All In

by Paula Broadwell

  Planning continued the following day as Flynn coordinated with U.S. Special Operations Forces in the clearance operation, which had been given the code name Eagle Claw 1. Special Operations Forces, with Afghan commandos, were planning additional air assaults on two villages north of Khosrow Sofla, Tarok Kolache and Khosrow Olya. Captain Shaffer, the Top Gun company commander who had been fighting in Tarok Kolache since July, knew which compounds to hit. He was a proponent of destroying as much as possible from the air, with good reason: His unit had suffered three traumatic casualties there over the past two weeks. Flynn told the Special Operations Forces that he had five or six compounds he wanted destroyed but that they should try to preserve as much of the village as possible so residents could eventually move back in. The Special Operations Forces coordinated with Flynn because it was his area of operations, but they were the ones who would implement. As Flynn went to sleep for a couple of hours before the next morning’s attack into Tarok Kolache, he told his executive officer, Major Tom Burrell, that he was not in favor of destroying more compounds in the village if they didn’t need to. But at 2:00 A.M., Burrell woke him up and told him that the Special Operations Forces wanted to destroy the entire village because it had been thoroughly laced with all kinds of bombs and explosives. Like Captain Shaffer’s men, the Special Operations Forces had suffered numerous IED casualties over the summer in the villages of the Arghandab. Flynn was convinced, and unleashed a thunderous display of firepower on Tarok Kolache, rattling the countryside for miles around.

  When B-1 bombers began dropping two-ton bombs on the village, the earth shook and the windows and walls rattled in Flynn’s command center, less than two kilometers west of the village. Flynn’s staff listened to the radios as American Special Operations Forces landed by helicopter and began their assault. Almost immediately, one of the assault force soldiers stepped on an IED. It malfunctioned—and prepared the Special Operations Forces for what was to come. As they cleared the village, they discovered IEDs, jugs of homemade explosives and fifty-gallon drums of explosives in the homes—house-borne IEDs. Raziq’s Afghan Border Police forces did not arrive until the next day. They fought alongside the teams that went to Charqolba Sofla and Khosrow Sofla.

  Some months later, the blogosphere erupted with complaints that Flynn, with Petraeus’s full support, had reverted to Vietnam tactics—destroying villages in order to save them. But Flynn believed that Tarok Kolache had been destroyed when the Taliban drove out all of its residents and seeded its fields and compounds with explosives. When Captain Shaffer’s soldiers fanned out across the village at first light on October 7, the compounds—and the bombs—were gone.

  By the end of October, Flynn’s battalion had lost seven soldiers and had awarded eighty-three Purple Hearts. Three-quarters of those wounded had been hit by IEDs. Fourteen soldiers had lost a limb or been so gravely wounded that their lives would forever be changed. Four had lost both their legs. Flynn was firm in his belief that they had achieved important results. “There’s no space for the Taliban to return to this district during the spring,” Flynn said. “This war either ends at the negotiation table or when the people unite and collectively reject the Taliban.”

  One reporter accused Flynn of war crimes and violation of the Geneva Convention for approving the air strike on Tarok Kolache. Yet many of the villages in his area of operations had been abandoned for two or three years, according to the village maliks. Like many villages in the area, Khosrow Sofla was an insurgent safe haven, a weapons factory used to build and export munitions throughout the south. Decades ago, the Soviets had failed to take this terrain from the mujahideen. Until the American troop surge and Flynn’s unit’s arrival, coalition forces had not been able to push forward from Jelawur beyond a second canal. The fall offensive and mass of troops, enablers and close air support finally shifted the balance. But it came at a tragic cost, inscribed on a card neatly folded in Flynn’s battledress pocket—the names of his seven men killed and the fourteen who had suffered life-changing injuries.

  Flynn approved precision strikes on Khosrow Sofla the same night Tarok Kolache was razed. He intended to take back the village, a key terrain feature on the Arghandab River, from the insurgents. The targets were acquired through a sophisticated reconnaissance aircraft that could detect homemade explosive materials the size of raisins.

  After striking several of the Taliban IED depots, Colonel Raziq’s four hundred ABP, aided by U.S. Special Forces, were tasked to clear Charqolba Sofla and other villages in the Arghandab. Though locals accused Raziq’s men of mistreatment, their U.S. Special Forces liaison team saw no such actions; moreover, there was no doubt they were effective in convincing the local population to show them where the deadly IEDs were located along the approaches to the villages. They cleared numerous key areas in a single day, according to the Special Forces team that partnered with Raziq. Raziq’s men and the Special Forces had discovered dozens of IEDs and opened the way for Flynn’s forces and the local population to gain access to Charqolba Sofla.

  The Border Police then withdrew, and the task to finish clearing the village was handed off to one of Flynn’s platoons. The unit employed bomb-sniffing dog teams, EOD specialists, minesweepers and local sources in a painstaking process that took two weeks, at the cost of two additional soldiers wounded, before they could declare the village safe and start to rebuild.

  Flynn was intent on preventing the Taliban’s return and clearing Khosrow Sofla so that the villagers could move back. Always in his mind was that the villages needed villagers to return, and that he needed to help equip them with the capacity to secure their own villages in the future. Within days of the attacks, Flynn rallied the displaced villagers and explained that he needed help in finding the IEDs. “I implored them to ask the Taliban where the IEDs were or else I would have no other choice but to use lethal means to remove the IEDs. I told them I didn’t want any more of my soldiers to get blown up, nor did I want the locals to get hurt either. They agreed to consider my request.”

  One week later, the village malik came to Flynn’s operating base and relayed that all the IEDs were gone. Flynn and his men went through the village and verified it. “No dozers. No mass punishment. They were already punished by the Taliban,” Flynn said with a cracked voice.

  A HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE miles northeast of the Arghandab River Valley, in the high steppe of east Ghazni Province, Lieutenant Colonel David Fivecoat rolled out of Forward Operating Base Andar with his five-vehicle convoy. When he was a captain in 2003, Fivecoat had served as Petraeus’s aide during the invasion of Iraq and got as good a view as anyone of the general as a combat commander. Back in the United States, Fivecoat oversaw the writing of Field Manual 3-24.2: Tactics in Counterinsurgency in 2008 and 2009, the tactical-level companion for Petraeus’s COIN manual.

  Now Fivecoat was commanding the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division—the Rakkasans. The Rakkasans had extensive combat experience in Afghanistan and Iraq since General Petraeus had led the battalion between 1993 and 1995. The unit was extremely proud of its combat history in every engagement since World War II.

  When the remainder of the surge forces arrived in September, including the 101st’s Currahee brigade, the 4th Brigade Combat Team, Fivecoat’s battalion completed a move from Paktika to the far more troubled terrain of eastern Ghazni. Although NATO forces had maintained some presence in Ghazni since 2001, it had been only intermittently patrolled for the past two years, primarily by Polish troops, and, given the lack of permanent presence, they had a mixed record of success before the Rakkasans arrived. That summer, the Regional Command East commander, Major General Campbell, had recognized that it was time to do something about the Taliban’s growing infestation in the area. In choosing which of his battalions to move to the challenging terrain, Campbell asked Fivecoat if it would make more sense to send Fivecoat’s unit or a newly arrived Currahee battalion of the 4th Br
igade Combat Team into the Taliban-controlled area. Fivecoat said it would be easier for his battalion to go, because he could capitalize on his unit’s combat experience to deal with fighting in a new area. The move was exhausting, but Fivecoat and the Iron Rakkasans completed the transition within a few weeks.

  Campbell and Fivecoat had served together when Campbell was a brigade commander in the 82nd Airborne Division and Fivecoat was one of his company commanders. Campbell had taken an interest in Fivecoat’s career ever since, supporting his assignment as an aide to Petraeus in Bosnia in 2001. Fivecoat appreciated how Campbell had listened to his position on why it made more sense for the Rakkasans to move to Ghazni.

  Soon the battalion’s units were occupying the terrain where Nir Rosen, an American journalist, had embedded with the Taliban in 2008 to write an article in Rolling Stone that Fivecoat would come to assign to his officers as mandatory reading, “How We Lost the War We Won.” “Until recently, Ghazni, like much of central Afghanistan, was considered reasonably safe,” Rosen writes. “But now the province, located 100 miles south of the capital, has fallen to the Taliban. Foreigners who venture to Ghazni often wind up kidnapped or killed. In defiance of the central government, the Taliban governor in the province issues separate ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers increasingly turn to the Taliban, not the American-backed authorities, for adjudication of land disputes.” By some estimates, the resurgent Taliban ran as many as twenty-eight schools, arbitrated land and property disputes in Islamic courts, levied taxes and occasionally assassinated those they thought were collaborating with the Americans. Their fighting force was thought to number around 400 insurgents, with active support from about 4,000 of the district’s 150,000 people. The government cause was not helped when, in 2005, a number of corrupt local power brokers won elections and began brutalizing and stealing and making the Taliban look good by comparison. Meanwhile, it was apparent that Pakistan had provided at least some of the money, arms and matériel support for the Taliban’s resurgence in the area.

  On September 16, the same day Operation Dragon Strike kicked off down in Kandahar, Sergeant William Bickers, a Rakkasan mortarman from Cincinnati, took a bullet in the arm when insurgents attacked a foot patrol he was leading in the Andar District with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. Campbell awarded him the Purple Heart and a Combat Infantryman Badge in the hospital a couple of days later, then watched as Bickers’s platoon leader reenlisted him for another two years. In late September, Fivecoat’s soldiers from C Company were attacked during a patrol in the Andar District. They were in enough trouble to call in Apache helicopters, the lethal gunships armed with 30-mm chain guns and Hellfire missiles. No matter how good the intelligence seemed, or how clearly fighters on rooftops were visible to the pilots, however, it was hard for the Apaches to be too discriminating once they started shooting. This particular battle was a case in point. Devoid of any larger significance, it left four Afghan civilians dead, including two small children, and three wounded. Fivecoat would later hold a shura with village elders and personally apologize.

  Just two days after the civilians were killed, Fivecoat’s men rolled out of their base camp in seven-ton $600,000 Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles (MRAPs)—five in a row, as was the norm when the commander departed the outpost. They were heading for Combat Outpost Deh Yak, in Taliban-infested eastern Ghazni Province. The Iron Rakkasans had spent the first five months of their tour in neighboring Paktika Province, where contact with the enemy was sporadic. But the Andar and Deh Yak districts of eastern Ghazni were altogether different, infested with Taliban, whose influence was to be felt everywhere Fivecoat went but whose foot soldiers were elusive and almost never seen, in part because the local population helped to facilitate their movement and, Fivecoat had come to realize, in part because the local population produced many of them. The central government in Kabul had provided almost no meaningful governance there since the initial American victory in 2001.

  The convoy passed a team of mine-clearing vehicles from the South Carolina National Guard that was working the route around the base, which was the size of a football field. The guardsmen’s job was to clear the roads around the outpost so the infantry teams could go out on missions and Afghans could travel with some degree of safety.

  The convoy drove through several tiny suburbs—fewer than a dozen houses made of sandstone and pieces of wood. Donkeys and goats walked in the road. Fivecoat waved at everyone, but only a few waved back; most often the locals didn’t even look up. “What do you expect after years of our presence here?” Fivecoat said. “Wait,” said a sarcastic trooper. “They used to throw rocks at us, so isn’t their ambivalence a sign of progress?”

  By any standard, Fivecoat was an expert in counterinsurgency operations, having served in the third of five surge brigades in Iraq that succeeded in pacifying the Mada’in Qada region of southeastern Baghdad Province, which was beset at the outset of the surge with Sunni and Shia insurgencies. A West Point graduate who grew up in Delaware, Ohio, he wrote a lengthy paper on this experience in which he examined the counterinsurgency practices of Roger Trinquier, a legendary French colonel who had served in Indochina and Algeria, to examine which of Trinquier’s practices were pertinent to the mission in Iraq. His answer: all of them except torture, which Trinquier had condoned. “As it was for Trinquier and his foes in Algeria,” Fivecoat wrote, “the goal for both the insurgent and the counterinsurgent in Iraq is to ‘control the population.’” His brigade in Iraq used six “lines of effort” to do that—security, transition, governance, rule of law, economics and communications.

  Having served as Petraeus’s aide during the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Fivecoat didn’t hesitate to send his old boss some unsolicited advice when Petraeus took command in July. “Come in, conduct a 30-day on the ground assessment, say the situation is much worse than imagined (but hard is not hopeless), and then take the gloves off for 6 months,” Fivecoat counseled, looking ahead to the review planned by the Obama administration around Christmas. “There was a lot of killing for the first six months of the surge in Iraq—you could call it compellence theory. The December assessment will be bad because you will have a lot of units, a lot of violence and it won’t taper off until November due to the weather.”

  Now, in the convoy to Deh Yak, Fivecoat pulled into a new combat outpost commanded by Captain Josh Powers. A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, Powers exuded a deep grasp of counterinsurgency doctrine and its application in Afghanistan. He had already been awarded a Purple Heart for injuries suffered in an IED attack over the summer. Powers and Fivecoat stood on top of a lookout tower that was under construction and surveyed the landscape. Having attended a village wedding earlier in the day, Powers understood the value of building rapport with the locals to gain credibility, develop sources and filter the reconcilables from the irreconcilables. Members of his company had been welcomed into the tribal wedding with open arms, even though they’d come with odd gifts—cases of Coca-Cola. But he had not had the same luck with his Afghan National Army partners, who were supposed to be collocated with them at the new outpost. The Afghan army refused to help build the outpost and refused to live in tents on the compound until the barracks were complete. Powers carried on without them.

  As Fivecoat and Powers talked about the challenges he faced, the captain pointed out the roads where Taliban often rode by on their motorcycles. He pointed to the village where the district center was located and discussed the fact that his outpost was not directly in the village but instead had been positioned out on the plain, in full vantage from some nearby hills. Since the mission was to protect the population, he questioned the selection of the terrain he now occupied. Eventually they would turn the outpost over to their Afghan National Army partners; they, too, would be vulnerable to the surrounding high ground and a little too far from the village to rapidly respond. But someone hi
gher than both of them had selected the outpost location.

  From Powers’s outpost, Fivecoat and his convoy headed to the district center, a few miles away. It was an old building, painted swimming-pool blue, situated on a barren hilltop overlooking a tiny village below. The district sub-governor apparently didn’t spend much time there, preferring to stay in Ghazni city with the provincial governor instead. There was more going on at the provincial level, and he had been threatened by insurgents at his own headquarters.

  About a quarter-mile away, there was a walled-in complex known as a qalat. The walls were made of sand and water and were in place to keep people and their animals in, and wild animals out. Two women walked down the main village road in full black burkas, with two children in long, brightly colored gowns, bright red and patriot blue, walking with them. There were solar-panel streetlights, which USAID had funded, on the road where the women walked, but all of the solar panels had been stripped from them. The terrain was barren and brown, though Fivecoat said it was once a lush and fertile green land according to research the Army had done.

  On the trip back to FOB Andar, the driver of Fivecoat’s MRAP said at one point, “We’ve crossed the point of no return, sir.” That simply meant that if an accident requiring a medevac occurred, the convoy would continue on to Andar rather than head back to the district center. Everyone in the MRAP remained quiet. Once back at Andar, Fivecoat was told that one of the mine-clearing trucks from the South Carolina Guard had hit a mine, killing a soldier whose son happened to be in Fivecoat’s battalion. The unit chaplain came into Fivecoat’s office and explained that the mine-detection vehicle had flipped onto the guardsman, killing him instantly. It was after midnight, and Fivecoat was starting to focus on a raid planned for 5:00 that morning. A theater policy allowed any next of kin to escort the body of a relative back to the United States. The chaplain told Fivecoat that he was going to go and wake the soldier and get him on the next helicopter out, at 2:00 A.M., with his father’s body. Fivecoat didn’t flinch, thankful to have the chaplain attend to this tragic bit of daily business. Fivecoat had lost two soldiers so far, fewer than his compatriots in the south but still hard losses. War was tough, he said, without elaborating, but his eyes showed the burden behind the mask. Deaths represented a statistic in Washington but a face to him and his fellow commanders. The civilians killed a few days earlier in the Apache attack were still on his mind. Two children had died, and Fivecoat had gone into town to apologize to the grieving family and pay reparations. Fivecoat’s voice cracked as he talked about the incident—he had a one-year-old of his own. But a moment later the stoic had returned.