by David Loyn
When Petraeus’s successor, General John Allen, took command in July, his task of building a better relationship with the Afghan president was made easier, as there was a change of ambassador at the same time. Out went Karl Eikenberry, who had been on borrowed time since his contempt for Karzai became public knowledge. He had lost the confidence of Clinton a year earlier and was moved only when what Gates called the “protective umbrella” of the White House was removed. In came Ryan Crocker, persuaded to return to the field despite health concerns.
When Crocker was ambassador to Iraq in 2008, Allen had been deputy commander during the Sunni Awakening in Anbar and instrumental in delivering the province tribe by tribe. There were eighty-eight tribes, and Allen came to know their sheikhs, each color coded for loyalty on a map on the wall of his situation room—charting progress as the map of the large, sparsely populated desert turned gradually, piece by piece, to green. The turning point came when one of the key leaders, Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, was approached by some of the original Sunni insurgents, asking for his support to attack U.S. forces. He told them that if they harmed one coalition soldier, the tribes would turn on them. Allen said, “We had a very tight relationship, and they were like brothers to me in so many ways.” His understanding came from the British explorer and later colonial official Gertrude Bell, who traveled in the region in the first two decades of the twentieth century and mapped the tribes, working part of the time during and after World War I with T. E. Lawrence. Allen made the reading of her books and letters compulsory for his officers in Iraq. But he realized early in his time in Kabul not to make comparisons between the two countries. He found Afghanistan vastly more complex. “About the third time I said, as the commander in Afghanistan, I want to do this because this had been successful in Iraq, I suddenly realized I’ve got to expunge that word from my vocabulary. If I’m going to offer my views on how to do something it can’t be explained as a result of my experience in Iraq.”
On arrival in Kabul in 2011, Crocker arranged for Allen to walk with him down the aisle of a large tent at the embassy erected for his swearing in, so the assembled Afghan and international guests could see that the diplomatic and military missions were marching in step. Crocker had known Karzai since the first winter of the war, when he was the first ambassador after the fall of the Taliban, and Allen listened as the two reminisced about the days when they met in that room in the Arg, the windows shot out, with torn furniture to sit on, and only a primitive stove to keep out the harsh cold of a Kabul winter. Allen’s political adviser Marc Chretien said, “Allen understands one-on-one relationships better than anyone else I know.”3 In the hard negotiations with the Afghan president in the months to come, he would stay in the room, however much the provocation, and keep going at times when Crocker would lose his patience.4 Other times, when Karzai complained about the conduct of American troops, it would be Crocker who put a restraining arm onto Allen.5 Their professional bond was a valuable partnership.
Allen is tall and imposing with a high-and-tight Marine Corps haircut and the posture and bearing of a general from central casting, able to fill a room with expansive arm movements and a big, warm Virginian baritone voice. He has a curiously latex face, with features that are not well defined, and while highly disciplined and focused, emotions are never far below the surface. He set a ferocious pace in Afghanistan, working until one o’clock in the morning, up again at five, day after day. But he was not a remote figure. Once, when commandant at Annapolis, he rappelled down a rope from the ceiling into a full mess hall, with camouflage war paint on his face, yelling, “Go, navy! Beat army!” before the annual army-navy game, one of the most enduring rivalries in sports.6
Allen embodied the best of American warrior virtue and was never in doubt of a career in the military, inspired by a childhood fictional hero, John Carter, who had a “sense of overpowering fascination” toward Mars, the planet and the god of war. Carter is transported to Mars from a post–Civil War skirmish with Apaches, and the books tell of his adventures there, rescuing women and slaying villains. His first encounter with a Martian might be from the counterinsurgency manual. “Placing my hand over my heart I bowed low to the Martian and explained to him that while I did not understand his language, his actions spoke to the peace and friendship that at the present moment were most dear to my heart.”7
Less publicly demonstrative than his predecessors, Petraeus and McChrystal, Allen was out on the ground as much as they were, consoling and encouraging, going on patrol to steady troops after bad incidents, and attending the sad ritual of the ramp ceremony more often than bearable. The month after he arrived was the worst for U.S. casualties in the war, with seventy fatalities, thirty-eight of them in one helicopter crash, brought down when the Taliban got lucky and hit the tail rotor of a CH-47 Chinook with a rocket-propelled grenade. The dead included seventeen Navy SEALs from Team 6 that killed Osama bin Laden, although none of those on the bin Laden mission died in the crash. During a six-week period that summer, the Taliban also attacked a couple of governors’ compounds, killed the mayor of Kandahar, and hit the British Council in Kabul, burning it to the ground. Twelve security guards, eight of them Afghan, were killed, but the civilian staff remarkably all survived, locked into a safe room that endured the shooting, explosions, and fire.
The first marine to command the international coalition in Afghanistan, Allen took over on the far side of the surge—with more than eight hundred bases to close, and U.S. troops leaving Afghanistan more quickly than he believed was in the best interests of his mission of securing the country. “I had to get the Afghan army ready to take over operations a year earlier than we had anticipated.” His undergraduate training was in operations analysis, and he would need higher math skills to manage the complex matrix of delivering combat effect, while drawing down the surge and moving the mission from fighting to advising. He had given the president his best military advice; now he had to fight the war he was given. Chretien said Allen was “haunted” by the withdrawal timetable. “It was the biggest albatross round his neck.” To Chretien, announcing the end date of the surge was “like playing poker, raising, while saying you’re going to fold next round.”
President Obama’s decision, setting the end of summer 2012 for the date the last surge troops should leave, had some in the NSC reaching for an almanac for the date of the autumn equinox. Obama wanted Afghans to shoulder more responsibility. “We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely. That is the responsibility of the Afghan government, which must step up its ability to protect its people.”8 Allen’s British deputy, Lieutenant General Nick Carter, on his third deployment to the country, said the challenge was to get “the machine to recognize that it’s time that the Afghans really did lead.” It required extraordinary leadership to understand there was “huge wisdom in not doing things.”9
As a reminder of the urgency of the mission to deliver better Afghan forces to take on the war for themselves, on his first day in Kabul, Allen signed the move order to send ten thousand surge troops home. An hour later, he called together his most senior staff round the large, polished wooden table in the cramped setting of the Herat room at ISAF HQ to reexamine the war from the ground up. They included Germans, Italians, and British as well as Americans—an alliance Allen valued above all. To him, the strategic center of gravity, which he defined as “the thing which if it was attacked or it came apart would bring about the failure of the campaign,” was the fifty-nation coalition of countries under his command. “If the coalition fragmented or began to disintegrate, the campaign would come apart, there’s just no question about it.” Protecting the population, the center of gravity in the counterinsurgency years and in particular for McChrystal in 2009, was now defined as the “objective of the campaign.” Allen’s operational center of gravity was the Afghan army. Getting it up to strength meant that the ISAF coalition needed to be reshaped from war fighting to being “principally an advisory force.”
/> So was it still a counterinsurgency? If there was any doubt of the way the wind was blowing, it was dispelled six months into Allen’s command, January 5, 2012, the date America formally closed the era of COIN. “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations,” declared the new defense strategic guidance.10 Counterinsurgency was demoted to the “lessons learned” corner of military doctrine. Allen believed the Afghan campaign was in many ways “more of a counterinsurgency” than before, but one now led by the Afghans themselves. Building them up for the task in the limited time he had left faced a new and complex threat from inside the Afghan army itself.
GREEN ON BLUE
Kevin O’Rourke was a New York City firefighter who assisted in recovery efforts at Ground Zero. The event would define his life. He was a founding member of HEART 9/11, set up by first responders in the wake of the attacks on America to assist in disaster areas, and he volunteered when they assisted in relief operations in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. And he answered the call for advisers to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2012, he died in a remote outpost in rural Afghanistan, shot by the very Afghan soldiers he had gone to help. Sergeant First Class Daniel T. Metcalfe from the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team was shot in the same incident at a routine checkpoint—his death marking a grim milestone, the two thousandth member of the American armed forces to die in the war in Afghanistan. Metcalfe joined the army just months before 9/11 and, like O’Rourke, had served multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan—heroes killed in a cowardly attack.
Exactly what happened at the Sisay outpost in Wardak Province on September 29, 2012, was never fully explained. There is no doubt that Metcalfe was shot dead first, and another American soldier wounded, by Din Muhammad,11 the sergeant commanding the Afghan platoon. Swift answering fire by U.S. soldiers downed the rogue Afghan sergeant but provoked further Afghan firing and, amid confusion, led to a general exchange of fire, including the use of hand grenades. It took some time for a U.S. second lieutenant to stop the mayhem. When the firing died down, O’Rourke had fallen, and two other Americans were wounded. The Afghan toll was four dead and two wounded. The Americans and Afghans knew each other, although not well; the 173rd Airborne had arrived in the area just two months previously.
Allen immediately flew to Wardak to try to understand the corrosive effect of what were known as “green-on-blue” attacks (where green were local allied forces and blue were friendly troops).12 He went on a foot patrol with the remnants of the platoon who were in shock. Metcalfe, twenty-nine years old, had been a father figure to the unit, and Allen could see his death really hit them. “Their souls had been wounded … they felt alone, they felt betrayed, they were angry as hell.”
Until 2011, there were only a handful of such attacks a year, each one an individual tragedy, but they did not threaten the mission. Now as the surge troops were heading home, there was a spike, with a chilling effect on operations far beyond the raw numbers. Allen knew that it would be hard to recover the training mission if trust broke down to the point where ISAF and Afghan troops fought each other at unit level. The attacks represented an existential threat to the campaign to train and mentor Afghan forces.
The green-on-blue attack that had the most impact caused the deaths of five French soldiers in January 2012; twelve others were wounded, shot by an Afghan soldier as they finished a workout session on a shared base in Kapisa in eastern Afghanistan. The shooting came just weeks after two French legionnaires were killed in a similar incident. The French defense minister, Gérard Longuet, immediately flew to Kabul. All French military operations in Afghanistan were suspended, and just days later, the decision was made to end the French military mission. The timing of the attack could not have been worse. President Nicolas Sarkozy was facing an imminent election where the challenger, François Hollande, was campaigning to bring the troops home. Sarkozy made an emotional speech saying the shootings left him with no option but to pull out a year earlier than planned.
Allen’s biggest fear was a domino effect, where other nations followed France and pulled out early. It was election year in the United States too, where the Afghan war was increasingly unpopular, and voices were growing for an early withdrawal. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta hinted after the French announcement that U.S. troops could “step back” from combat operations in 2013, a year earlier than the current schedule.13 Allen knew that any lack of resolve could damage the mission. Michael Clarke, the head of the London-based think tank the Royal United Services Institute, likened the effect to a false start in a hundred-meter race. “If the Americans are now flinching in their block there will be two or three actors who get off to a flier. The suspicion that America is going to pull out early will create a self-fulfilling prophecy and there will be a rush to the exit.”14
When the attack on French troops in Kapisa happened, Allen was in Germany after a meeting of NATO defence chiefs in Brussels. As always when in Europe, this most coalition-centered commander visited other capitals to weave them into continued support for the mission. Allen’s Gulfstream took him on to France, where the first thing he saw on arrival was a front-page story in The Washington Post highlighting a report from inside ISAF that the U.S. training mission was doomed to fail because the troops were culturally incompatible. The report was a “Red Team” inquiry, a way of thinking outside the box, instigated during Petraeus’s command the previous year, when green-on-blue attacks began to become a concern. The author, Jeffrey Bordin, concluded that personal clashes and “strong dislike, even contempt” were leading to a “crisis of trust” where green-on-blue attacks were an inevitability. Bordin characterized the opinions of Afghans and Americans in a colorful list. “One group generally sees the other as a bunch of violent, reckless, intrusive, arrogant, self-serving, profane, infidel bullies hiding behind high technology; and the other group generally views the former as a bunch of cowardly, incompetent, obtuse, thieving, complacent, lazy, pot-smoking, treacherous and murderous radicals.”15 Allen was deeply concerned that the publication of the report would feed into a growing view in the U.S. that this was mission impossible—that cultural incompatibility meant the task of training and advising, the operational center of gravity of his campaign, was fatally flawed. If Bordin was right, he said, “we would never be able to work together. Any strategy that relies upon an advisory presence is a failed strategy because there’s just no compatibility.”
Shortly afterward, the North Atlantic Council, the ambassadors of NATO countries, met in Brussels. Fifty countries, including non-NATO partners, were represented in the room round the long oval table. Allen could see it would be a tough meeting when the French ambassador spoke forcefully about how the Kapisa attack fulfilled “in the French mind the futility of the campaign.” The French operation was code-named Task Force La Fayette—a name with powerful resonance in America since the days of the Revolutionary War. Allen did not want any other countries following La Fayette out of theater. While the ambassador was speaking, white name cards round the room popped up one after another, signaling that people wanted to speak, and Allen sensed he was in for a rough ride. But the mood changed when the Australian ambassador, Brendan Nelson, sitting opposite the French ambassador across the wide, oval space, spoke next. “And he said this remarkable thing. He said, ‘Look, nobody’s suffered more casualties from green-on-blue than Australia has, and we have two options here, one is to cut and run and the other is to double down, and Australia is going to double down.’” To Allen’s relief, the intervention ended the conversation. “The French still pulled their operators out but not another country did.”
With the coalition steadied, and no one following France to an early exit, Allen quickly needed to find a solution to the rising toll of green-on-blue attacks, which exploded after the French decision as the Taliban had a tried and tested route to fracturing the coalition. There is no evidence that green on blue was a tactic originally devise
d by the Taliban, but intercepted Taliban chatter revealed that once they understood the effect, particularly on coalition cohesion, they moved to attempt to insert infiltrators into Afghan army ranks and assist disaffected soldiers. If the contagion spread, it would wreck the mission.
August and September 2012 were the worst months of the war for green-on-blue attacks. On the evening of August 10, three U.S. Marine special operators were killed while exercising in the gym in Garmser District in Helmand. The marines, Staff Sergeant Scott Dickinson, Corporal Richard Rivera, and Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley, were in a shared base with Afghan police they were training. The killer, Aynoddin, was aged seventeen and looked younger. He was wearing civilian clothes and shot the marines with an AK-47 assault rifle he’d picked up from an unguarded room. He then walked out to say to police officers before they disarmed him, “I just did jihad. Don’t you want to do jihad, too? If not, I will kill you.” Aynoddin could come and go from the base with ease. He was a “tea boy” for the district police chief, who allegedly kept him for sex—a common practice in southern Afghanistan that international troops had failed to stamp out.16
Allen arrived in Garmser later that night, and stood in the dark in a circle of silent bearded special operators just back from patrol, comrades of those killed. “I was trying to explain to them that this moment is one where we can lose our motivation or we can double down with our discipline and still win.” But Allen was beginning to doubt himself as the attacks piled up. He would say to the press that the troops were well trained and well led, and he was sure they would remain focused on the mission, but attacks like this one, or the one that took the lives of Metcalfe and O’Rourke, made him question his own public reassurances. After every incident, he would stride up and down mess halls and tents, rallying young troops. “After about two or three of those I thought to myself, hell, I don’t know whether I’m right or not, I’m just assuming that I am.” Perhaps green on blue really would harm the morale and effectiveness of ISAF troops. He needed to find out what was going on.