Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  In Helmand the security forces were dominated by the Nurzai tribe. Colonel Shirzad, from the Nurzai tribe, served in various security posts in Helmand before being appointed police chief. Abdul Rahman Jan, the first postwar police chief, was also a Nurzai, as was Lieutenant Colonel Ayub, who had served as deputy chief of police following the overthrow of the Taliban. Ayub was known as an uneducated illiterate warlord. Colonel Torjan, the logistics officer, was a Nurzai. The Helmand passport officer was a Nurzai. The Border Patrol chief for Helmand was a Nurzai. General Mirwais, the head of the police in southern Afghanistan, was a Nurzai. The Nurzais were a plurality in the province, especially in its important places. Marja, the district where the Taliban had its strongest hold, had a Nurzai plurality. In 2009 Marja had a bumper poppy crop thanks to Taliban protection. A few months later Marja was the first district targeted for a major U.S. offensive in 2010.

  Every police chief in Helmand, including Shirzad, bought his post from officials at the Interior Ministry. Police in Helmand were known to release prisoners for bribes ranging from five hundred to twenty thousand dollars. Shirzad’s predecessor arrested a Taliban commander and was offered fifty thousand dollars for his release, but the Americans caught wind of it, so he couldn’t close the deal. To ease the pressure he was facing to release the prisoner, he asked for the prisoner to be flown to Kabul.

  In 2007 a district police commander went to Colonel Torjan to receive his two mandated Ford Rangers, but Torjan demanded ten thousand dollars for each. The Americans took the commander’s report, but two or three weeks later he was killed by an IED. Conducting routine affairs in the Education Department required a bribe. The Justice Ministry in Helmand was particularly notorious. In addition to the poor quality of the police in Helmand, there just weren’t enough of them. Helmand was supposed to have an increase of five hundred police as part of the surge, but so far only 211 had been recruited.

  Locals complained that the police charged taxes at checkpoints. “The police know we’re here to watch them as much as fight the Taliban,” said Sergeant Gustafson. “Shirzad is a wily adept politician,” he told me. “He comes with a lot of baggage.” Shirzad was tied to the warlords connected to the poppy trade. Following a large opium seizure in 2009, the drugs disappeared and the trail went cold at Shirzad’s headquarters. It was not that Afghans were corrupt and the Americans would teach them how to govern. The Americans helped bring corruption to Afghanistan by funding warlords, paying off tribes, and creating parallel institutions and a network of foreign and Afghan contractors. They created an infrastructure of unaccountability.

  July 2009 was the worst month since the war started for the Americans and their allies, with forty-two Americans and twenty-two British soldiers killed, and a total of seventy-five foreign troops killed. Most of the casualties that month occurred in Helmand, when the Americans launched an operation for the fourth time to secure the area. More than four thousand Marines descended on the Helmand River Valley in a mission that had been planned months earlier. It was the first major operation of Obama’s presidency. Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, Marine commander for the operation, stressed that the focus was on getting the Afghan government back on its feet. He urged his men to get to know the people, to drink tea and eat goat with them. Six hundred and fifty Afghan soldiers also took part. Nicholson promised that “where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold.” The Marines hoped to win over the population. So too had the thousands of British soldiers who had been in the province since 2006. The British military was conducting a simultaneous operation in Helmand. Like the Marines, they hoped to provide enough security so that the August presidential elections could be held credibly.

  About 750 Marines made it to an agricultural district called Nawa south of Lashkar Gah. Before they arrived there were only about forty British soldiers there, ensconced with some Afghan soldiers and police in the district center, unable to move outside a small secure zone one kilometer wide. Beyond that the Taliban manned checkpoints. “Everybody knew we were coming,” a Marine colonel told me, “so we wanted to deceive the enemy about what that would mean.” On June 19 three hundred Marines flew into Nawa and conducted patrols to lull the Taliban and give them ten days to think that was it, that they could handle the surge. The patrols had an average of one contact with their enemy every day. On July 2, the rest of the battalion came to block the Taliban escape and reinforcements. The Marines had expected their invasion to be more kinetic, meaning they had expected more shooting. They encountered a few days of stiff resistance and were impressed with their enemy’s combat techniques. But then the Taliban wisely melted away, laying down their arms or fleeing to Marja, fifteen miles to the west. The Taliban left poorly hidden weapons caches and poorly placed IEDs, and the Marines caught some of them fleeing. The first two IEDs destroyed vehicles, but the Marines uncovered the next twenty before they detonated. The Taliban also set up antipersonnel mines, placing an IED in a tree with a kite string attached to it as a command wire, and another IED in a wall.

  The Marines were led by Lieut. Col. William McCollough, who operated out of a partially constructed brick building covered with sandbags. Although they officially had 650 Afghan soldiers with them, in private the Marines complained that it was more like four hundred and that the lack of an “Afghan face” was their “Achilles’ heel.” For an operation months in the making, it was a huge and inexplicable shortage.

  Team Ironhorse and the ANCOP were to go to Helmand at the same time to increase the Afghan veneer. “We will deliver stabilization and development,” a Marine colonel in Helmand told me. “The Taliban filled the space. They took the governance high ground. The Taliban rule through intimidation and coercion. Harassment by the Taliban has become more intense, and the population is becoming more dissatisfied.” There was now a civilian “stabilization adviser” in Nawa with the Marines, the colonel told me, who was “trying to coordinate with local Afghan leadership so that the district government and police chief can organize and take the governance high ground. We’re going to deliver governance by demilitarizing it as soon as possible. The most important lesson from Iraq was the transition piece. You need to have Afghans involved at every phase and remind yourself it’s about them and their country, and remind each other we have to get our Afghan partners involved at every level.” The short-term goal was to provide security so they could deliver the upcoming August presidential elections in a meaningful way.

  Major Contreras led Team Ironhorse and Prowler in mentoring the police. The ANCOP were a highly trained unit (by local standards) that took over temporarily for local police units while they were sent away for training. Contreras was excited about his role in the war. “This is in its infancy,” he said. “We’re beginning to see the military might that we as a nation can bring.” A true believer, he explained that he was fighting to protect the American way of life and because his wife had been working in the Pentagon when it was hit on September 11. Contreras was concerned about the “negative tone” of my previous article on Afghanistan for Rolling Stone and hoped I would write a more positive article this time. “We can win this,” he told me. “We were doing it one year at a time before for seven years.”

  But first he would have to overcome Afghan bureaucracy. He couldn’t go to Nawa to link up with the Marines because Colonel Saki had not received his official orders from the Interior Ministry. The order had been signed and sealed five days earlier, but it had to be delivered by courier to Saki. There was no e-mail or other way for Saki to receive his orders. This was minor compared with the problems Contreras usually had with the ministry, he joked. Colonel Saki had not received supplies like radios, ammunition, and fuel, so he did not even have the logistical ability to head down. Saki met Colonel Torjan, who was in charge of logistics, and asked him for a commitment to replenish the ANCOP’s weapons and ammunition. Torjan took him to his depot to show him that he had nothing to spare. The following day Contreras went to meet Torjan in the police headq
uarters. He stuffed a pistol between his belt and the small of his back, just in case.

  Torjan had not received the official document from the ministry ordering him to equip the ANCOP. All he had was a letter from the ANCOP. The ANCOP could have made it up themselves, Torjan said. There was fighting in many parts of Helmand, and many people were running out of ammunition, he said. He received about one-third of what he requested from the ministry in Kabul. Two British officers advising the police headquarters sat in on the meeting, as did a portly civilian contract police adviser. The provincial reserve requested eighty radios. Contreras and the British disputed how many they actually needed. Then they struggled to figure out which form they needed to fill out to get the Interior Ministry to ship supplies to Kandahar and then to Helmand, and how to make sure the staff at the Kandahar headquarters didn’t keep most of the supplies for themselves. Contreras and Torjan discussed how the ANCOP would refuel in Nawa, with Torjan suggesting they find gas stations. Nobody knew if there were any gas stations in the area.

  That evening Ironhorse sat waiting to be briefed by Contreras. They were all scouts, and some were snipers, chosen by their lieutenant because they were “rough” and “shooters.” The major’s original plan called for them to go to Nawa before the Marines got there. “We would have gotten eaten alive,” one of them joked. The Marines in Nawa were attempting to provide a safe and secure environment for the Afghan government in order to facilitate the handover of the security mission to the ANSF, he explained. Ironhorse’s mission was to conduct a movement to Nawa—traveling through the eastern desert to avoid the much faster main road, which had not been cleared of IEDs—in order to link up with Marines and support their operations.

  Contreras said guys in police uniforms were harassing civilians in Nawa. The men seemed very skeptical about the whole thing. “Duration of mission and number of legitimate police in Nawa, and how will ANP get along with ANCOP, and who is mentoring the ANPs there?” Staff Sergeant McGuire tersely asked without moving or looking at the major. Staff Sergeant Verdorn complained that they would be doing the Marines’ job of clearing. As the major concluded his brief, McGuire loudly muttered, “It’s a cocksuck.” Contreras left. “That was very well thought out,” McGuire said. I asked him to elaborate. “Fuel will be the biggest issue,” he said. “We don’t know where we’re gonna live, we’re not taking tents.” It was the worst operations order he had ever seen, he said, just telling them to go down there and the Marines would tell them what to do. “It’s a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ operation.” There was no plan for what would happen after they got to the school where the Marines were based. McGuire wondered what the mission was. If it was to give an Afghan face, well then there were already hundreds of Afghan soldiers there. Staff Sergeant Thacker was also worried. There were “a lot of I don’t knows” in the brief, he said, like the radio frequencies for the Marines. “A normal op order, even the lowliest private knows what everybody’s going to do,” McGuire told me.

  The British warned against occupying a school, but Contreras dismissed the concern. “The point is to provide a safe and secure environment,” he said. He told the men to plan for seven days before they returned to base. “The reason why we’re going down is to put an Afghan face on the mission,” he said. “There isn’t enough ANSF there.” Contreras explained to me later that the goal was to set the conditions to deploy the ANCOP to work with the Marines in that area. It was a clear-and-hold operation, a basic element of counterinsurgency. “The Afghans have to feel like we’re there with them,” he said. The Marines would clear the area of Taliban, and the police would hold it. “My Afghan counterparts say that loads of Taliban want to stop fighting and reform,” Contreras told me. He believed the Taliban had seen the error of their ways. All evidence pointed to the contrary, though. The Taliban were more confident than ever.

  “The Marines are trained to go off a ship, hit the ground and fucking charge,” Contreras told me, worrying that they might not be suitable for COIN. “I’ve never been to the place where I’m going. I have no idea what it looks like,” he admitted. Contreras drove to the ANCOP facility, and we walked to Saki’s office. There was a marijuana plant in the garden. Saki was watching Bollywood movies. He had a picture of President Karzai on his wall, some plastic flowers next to it, a bare desk, and a coffee table in his office, along with a map of Helmand. Saki wore an ornate salwar kameez, cream-colored with shiny embroidery. He had thick eyebrows and a short, well-groomed beard. “Intelligence we received says that in two days all the Taliban will leave Nawa and go to Marja, because of the large number of Marines,” he said. Saki warned that the Taliban planted at least one hundred IEDs in Nawa but added that most were of poor quality and would not explode. About twenty were properly planted and effective, he said, with remote control detonation. Saki showed the longer road through the desert we would take to avoid IEDs along the road to Nawa.

  IEDs were the biggest threat, the perfect asymmetric weapon. In 2009 there were thousands of IED attacks on ANSF. Most of the American and British soldiers killed every month were victims of IEDs, not small-arms fire, but IEDs were not just effective when they exploded. The threat of them crippled foreign and Afghan security forces. It meant that their vehicles were not free to go to all areas, and that they had to proceed at a snail’s pace with bomb detectors walking in front of convoys or their vehicles crawling ahead. IEDs were built from homemade explosives like fertilizer and fuel as well as old mortars from past wars. Some were detonated by remote control, by cable or a pressure plate. In Iraq paved roads made it harder to conceal them; in Afghanistan the prevalence of dirt roads made it easier.

  The men of Ironhorse had lost their lieutenant and a sergeant, as well as an interpreter and a cop, in a February 2009 IED blast. Lieutenant Southworth and Staff Sergeant Burkholder had gone to examine an IED the ANCOP discovered. They asked for an explosive ordnance disposal team to destroy it because they needed the road open and they worried civilians would get blown up. The British told them to mark the location and move on. As the ANCOP tried to dismantle the IED, it blew up. Ironhorse and the police spent an hour picking up pieces of their friends from the road and even a tree. Ironhorse later got a good tip on the IED maker who had killed their two friends. They raided his house, arresting him and his son, but when the two prisoners were in police detention they paid $1,500 to two guards and escaped. Ironhorse had returned to the house three times looking for them.

  Although the men were chosen by their lieutenant for being “meat eaters,” the months of daily operations and shitting in bags had taken a toll on them. They hated being in Afghanistan and being sent on missions that weren’t their own; they resented the neglect they felt and the lack of progress. One sergeant’s parents owned a hardware store and sent the team four tow straps for their Humvees because their request through the military was going nowhere. One Humvee drove around with bad transmission for a month and a half because they couldn’t get a mechanic. “That’s the kind of shit that just wears on you,” Sergeant McGuire told me. “We were doing repairs above our mechanical level because there wasn’t anybody to look at it, and then we got an e-mail asking why we were doing it, a kick in the nuts.” While stationed in southern Helmand, they had to find their own water supply because the Army wasn’t providing them with any.

  Southworth had been very passionate, his men told me; he believed he had come to give Afghan kids a better future, and he loved what he was doing. He paid Afghans $150 for pointing out IEDs. A rich aunt sent him the money. It was unusual but it worked, his men said. The men had been told they would be on a large base in a safe job. Southworth knew different. They were going into the shit. He spent over a year putting the team together, sending them to schools for sniper, scout, combat lifesaver, and mountain skills. He gave a speech to the men before their final leave back home, warning them that a couple of them wouldn’t make it back. His death was a huge loss for the team.

  Contreras agreed to go t
hrough the desert to avoid the main road. The Marines or police working with them would meet them on the other side of the Argandab River to guide them to the schoolhouse base. The Marines were in the desert between Marja and Nawa to prevent an exodus of Taliban to Marja and prevent reinforcements from Marja coming into Nawa. Saki thought the Marines couldn’t distinguish between Taliban and civilians. He asked for gunpowder residue kits so that people’s hands could be tested to see if they were handling weapons. None were available. Saki strongly believed most Taliban were local farmworkers who fired when they had a chance and then threw down their weapons and took up shovels. Contreras told Saki he wanted him to set up two checkpoints with thirty men each so there would be about thirty left for patrolling and other missions. “If there are Marines with us, we can man checkpoints,” Saki said. “Otherwise we can’t.” It was too dangerous for his men to do it alone.