Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  But Saki had still has not received his written orders from the Interior Ministry to go on the mission on Sunday, and it was already Friday. He joked that by the time he got the orders the Nawa operation would be over. He worried that his chain of command would make problems for him, especially if he lost somebody there. Saki asked Contreras to tell the American training headquarters in Kandahar to e-mail the deputy minister of interior and explain that they needed an order to move to Nawa. He still could not even confirm that he would go there. He needed orders or he would get in trouble, but he didn’t have the authority to speak to the ANCOP commander in Kabul or the deputy minister of interior. He asked the Americans to do it for him and pressure his leadership to give him the mission orders. A key element in the year’s largest operation was being held up by bureaucracy.

  Saki was concerned about his informant in Nawa, who was traveling on foot. He asked Contreras for money to get him a motorcycle. It would cost $500 at the most, he said. He lost informants because of lack of resources, he said, and asked for more to help them. But Contreras was noncommittal. Saki had not heard from one of his informants for the past two days. He worried that the man had been captured by the Taliban. Saki had no food, fuel, or water for the mission. The Marines would help provide food, Contreras assured him, while Ironhorse would take care of the water. This left only the need for diesel fuel. The Marines had fifty heat casualties yesterday, Contreras told Saki: “They haven’t learned to stop working in the middle of the day.” Saki and his assistant laughed.

  The next day Contreras met with Saki again. “The Marines are giving me a lot of problems because of the delay,” he said. Contreras asked for an assurance that they could leave in two days. Saki was still waiting for supplies. A quick reaction force of forty men from Kandahar would also go along with Saki’s sixty or so men from ANCOP, and he would equip them. “They will look like ANCOP, but will they act like ANCOP?” Contreras asked, worried that they might spoil the good name of Saki’s ANCOP. “As long as you and I are in charge it will be okay,” Saki said with a smile. He told Contreras he heard the Marines were trying to get close to the people but the local police were making problems and people were complaining that the police were thieves. “We will tie Taliban to trees and shoot them,” Saki said. Contreras looked down and shook his head, laughing. “Enemy morale is low,” said Saki. “The enemy is nothing.” Saki didn’t trust the local Nawa ANP. “They inform the Taliban,” he said. He also didn’t trust the police in Lashkar Gah and warned Contreras not to travel with them. “If they could, the ANP would hand me over to the Taliban,” Saki said. The ANCOP liked to say about the ANP that “you can change the blanket on a donkey, but it’s still a donkey.”

  Two days later they finally get the order to go. McGuire was in command of the first Humvee, and I joined him as a passenger. The gunner up top shot pen flares at cars that got too close. The pop sounded like a gunshot and served as a warning. We drove by a group of small kids fighting, punching one another in the face. The men cheered. McGuire opened the windows and shouted, urging them on. McGuire asked if I was sure I wanted to be in the first vehicle. It would be the first one to get blown up by IEDs.

  The team linked up with the ANCOP and waited for them to get ready. Contreras met with Saki and assured him that he would also take part in all the meetings with the Marines. Saki suggested that the Americans’ armored vehicles take the lead once they crossed the river because his vehicles were more vulnerable to IEDs, and recommended that the Americans stay in the lead in dangerous areas. Contreras agreed. He told Saki he still didn’t know who would meet them on the other side.

  As we drove south the ANCOP stopped in front of every culvert to search both sides of it. Progress was slow. Some of the police pickup trucks got stuck in the deep soft sand. The Americans grew frustrated with the way the ANCOP plodded through the desert. Our vehicle searched for a place to cross the hundred-meter Argandab River, avoiding the unexploded mortars on the sand. McGuire emerged to walk across it, making sure the vehicles could cross. The water reached his mid-thigh. Water seeped inside the Humvee, reaching up to my calves. The rest of the vehicles followed. One of the rangers got stuck in the water and had to be towed out. “ANCOP is better than the ANP in running checkpoints,” McGuire said, “but little things like vehicle movement, and it all breaks down.” “Instead of following each other they race around,” Sergeant Sadler said, laughing at the ANCOPs crossing the river like they were at Nascar. Two of the police got into an argument about the driving, and one pointed his rifle menacingly at the other. This had happened before, Verdorn later told me. Once, on their base, two of the ANCOPs got pissed at each other and drew their pistols. “There was blood in their eyes,” Verdorn said. The Americans were caught between them.

  Two Marine Humvees met Ironhorse across the river. Thacker chatted with them about what kinds of IEDs they had encountered. We were in a thick vegetated area of farmland and trees. Cows grazed near flooded fields. We crossed narrow canals and arrived at the schoolhouse. Sandbags lined the top of it. Hundreds of Marines wandered around shirtless, wearing green shorts and kicking up dust as they walked. It looked like Lord of the Flies. They slept on the ground outside or in classrooms that smelled of sweaty feet.

  A Marine captain thanked Contreras for his arrival. “Our weak spot” was the shortage of ANSF, he said, so the additional cops were helpful. Nawa had been quiet for the past five days, since July 2. “The Taliban left for Marja to lie low,” the captain said, “but this is their breadbasket, so they’re not likely to give it up.” Ironhorse occupied two dirty arched rooms in the schoolhouse. The men hastily swept the broken glass, dust, and dirt and set up cots, unloading boxes of water bottles and food, making it home.

  The Marine commander, Lieutenant Colonel McCollough, told Contreras that they had discovered “rogue” police who were abusing people in Aynak, to the north. In two communities people had complained about the police. When the Marines first encountered the local police in Aynak, the police were so startled that they fired warning shots and nearly got into a firefight. “They weren’t disciplined and appeared to be on drugs,” he said, addressing Saki. “They had no mentors and had no connection to a higher headquarters. It worries me that that’s how those communities view the Afghan police, so I wanted the ANCOP to replace those police and show those communities what ANSF is about.”

  McCollough turned to Contreras and said, “I’m glad you’re here. You couldn’t have come at a better time.” Nawa’s chief of police, Nafaz Khan, sat in on the meeting. He had a long beard and a long, nervous face. The Marines described him as a local mafia boss. “The Taliban come to people’s houses at night and demand collaboration,” Khan said. “If people don’t get away from the Taliban, the elections will fail.” Although he had 250 men officially working under him, he said the real number for this large rural area of 180,000 people was only 138. “We had a lot of tough days here and we cannot handle those days anymore,” he said. “There were times when we had no food and nobody came to ask us how we were doing.” Sergeant Sadler suspected that Khan was keeping his men’s salary for himself, forcing the police to steal for a living. Khan denied that the police in Aynak were under his authority and claimed he had never heard of them.

  Saki didn’t trust the Nawa commander and waited until he left to speak freely. McCollough told Saki that he should supplant the “rogue police” in Aynak. “Those are not police officers,” he said. “They’re criminals.” He estimated there were about sixty of them. The Marines had to fight to get up to Aynak, and although it was only a few kilometers away, they planned our trip up there like a careful military operation.

  The next day we waited. The men of Ironhorse played cards. The ANCOP sat in the shade of a tree.

  The Marines promised that once in Aynak they would meet with locals in a shura, or council. But Thacker dismissed it. “These shuras are just a bitch session,” he said. “They’ll complain about cops shaking them down. The
major will make promises, and the ANP will come back and go back to the same ways.” After their additional training, when the ANP returned to one district where Ironhorse had taken over, they went back to setting up illegal checkpoints and demanding money from cars passing by. When Ironhorse and the ANCOP came in, towns that were formerly abandoned would slowly get re-populated with their residents, and when Ironhorse and the ANCOP prepared to leave and make way for the ANP again, people would flee and move back to Lashkar Gah. “We don’t see what it’s like after we leave,” Thacker told me. One team of police who came back from training actually got into a firefight with the Afghan army and killed four men. In one district the ANP came back from their training with new body armor, boots, goggles, and rifles; later, when Ironhorse returned on a mission to support the British, whose base was in danger of being overrun, they found the same ANP wearing sandals but not their body armor or goggles. The problem with coming in for a short cycle as the local ANP were sent on training, Thacker told me, was that just when they got to know the area and the people, they had to leave.

  The men prepared for a departure the following morning. The Marines gave them enough fuel for another day or so. McGuire worried about what they would do after that. “The homework wasn’t done in advance,” he said. At 5 a.m. Sergeant First Class Sadler showed the men the route. The military command for Helmand contradicted the Marines and Nafaz Khan, informing Contreras that the Aynak police were legitimate and that they belonged to the Nawa headquarters and Khan. We rumbled slowly along a green canal. Marine minesweepers walked ahead of us. At 9 a.m., nearly four hours after leaving, we had gone only four or five kilometers. It was a numbing pace and one that allowed the fleet-footed Taliban to flee well in advance. The Americans’ enemy was elusive, normally engaging them from a few hundred meters away unburdened by the heavy body armor and gear the Americans had.

  As we progressed, I watched children tending cows and sheep in dark green fields. It was almost idyllic. The men I was traveling with linked up with the Marines at 10:30 a.m. Dozens of their vehicles were parked off the dirt road on plowed fields, crushing corn plants. “This farmer is not gonna be happy,” Corporal Chapman said. The Marines had paid damages to farmers in the past few days. They accidentally set one field on fire and ran around trying to put it out.

  The shura meeting was canceled because we were so late. Instead, Marines lay about in the shade. Specialist Baker sat atop a Humvee. “We came, we parked, we relocated, then we parked,” he said triumphantly.

  Marine Captain Schoenmaker told Contreras that when they first arrived in Aynak and asked locals about the Taliban, they heard complaints about the police instead. He estimated that there were about 150 of them. They were stoned, he said, wearing beads and looking shady. “It was uncomfortable when we met them, they were all high,” he explained. Aynak was mostly deserted, he said. The Marines didn’t know what to expect up there, and Colonel Saki was frustrated with the lack of a plan.

  We languished in the heat for hours, eating watermelons purchased from a local farmer. McCollough complained that he had been given only one hundred Afghan soldiers. The night before he had watched satellite footage of twenty-five guys dressed in black meeting the cops at the Aynak checkpoint, he told Contreras. I thought they might have just been other cops. Saki called his boss, Colonel Shirzad, who said he would send somebody down to Aynak. Shirzad said one station in Aynak belonged to Nawa district and the other one belonged to Lashkar Gah, and both would be instructed to hand over control of their stations to the ANCOP. Saki said all the Taliban had left the area. I asked him if the ANP improved after coming back from their additional training. “Only for the first five days,” he joked, then they went back to their old ways. “The academy has good showers, free food—the result is these first five days. They need more training.” He told me of an incident where police returned and then deserted to join the Taliban.

  “Why are we driving into this town to remove the ANP?” Thacker asked. “Because the Marines want us to,” Contreras told him. “These ANP up here sound like the ANP everywhere in this fucking country,” Thacker said. “The ANP are crooked. This problem is everywhere in this country.”

  We wouldn’t be leaving until 4:30 in the afternoon. Verdorn was concerned. “It seems like the Marines want to get in a firefight,” he said. “5:30 PM is the beginning of fighting time.” “I’m beginning to think these Marines are a bunch of cheese dicks,” Thacker muttered. I asked the major why the operation was being delayed. “Because it’s fucking hot,” he said, and the Marines had to walk. Since the operation started they had lost dozens of casualties just to the heat.

  A couple of Marines told Thacker that it seemed like there was going be a fight in Aynak. He dismissed them. “What, are there signs up?” he asked. “No briefing about what we’re doing, how far it is, how the convoy will be spread out,” McGuire complained. As the vehicles slowly lined up on the road, the Marines and soldiers had trouble communicating, which made McGuire even more impatient. “Unbelievable, there’s no command and control. I’m awestruck. What a clusterfuck. A good leader puts together a plan, formulates an op order, and then briefs our men.”

  We finally began to plod along on the rocky road, the Marines walking in front of us. Kids stood motionless in front of homes and glared at the Americans, unlike the children in Lashkar Gah, who often waved (though sometimes they threw stones too). Men with black beards and black turbans stared at the Americans, expressionless, standing ramrod-straight. “That’s a fucking Talib if I’ve ever seen one,” McGuire said.

  There were no paved roads in the villages we passed, only rocky paths. We drove around a large crater. “That’s a pretty fucking good bomb there, hell yeah!” McGuire said. The wall next to it was destroyed, and a new one was being built of fresh mud. A boy emerged from behind a metal gate and mud walls to talk to the ANCOP, but none of them spoke Pashtu and he didn’t know Farsi. The Americans’ interpreter translated. There was an IED on the road up ahead, the boy said. His father came out wearing a green salwar kameez. He fingered red worry beads nervously. The IED was planted on the road on the side of their house. Several days before the Taliban were hiding in the house several hundred meters away, he said, pointing toward it. He worried locals would inform the Taliban that they had warned the Americans about the IED. McGuire walked five feet up to the IED and saw it partially buried and concealed by shrubs. “Plain as day,” he announced. The minesweepers arrived but were dismissive. They didn’t think a guy from the Army could find an IED or that they could miss one. They sent a robot to place plastic explosives on it. On the first attempt, the explosives blew up but not the IED. The second attempt worked, sending up a huge cloud of smoke and debris. Rocks rained down on us a few hundred meters away. The men speculated if it would have been a catastrophic kill. McGuire thought it would have just tossed us up a bit in our armored vehicle but would have obliterated the police.

  We made it to Aynak after nightfall. It had taken an entire day to go twenty kilometers. Clouds hid the moon. It was pitch black, impossible to distinguish faces at the checkpoint. Dozens of local cops surrounded the five Americans, Saki, and some of his men. Many of the cops wore turbans and the salwar kameez. They looked like the Taliban. They were cooperative and friendly, unlike what the Marines described. They shook hands and moved out. Thacker and McGuire were impressed with them; they seemed just like any other ANP, but their facility was cleaner than most. The Marines had never seen the ANP before and had nothing to compare them to.

  We slept under the stars that night, the men taking turns on guard shift. Overnight we heard explosions and gunfire in the distance. The next morning we were able to explore the dusty abandoned schoolhouse. The police used an adjacent mud compound as a bathroom, and so did we. Shell casings from ANP battles with the Taliban littered the sand. There was nothing to do except wait. The men discussed the odds of getting into a firefight. The consensus was that there were too many Americans and the Taliban
would not risk it. That morning an Afghan man approached the Marine captain. He poked him in the chest and said they were occupying his property. Then he slapped the Marines’ interpreter.

  Colonel Shirzad, the ANP commander for Helmand, showed up. I hitched a ride back to Lashkar Gah with him, sitting in one of the four Ford Rangers in his convoy. It took us thirty minutes to drive to Lashkar Gah. The trip from there to Aynak with the military had taken three days. Shirzad’s men did not stop to check the road for IEDs, which could shred their vulnerable Rangers. I scanned the road desperately.

  The next morning Ironhorse went out on patrol with the ANCOP and found five IEDs placed on the road I had just taken. That day a twenty-vehicle Marine convoy from a base in the desert to the west tried to go to Aynak to resupply the Americans. Twenty kilometers away the Taliban attacked the convoy so fiercely that it turned back. Eight British soldiers had been killed in Helmand the previous night. On the afternoon of my return to Lashkar Gah, two mortars landed just outside the base.

  The Afghan army refused to come to Helmand, the Americans said. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers had been trained at the cost of billions, and yet the Afghan army was a no-show in a major operation contingent on an “Afghan face” that wasn’t there. What was the point of an army that didn’t deploy?

  EIGHT YEARS INTO THE WAR, the Americans and ISAF were making their big push. With more international troops and more combat would come more civilian casualties. The American focus on the south had allowed provinces like Logar and Wardak in Kabul’s backyard to fall into Taliban hands. With only sixty thousand Afghan soldiers it would take too long to increase the size of the army and there would never be enough foreign troops to remain in villages and control them, a British counterinsurgency expert in Afghanistan told me, so the Americans would remain like firemen responding to crises but never achieving sufficient density to get to know the community.