs pouring in. The assailants had disguised their movement in the night under sound from a diverted stream. The Americans were pinned down. The unit’s best weapon, a TOW antitank missile launcher, was set on fire in the first salvos, and soldiers could never reach one mortar position, as it was exposed to murderous fire throughout the attack. Eight of the soldiers who died fell in a separate observation post. They included Brostrom, who ran under fire to relieve his comrades. The Taliban were supported by villagers who joined the attack and almost certainly by local police officers. A CENTCOM investigation forced by Brostrom’s father, Dave, a retired army colonel, found failings up the chain of command and recommended letters of reprimand that would have ended several senior careers. But the finding was overruled, so the dead ended up taking the blame.
Chosen Company were in the last days of a fifteen-month tour. These were now becoming the norm for Afghanistan—the first was Nicholson’s Task Force Spartan, who had finished their planned twelve months when they were told they would extend in 2007. The ISAF commander, General David Richards, was impressed by the length of the tours. It meant the American military really were “at war,” with a commitment not shared by European armies. The muscular military capability of the Americans and their will to engage “made the rest of NATO look rather pathetic.” And most Americans were willing to support his intent for an enlightened counterinsurgency strategy, not merely concerned with grinding down the Taliban, although he conceded, “Not all of them agreed with it.” The replacement for Task Force Spartan still came out as scheduled—doubling the force in the east, and the first sign of a new focus by the Bush administration on the Afghan war, ratcheting up beyond this being an economy-of-force operation.
PAKISTAN
In an effort to cut cross-border infiltration, Richards unilaterally embarked on a mission to improve relations with the Pakistani leader, President Pervez Musharraf. This went beyond what might have been expected of a theater commander. There was an unwillingness in Washington to confront Pakistani duplicity because of concern over destabilizing an Islamic state armed with nuclear weapons, and because American trucks full of key supplies for the war needed to cross Pakistan. This was a fundamental plank of U.S. foreign policy with deep ties that took some years to change after 9/11. The alliance went back to the days of the Cold War, when Pakistan received military aid at levels unparalleled anywhere except Israel, as America’s only guaranteed friend in the region—and was a launchpad for spy plane flights over the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, U.S. funding of Afghan guerrillas based in Pakistan to fight against the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan left a toxic legacy as Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, forged deep links with the most fundamentalist Islamist mujahideen groups who received the lion’s share of the funding.
Pakistan’s view that its security interests depend on a compliant government in Afghanistan brought it on a collision course with the U.S. after 9/11. It was playing with fire by promising to support America against al-Qaeda, while continuing to train and support the Taliban in Afghanistan, helping them to recover and regroup after their defeat. Afghan foreign minister Hanif Atmar said Pakistan made an “industrial-level effort to reorganize the Taliban,” to ensure they still had influence in Afghanistan.20
Musharraf had put himself in power in a military coup two years before 9/11, regularizing his rule with an election in 2002. Richards believed it was important to create a relationship with the government in Islamabad at his level, to have the ability to influence them, and even aspired to use his office to bring better relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He did not seek approval from General James Jones, who as SACEUR, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, was responsible for NATO in the Afghan campaign. And Jones did not back the initiative when he heard about it, becoming increasingly concerned about Richards’s political maneuvering. Musharraf was keen for the talks to go on, approving a plan for a joint Afghan/Pakistani committee, and asking Richards to be a facilitator. The ISAF commander was flying on his own, but he misjudged the wider effects of his maneuvers. His peace initiative never had any traction in Afghanistan, where Pakistan was seen as being at the root of all the evils that had befallen the country.
Karzai was convinced that Pakistan had been behind the targeted assassination of his father on Pakistani soil, and was never a willing partner in the Richards peace initiative. And the plan to broker a new AfPak deal would not be picked up by the next ISAF commander, General Dan McNeill. But Richards was willing to risk an inevitable suspicion on Karzai’s part if he could improve security. “My role was to bring the two nations together as best I could, I felt, and therefore, I had to sort of balance the two. They both were paranoid about each other, and I was there trying my best to keep a balance.”