All In

by Paula Broadwell

  “I think it would be a good thing. You can follow us and go with me,” he said. Flynn had never attended an Afghan funeral and was concerned about the cultural sensitivities associated with his presence. Flynn stripped off all his body armor, helmet and ammunition and wore only a pistol under his shirt. He wanted his presence to be as low-key as possible.

  The funeral took place outside in the desert, about a mile north of the gardens of Khosrow Sofla, between Jelawur and Durie. There were hundreds of people milling about. Graves were marked by mounds of stones, some with ornate strips of cloth hanging from tree branches dug into the ground next to the graves. Karim Dad’s body lay on a straw-thatched bed next to his open grave. It was lowered into a grave, and the Afghans began covering his body with earth. Akmal told Flynn he did not think it would be a good idea for him to take part, so Flynn sat and watched, wanting in some way to pay his respects, beyond just his presence.

  The loss of Karim Dad was a significant blow to Flynn’s efforts to rebuild Khosrow Sofla and other villages in the district. If the Taliban had killed Karim Dad, Flynn feared he might have been in the midst of a terror campaign against all government leaders in the area, a foreboding sign of the fight to come in the spring. Only time would tell.

  WHILE FLYNN’S TOP GUNS braced for the spring fighting season in the Arghandab, Lieutenant Colonel David Fivecoat’s Iron Rakkasans had already rotated home to Kentucky, their fight over. Fivecoat remained behind in Afghanistan, waiting to turn over the Andar and Deh Yak districts of eastern Ghazni Province to the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment. His change-of-command speech on February 8 was hardly a declaration of victory. “It has been my distinct privilege to lead the Iron Rakkasans here in Andar and Deh Yak for the past seven months as we tried to improve the security situation, forge friendships with our Afghan and coalition partners and defeat the insurgency. It has been a tough struggle, but I believe the task force and our Afghan and ISAF partners have made a difference in the lives of the people of eastern Ghazni.”

  The numbers compiled by the Rakkasans told one story: 1,600 patrols, seven air assaults, a hundred insurgents killed or captured, thirty-three weapons caches seized and destroyed. His men had provided basic government services in both districts, fixing potholes and opening schools. But polling data compiled by the Afghan government in Ghazni Province told a different story and suggested a standoff at best: 48 percent of those living in the province believed foreign forces do not help the people, 28 percent believed them to be incompetent, and another 11 percent believed that the foreign forces do not bring peace, especially in unsafe areas, which translated to twelve of the province’s eighteen districts. Nearly a quarter of the people in Ghazni supported the Taliban, a percentage that was behind only Kandahar, Helmand and Nuristan. In the Deh Yak District, where Fivecoat had traveled in September in the heavily armored convoy, 40 percent believed what the Taliban were saying. At one point, during a clearing operation in the town of Bashi, his troops had discovered an accurate terrain model of Forward Operating Base Andar, his headquarters. It had bothered him to think that the Afghans working on the base might be spies for the Taliban.

  Ghazni had been in the neglected eastern region, third in order of priority for resources behind Helmand and Kandahar. The move from Paktika to Ghazni had forced Fivecoat’s men to start over midway through their tour, which made it difficult to develop local sources and fully understand what was happening. Fivecoat’s task force was also placed under the command of a Polish brigade in Ghazni that did not have the enablers of a U.S. brigade and thus had a difficult time executing some of the counterinsurgency tactics favored by Petraeus. The Poles could maneuver and coordinate artillery, small arms and air support, but they lacked robust staff capacity, intelligence collection and analytic training. Moreover, their development capacity, construction management and contracting capabilities were virtually nonexistent, according to those on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in the area. But Fivecoat knew the importance Petraeus placed on the presence of NATO allies on the battlefield, and the Poles and all of the allies were steadily improving along the way—a benefit of coalition warfare. Whatever the Poles’ organizational limitations as counterinsurgents, their spirit and the fact that they and thousands of other NATO forces were fighting side by side with Americans and Afghans brought strategic legitimacy to their cause, which was critical, given the view much of the rest of the world had of America years into its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  In any event, Fivecoat had enough experience in counterinsurgency—in both Iraq and Afghanistan—to take initiative. He did need intelligence, and he lucked out with a cooperative Afghan partner in the National Directorate of Security. He also had a West Point classmate who happened to be the lead intelligence officer in Campbell’s eastern regional command. She took care to provide the additional intelligence assets and analysis. He understood that the tactics were all about protecting the people, whose lives he was able to touch with development projects, health care and security. But even with daily interaction with villagers, his classmate’s intelligence reports, insights from interrogations, and captured documents and photos, Fivecoat still found the enemy network and its sources of funding opaque.

  In an article for Infantry magazine, Fivecoat and three of his captains wrote that they faced “a strong and determined enemy in Ghazni Province” who had attacked the Rakkasans 420 times, or an average of 2.3 attacks per day. In November, Fivecoat began using a Persistent Threat Detection System—a blimp—in his fight against the Taliban. Equipped with video and infrared sensors, the helium-filled blimp could provide twenty-four-hour surveillance of insurgents up to twelve miles away. Against an enemy that sometimes still used primitive AK-47s, he also had the ability to call in Predator drones equipped with lethal Hellfire missiles, and F-16 fighters carrying five-hundred-pound bombs that could shake an entire village. In the Infantry article, Fivecoat described Operation Iron Blade II, a three-company attack in late November. Using surveillance from both a Predator and a blimp, Fivecoat flushed two insurgents into the open and killed them with five-hundred-pound bombs dropped by a pair of F-16s. A third insurgent on a motorcycle was forced out into open terrain and killed with a Hellfire missile.

  His efforts had been relentless, and he was one of the top-rated battalion commanders in the theater. But in spite of all the effort, Ghazni remained a tough area where the Taliban were deeply entrenched. Fivecoat’s mission had really been to protect the people so that legitimate governance could develop in their districts, resolve local disputes, care for the sick and run schools for their children. That was too much to ask in Ghazni outside its capital at that point. There weren’t enough soldiers to support population-centric counterinsurgency operations. So Fivecoat’s mission had become to develop the situation. He was told to establish operational bases and checkpoints, connect with the local people as much as possible and map the enemy situation so that his successor could continue the mission. If the unit coming in to replace the Iron Rakkasans, the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry, was as good, it would take them another year to stabilize Andar and Deh Yak—if the Taliban chose not to reinforce. Only then could the coalition expect real and enduring progress in governance and development efforts. The truth was, the return of the Taliban to Ghazni was not likely to be reversed. With a drawdown of forces coming and the resource constraints faced in the east, there would never be enough American or NATO troops in the area to win over the locals with good governance, decent roads and quality schools. In his heart, Fivecoat felt that his unit had, indeed, put pressure on the insurgents in the area, and he hoped that his successor unit could continue to expand the security bubble across Ghazni and along Highway 1. But, he later reflected, “COIN required a long-term process and six months is too short to convince the population that the government represents the best chance for the long-term future of Andar and Deh Yak.”

  Fivecoat believed in counterinsurgency, and he bel
ieved even more strongly in David Petraeus, a man he had seen overcome the toughest of challenges on the battlefield. But Petraeus could not be everywhere, and America could not afford to put enough troops on the ground in all the places in Afghanistan where, with enough mass and enough time, they might have done some good. Fivecoat was extremely proud of the Rakkasans for taking the fight to the Taliban. But he found the battalion’s losses—three dead, 125 wounded—to be a heavy burden. He thought he was mentally prepared to carry that weight, but this was turning out to be harder than he imagined—as most of his peers found, too. He was also frustrated that the surge of 2011 in Afghanistan had not been able to achieve what he saw accomplished in Iraq during the surge in 2007 and 2008. Having been part of a successful counterinsurgency campaign there, he found it tough leaving Afghanistan with so much work still to be done. In retrospect, breaking the back of the insurgency in Ghazni was going to require more combat operations, to kill enough insurgents and persuade others to seek reintegration, with the cumulative effect sufficient to tip the balance of power, perhaps also accompanied by some form of political deal. As Petraeus had frequently observed, Afghanistan was not going to be “flipped” the way Iraq was during the surge there; the circumstances were different, and persistence was going to be required.

  As he prepared to fly back to his family in Fort Campbell, Fivecoat sent Petraeus a parting note with a few thoughts about his command of Petraeus’s old battalion and about his Afghan experience. Petraeus congratulated him and then cautioned against leaving it too far behind. “Expect to be back here in a few years as a brigade commander,” Petraeus wrote.

  Fivecoat read the general’s e-mail on his laptop and just stared at the screen.

  CHAPTER 7

  LINES OF OPERATION

  One cool morning in mid-January, Brigadier General Mark Martins stretched out in the plush polished-hardwood interior of the Gulfstream V jet supporting the theater and began to pitch the work of his Rule of Law Field Force to Major General Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayed Zadah, head of the Afghan Interior Ministry’s counterterrorism division. He and Sayed Zadah were flying from Kabul to Kandahar to see the Chel Zeena Criminal Investigative Center, adjacent to Sarposa prison, the first of five planned regional “green zones” for law and justice in Afghanistan. Martins mentioned to Sayed Zadah that there had been 110 assassinations in Kandahar over the past year. The city’s chief prosecutor, Jalat Khan, was doing his best to keep up with the caseload, Martins said, but was simply overwhelmed. Khan needed help. Sayed Zadah listened intently.

  Petraeus and Martins had reunited in Afghanistan shortly after Petraeus’s arrival in Kabul. The war’s new commander had created a job for his favorite lawyer running what became the U.S.-led Rule of Law Field Force–Afghanistan. Petraeus told Martins to come up with a strategy for getting all forty-nine coalition countries behind creation of a functioning, modern justice system. Petraeus remembered how critical the creation of rule-of-law “green zones” had been in Iraq (an effort also guided by Martins), and he considered them no less crucial in Afghanistan. Significantly, the Afghan implementation differed in certain respects from Multi-National Force–Iraq’s rule-of-law efforts. Martins continued to use the idea of the green zone, but efforts in Afghanistan were also built around the idea that the Afghan government could never compete in providing dispute-resolution services and justice to the people so long as it lacked a minimally capable network to do so. Martins reinforced a traditional Afghan division of functions between national, provincial and district levels of governance. The result was a “hub and spoke” model that emphasized assistance to Afghans as they reinforced key legal institutions at provincial centers and then projected dispute-resolution and governance capacity into surrounding districts.

  Petraeus hadn’t flinched when it came to handing Martins, a military lawyer, command of hundreds of U.S. combat troops and legal experts to support his rule-of-law initiative. If Martins was going to create a functioning courthouse in the Arghandab River Valley, now that Flynn had cleared it of Taliban, he needed troops to defend it and those manning it, there and around the country. This was Petraeus’s Anaconda strategy in action: Flynn and the Top Guns fought the Taliban on the battlefield, and Martins and his Afghan provincial judges and prosecutors fought the insurgents in the courts. Martins was sensitive to concerns that he was “militarizing” criminal justice, but both he and Petraeus thought there was a lack of sufficient civilian capacity to begin this portion of the clear-hold-and-build effort. Senator Graham, a military lawyer in the Air Force Reserve, applauded Martins’s command of combat troops, which he thought was “unprecedented in the history of military law.”

  Back in November, Martins had made a similar plea to Noorullah Sadat, the Karzai government’s chief national security prosecutor in Kabul, asking him to appoint three competent and honest subordinates to satellite courthouses he was establishing in Spin Boldak and two other recently cleared districts around Kandahar: Zhari and the Arghandab River Valley. Martins had support from U.S. commanders like Flynn in those areas, and money to boost salaries from the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. But what he really needed was specially trained lawyers to assign as trainers and advisers to their Afghan peers before the courthouses were established—amid additional Afghan partners.

  After Martins and Sayed Zadah touched down in Kandahar, Martins gave the Afghan official a tour of the Chel Zeena compound. Chel Zeena, built mostly with U.S. funds, was designed as a secure facility where investigators, prosecutors and clerks could do the legal and forensic work necessary for evidence-based criminal proceedings. Despite investment in new equipment, the facility still looked dilapidated. Prisoners, many of them barefoot, sat in open courtyards. One open-air area housed criminals accused of petty crimes. In a separate, smaller holding area, a handful of female prisoners sat chatting while their children played around them. A final holding area housed hard-core prisoners, most of them insurgents.

  Martins and Sayed Zadah walked on the roof of Sarposa prison, part of the Chel Zeena compound, a prison infamous for the breakout by more than four hundred Taliban fighters in 2008. After Martins explained the layout of the compound, they proceeded to a conference room to meet with advisers from the FBI and the State Department, military police officers and Afghan police and prosecutorial officials, including chief Jalat Khan.

  Khan was a medium-size, salt-and-pepper-bearded, vigorous man with a toothy smile. He was grateful for the international assistance and willing to discuss the Rafiullah case, one that held considerable interest for Martins. “Rafiullah turned himself in after he realized we were on his trail, but was deceptive about his identity,” Martins explained through an interpreter. “We questioned him carefully and did follow-up research to find his real name. He was accused of murder and extortion.” Other records, however, indicated that he had been involved in supporting insurgents, and it was his connection to organized armed groups seeking to bring down the government that enabled investigation of him as a national security threat and trial under a separate chapter of Afghanistan’s criminal code.

  “Have you run a full scan of his biometrics with the Cross Match Jump Kit?” Martins inquired, learning from one of the Afghans that, yes, recently trained enrollers had done so. “You should check the coalition database to see if we have any latent prints.” The Afghan Ministry of the Interior had over the past year begun distributing the Jump Kits, which digitally scanned fingerprints, recorded iris shape and photographed facial appearance on a laptop computer. Martins had pushed to get the equipment and necessary training to Kandahar and other areas recently cleared of Taliban. The Jump Kits were very similar to the U.S. military’s laptop-based Biometrics Automated Toolset and Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment systems. Biometric enrollments of criminal suspects, applicants for the security forces and government jobs, prison inmates and other high-risk populati
ons was a critical enabler for the rule-of-law effort. As tens of thousands of latent fingerprints had been lifted from the surfaces of exploded IED fragments and from weapons found at Taliban hideouts, more and more matches were being made between newly enrolled Afghans and the database of latent prints.

  These systems were an important step toward creating identities for friend and foe, denying insurgents the anonymity on which they depended. All Afghan police and military officials were scanned along with prisoners; even enemy KIA were often scanned to compare against target lists. To that point, about one million Afghans had been enrolled in the system, but with a military-age male population of about seven million, the Afghan government was pursuing a biometrically enabled national identification card to increase these numbers. Greater enrollments were needed so that Afghanistan could control its borders more effectively, corner insurgents and criminals and reduce corruption in everything from elections to applications for jobs. Here, even if a database check revealed no matches against fingerprints found on bomb parts, Jalat Khan could definitely benefit by having Rafiullah’s exact biometric data on file. There were four “Rafiullahs” in Kandahar police custody, and they all were using aliases.

  Sitting at the rectangular table in the conference room, part of the first structure completed at the criminal investigative center, Martins urged one of the FBI agents only recently posted to Kandahar to offer technical assistance. “How can you corroborate Rafiullah’s partial confessions for conviction, Jalat?” the agent asked. Evidence gathering was a major challenge for Afghan investigators, who rarely made it to the scene of a crime. Jalat responded, “We need a much fuller background check. Some of these brave investigators here should visit the places where witnesses say Rafiullah did his crimes. We need to reinterview these and other witnesses. And then we need to reinterview Rafiullah.” This kind of attention to a case was only just now becoming possible, due to the improved security situation and the training and facilities being devoted to investigation.