Petraeus promised Felter and Lujan that the CAAT would remain based at ISAF headquarters, in close proximity with Petraeus and his staff. “‘As long as I am COMISAF, you will always report directly to me,’” Lujan remembered him saying. “That will never change.” Lujan said in an e-mail he fired off to his CAAT brethren back in Kandahar when the briefing was over, “We literally got every single thing we asked for. We are hereby institutionalized. Expect big influx of resources and people over the next few months. We have the charter to create a new paradigm out here.”
“We’ll do everything possible to ensure the CAAT remains a relevant and effective asset both now and in the years ahead,” Felter wrote to Petraeus. “It’s really a privilege to serve with this great group and for us to have the chance to support you and ISAF at this critical time in the fight.” Petraeus responded later that night: “Actually Joe, I thank you. In truth, my ‘direction and guidance’ were pretty fuzzy! The idea was to allow for max initiative. But my support should have been very clear. The CAAT is a true force multiplier, and it’s been great to see what you and the team have done to develop it. Thanks for all that you’ve done!”
Three days later, Flynn convened a meeting between his staff and representatives from the U.S. Agency for International Development and Afghan government agencies to discuss the rebuilding of Tarok Kolache. He estimated that the cost to replace the buildings and compensate the farmers for the revenue lost from pomegranate sales would total well over $500,000. As they had walked days earlier in Tarok Kolache around the bulldozed site, Petraeus had directed him to spend what was needed; if he had to, “spend a million,” the ceiling allocated for funds through a program called CERP, for Commander’s Emergency Response Program. “Blame the CERP ceiling restrictions on that darned former Central Command commander,” Petraeus joked, referring to himself in his old job as head of Central Command. Petraeus and Flynn felt a deep obligation to rebuild what had been damaged or destroyed. Construction of a new mosque was scheduled to begin in late December. Shortly thereafter, landowners would be paid for assisting in the reconstruction of the village. Building—or, in this case, rebuilding—was by far the hardest stage of the clear-hold-and-build process.
At the same time that his unit engaged in the rebuilding of Tarok Kolache, Flynn had begun talks with villagers from Charqolba Olya on establishing an ALP force there, the site of one of three nascent ALP units in his area. Charqolba Olya had previously been infiltrated by the Taliban, and the villagers had been displaced to Kandahar city and other nearby villages by the time Flynn’s unit had arrived in the Arghandab River Valley in June. By January, villagers were starting to move back into their homes. Flynn’s team was helping to rebuild damaged properties, and he was eager to help them defend what they rebuilt.
One challenge Flynn faced was the territorial feeling that the Special Operations community had about its Village Stability Operations, the forerunner of the ALP program. Many Special Forces soldiers felt conventional units were simply unqualified and incapable of working closely with villagers to win their trust and build a local security apparatus. Flynn agreed that it took mature soldiers to run an ALP program and thought conventional forces had to be selective in choosing the right leaders to do it. He knew conventional forces had been successful in raising indigenous forces in Vietnam and in Iraq. Also, conventional forces had a green light from Petraeus to launch ALP initiatives in accordance with guidelines he established.
Providing the local citizens with arms, however, also proved to be a complicating factor. The Afghan government understandably feared that they were arming warlords and militias to face off with each other and the central government in Kabul. Petraeus issued guidance saying that U.S. forces must not arm the ALPs; the weapons had to come from the Ministry of Interior as part of the official ALP program. This was among the guidelines established with Karzai. But the program was not always as agile as needed, and weapons were very important to the Afghans. Flynn tried to talk to some of his villagers about community watch and reporting on Taliban activity, and the first response they always gave was, “I need a weapon.” Afghanistan was awash in AK-47s, RPGs and other weaponry, and with heavily armed insurgents marauding across the countryside, a local security force member’s power emanated from the barrel of a gun. It was that simple.
Compensation for the ALP was also an issue. At Nagahan, the first place in the Arghandab where an ALP was established, the Afghan Ministry of the Interior had yet to start paying the new ALP members by January, which left the A-Team, a Special Forces unit of twelve soldiers, responsible for the payroll. In working to develop an ALP unit in Charqolba Olya, Flynn found that offering ALP members only 60 percent of what a member of the Afghan National Police earned was “a show stopper.” All the bureaucratic delays in Nagahan related to pay and weapons could doom the effort in Charqolba and keep Flynn from having a coherent force in place by the time the Taliban came back in the spring.
In late December, Flynn’s soldiers intercepted a conversation that said a lot about the state of affairs in the Arghandab River Valley. “The Americans in this area are very brave and they are everywhere!” said one Taliban fighter. “Don’t worry,” replied his comrade. “It will be okay when our friends all come back.”
Flynn thought there was only a small number of Taliban fighters left in the entire Arghandab, perhaps as few as ten or twelve. They were conducting limited and infrequent harassing attacks to determine where their fighters would be able to maneuver in the spring. They would probably not return in earnest until after the leaves were back on the trees in March, at the earliest. The enemy knew how to take advantage of the cover and concealment that the pomegranate fields and their foliage provided. Significant numbers probably wouldn’t be encountered, Flynn thought, until late May or June, if they came back at all. Flynn’s soldiers had seen some freshly planted IEDs among the dozens of older ones and removed them from the battlefield during the early winter months. The few Taliban who remained were also trying to intimidate the population and dissuade them from supporting the government or the coalition. They targeted, in particular, the village maliks. It was a classic counterinsurgency struggle.
Flynn considered himself fortunate to have a good working relationship with CIA officers in his area of operations. He met with them biweekly in what was by far the closest relationship he had had with the agency in three overseas deployments. At one point, Flynn hosted the base chief and some of his officers for an overnight stay at his battalion headquarters. In late December, Flynn’s battalion hosted a medical clinic for a team of indigenous Afghan doctors working for the CIA. Without appearing to be connected to the United States, the doctors treated more than four hundred villagers in two days. The CIA was also responsible for introducing Flynn to one of his primary Afghan contacts, Inayatullah, a former checkpoint commander in the Afghan military who’d served in Kandahar the first time Flynn was deployed there in 2004.
Flynn had also recently befriended Issa Mohammed, a native of Charqolba Olya who had moved to Kandahar about ten years earlier. He was the appointed malik of Charqolba Olya and was the brother of the district police chief, which made him an important figure in the establishment of the ALP in the village. Mohammed, a member of the Alokozai tribe, was part of the tribe’s effort to reassert itself in the Arghandab River Valley. The Alokozai had dominated the district historically, but the tribe’s influence and role in the Kandahar government had waned since 2002. Other tribes in the district, the Sayeeds, Kakar and Ghilzai, had been friendlier to the Taliban and had helped them gain a foothold in the district.
Issa Mohammed arrived on New Year’s morning with six of his villagers, ready to start the ALP unit. Inayatullah was absent, attending another meeting elsewhere. Flynn got a commitment from one of Mohammed’s men, Shah Mamood, and another villager, Sherullah, to lead the effort. Flynn walked into the dimly lit shura room at Forward Operating Base Terra Nova with all
seven Afghans already seated on the red cushions spread around the floor. He moved to Mohammed first and offered his best Pashto greeting and proceeded around the circle to offer a customary greeting and handshake. Flynn was always struck by the pleasant manner in which Afghans offered greetings no matter what the circumstances. Two nights earlier, Flynn and his men had sat through a shura in the village of Babur that was led by the malik there to make peace after a village brawl. Before him were five bloodied villagers who had beaten each other with shovels and picks over wood cut during a cash-for-work project. The dispute was resolved when the younger men approached the malik and kissed his hand. The malik then kissed each man on the head, and calm was restored after two hours of arguing and wrangling.
Building an ALP unit in Charqolba was an interesting proposition, since no one was left living there at the time. It had been totally abandoned even prior to the Americans’ arrival in the Arghandab River Valley in June. Flynn’s soldiers had captured the village from the Taliban in mid-August. A walk through the village in January left no question about the battle that had taken place there: The adobe-like buildings were riddled with bullet holes, large craters existed where mortar fire had landed, crumbled mud homes looked like kicked-over sandcastles, and torn pieces of uniform from soldiers who had lost their lives there still littered some trees and bushes.
Issa explained that there had been three mosques in Charqolba, but members of only one were participating in the ALP. Flynn promised to work through the local Afghan government to make sure they would be rewarded with a new mosque for their effort. After more discussion, Flynn said they could practice with the Americans’ weapons until they could legally procure their own.
But the Afghans continued to express concerns about the people of nearby Jelawur, which the Alokozai describe as a place that was welcoming to the Taliban. Flynn told them that he was relying on them to tell him who was good and who was bad. They told Flynn that U.S. forces shouldn’t interfere when they detained a suspect. It was no secret that the Afghan National Police beat their detainees and treated them in ways that were unacceptable by U.S. standards. Flynn did not tolerate such beatings if he observed them, and he told the Afghans he thought it was counterproductive, but he also knew that prisoner abuse in Afghanistan would not end on his watch. When the session ended, Flynn felt optimistic that a local security force in Charqolba Olya might actually be established. This wasn’t the textbook process—but there really was no textbook for ALP yet, just guidelines, and he knew that the chain of command was comfortable with those at his level exercising initiative within the guidelines.
As Flynn and his men worked to rebuild the villages in the Arghandab River Valley, a commission appointed by President Karzai reported in mid-January that fighting in and around Kandahar the previous fall had resulted in $100 million in damage to homes and farms. Petraeus mobilized an effort to get the facts out, having walked through villages in the Arghandab River Valley with Flynn and through the other districts with other commanders. He had seen for himself both the damage and the enormous amount of reconstruction under way. At his morning command briefing at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, Petraeus said that roads were being rebuilt and thousands of trees had been planted, with tens of thousands more to be planted in the weeks ahead. Flynn felt that the homes he and other commanders had ordered destroyed needed to be destroyed: They had been abandoned and wired with what he called an “ingenious array of bombs” that were hidden in the door frames, windows and floors and that prevented the original inhabitants from returning; they made conventional clearing operations nearly impossible or too costly to risk. He was “more than outraged” that comments from an Afghan government spokesman had reinforced the impression that U.S. forces had heavily damaged properties without repairing or replacing the damage. A representative of the ISAF Joint Command noted that photos had been taken of every building or home that had been destroyed, to show that troops were not engaged in the wholesale destruction of villages. A database had also been created, detailing all compensation that had been paid.
Petraeus ordered up a “constant drumbeat” of stories out of the southern regional command regarding the compensation efforts. “I want to drown out the stories of property damage,” he said, “with the truth of what we have done, and will be done, regarding this issue,” he said. At his briefing the following morning, Petraeus remained agitated at officials around Karzai. “I have walked the ground there,” he said. “None of them have. We need to be applauded, not criticized, for our efforts” to repair the damage done. He wanted to make sure this issue was discussed at the next meeting of Karzai’s National Security Council. “This is an open wound for me,” he said. “Warn them: if they put salt on it,” he cautioned, he would get “exercised.”
The Afghan report claiming $100 million in property damage also set off a brief eruption in the blogosphere. Joshua Foust, a fellow at the American Security Project and a PBS columnist who previously worked in the intelligence community, revisited Flynn’s decision in October to level Tarok Kolache in a post called “The Unforgivable Horror of Village Razing.” He cited the inaccurate Daily Mail story quoting Flynn as telling villagers in Khosrow Sofla that if they did not tell him where IEDs had been buried, he would wipe the village off the face of the earth. He argued that bombing villages in Kandahar Province as a means of ridding them of IEDs and homemade explosives violated Article 33 of the Geneva Convention. Foust also questioned whether Flynn was circumventing oversight by the Afghan Ministry of the Interior by independently choosing members of the Afghan Local Police detachment in Charqolba Olya. He wondered whether Flynn and other U.S. commanders should have involved Afghan colonel Abdul Raziq in the clearing of Khosrow Sofla and other villages in early October. By supporting warlords such as Raziq, Aikins had written in the Harper’s story, “the ISAF has come to be associated, in the minds of many Afghans, with their criminality and abuses. ‘We’re doing the Taliban’s work for them,’ said one international official with years of experience in counternarcotics here.”
Flynn, however, had never set out to destroy villages with bombs and missiles—especially not those of the residents with whom he had become close. But in the case of Tarok Kolache and Khosrow Sofla, destroying the villages really was the only way to safely disarm the invisible and countless IEDs that terrorized the population and would have maimed any forces trying to clear them. Flynn also noted that, as far as the Afghan Local Police detachment in Charqolba Olya was concerned, members were being vetted through the Ministry of the Interior and had yet to receive weapons. Moreover, he noted, “Farmers are moving to their fields by the hundreds since the clearing operation, as opposed to handfuls when Tarok Kolache was a Taliban sanctuary. Our cash-for-work employment of the locals is in the hundreds, up from zero. Village-level shura attendance is on the rise.” By winter’s end, the mosque in Tarok Kolache was nearly completed and fifteen homes were under construction in the village. Renovations to the mosque in Khosrow Sofla were almost completed, and a new mosque in Charqolba Oyla, where training of the Afghan Local Police unit continued, was 80 percent finished.
But despite all the progress, Afghanistan could break a commander’s heart when he least expected it. As Flynn sat buried in paperwork in his office on the evening of January 21, his phone rang. It was Akmal, his Afghan interpreter, calling. “Sir, I’ve got some bad news.
“I just got a call from Karim Dad’s nephew, and he said Karim Dad is dead,” Akmal said. “Somebody killed him outside his home thirty minutes ago.” Flynn was saddened but not surprised. Karim Dad, the malik for the village of Khosrow Sofla, had told Flynn several times that the Taliban had threatened him. After Flynn was forced to call in the bombing strikes on Khosrow Sofla, decimating about half of the abandoned village, his relationship with Karim Dad had grown stronger. He recalled a conversation outside his village in which Karim Dad told him, “There are people who are trying to kill me, but I don’t care. I am n
ot afraid of them and will continue to work with you to fix our village.” Karim Dad said the Taliban had moved into the village several years ago and turned it into their base of operations. He had been happy to see the Taliban routed from his village.
The following day, Flynn went to see Niaz Mohammed, the district police chief, at his office. Niaz invited him in to drink chai and discuss the ALP detachment being formed in the village of Lowy Manarah. Niaz told Flynn many times that he was worried that his brother, Issa, would be killed. He thought Issa was too careless when he went to visit the area and the village. Flynn brought up the killing of Karim Dad. “Karim Dad is one of our cousins, and we are all very sad today,” Niaz Mohammed said. “I know who did this and would like your help in finding the killer. He must be killed. There is no other way to deal with these people.” Flynn told Niaz he had his full support, although Flynn clearly preferred capture. “Once we capture him, he’ll have to go to trial,” Flynn said. Niaz clearly was not interested in capture.
Niaz cut his conversation with Flynn short and said he and his aides were all headed to Jelawur to attend Karim Dad’s funeral. Flynn considered Karim Dad a friend and felt partly responsible for his death. “Do you think it would be a good thing or a bad thing if I attended the funeral?” he asked Niaz.
All In Page 20