by Steve Coll
As a diplomat, Grossman was a facilitator, a man of process and professional tradition. All along, he accepted the stated policy of the Obama administration that peace talks were to be Afghan led. He made no effort, as a Holbrooke or Petraeus might have done, to tell Karzai that he was full of crap and that he had to cooperate here and now—that the future of peace in Afghanistan was too important for Karzai to let his ego or his illusions of power stand in the way. Grossman had instructions from Hillary Clinton that there was too much at stake in the alliance with Karzai to blow up the relationship over deal points in this incipient negotiation. If they defied Karzai or bullied him, he might go public and denounce the United States for negotiating secretly with the Taliban without his permission, which would be a devastating accusation in Congress, among other places. The Taliban believed Washington had decisive leverage over Karzai, because he could not survive without their aid; the truth was, Karzai had established decisive leverage over the Obama administration, by taking their pledges of Afghan sovereignty at face value.
In essence, Grossman told Karzai, “Okay, Mr. President, I’ll take this forward.”27
He flew on to Doha to present Karzai’s terms to Tayeb Agha. Grossman’s assumption was that this might be just another twist in the road that could be negotiated to a compromise. Others on his team thought it was definitely the end of the road. When they were gathered around the table at the Doha compound, Grossman read out Karzai’s new requirements. “Our allies, the Afghans, have kind of changed their mind,” Grossman conceded, “and we have a responsibility to them.”
The Taliban envoy recoiled. He was plainly furious, as were the Qataris. From the Taliban’s perspective, Karzai was merely an American puppet, one that depended on American support for money and physical survival. It seemed obvious that Karzai could be forced to do whatever the Americans wanted. Tayeb Agha said he and the Taliban political commission had taken great risks internally to negotiate with the Americans, and now, out of the blue, with some lame reference to Karzai, the Obama administration had upended agreed terms. They had made a deal, down to fine points, for the political office in Qatar. The Americans were tearing up the agreement. They did not seem to hear what Tayeb Agha had been saying on behalf of the Taliban leadership all along: They would not deal with Karzai, a quisling of no legitimacy.
“We reject the role of Kabul Administration in office opening, prisoner transfer [sic] and will only continue talks and negotiations with the United States after office and transfer is concluded,” the Taliban reported back in a written message passed by the Qataris. They would not talk to Karzai’s representatives “at present stage or negotiation stage” later because it had now been “proved to all that Mr. Karzai is playing in the hands of others and has no power of decision making.”28
Those at the Pentagon who had been monitoring the talks were appalled. They felt Grossman had been too accommodating of Karzai. They also felt he had envisioned the negotiations too narrowly, and that his plan was just to get Afghans to talk to Afghans after the Taliban had an office address, whereas what was needed was a much more comprehensive, strategic approach worked out with Karzai in advance. In the later search for blame, a number of Grossman’s colleagues wondered whether he had done all he should have to keep Karzai and the Pakistanis on his side as the high-risk talks with Tayeb Agha ripened. Grossman seemed to them too careful, too self-protecting. He did not spend the long hours over meals to cultivate Karzai as Zalmay Khalilzad had done. He did not project the forceful energy of Richard Holbrooke. Grossman’s defenders admitted that he was no Holbrooke, but argued that he was intelligent, experienced, methodical, and diligent, and that the fault wasn’t his, but Karzai’s. Another hard truth was that although the president had strongly encouraged the effort, the Obama administration had not brought the full weight of its power or the breadth of its government to the process. Neither the director of the C.I.A. nor the secretary of defense supported Grossman’s efforts. They were the ones who, in a pinch, had the clout to try to coerce Karzai. In any event, the failure was a bitter one for the State Department, White House, and Pentagon officials who had been working weekends and endless hours for more than a year to try to negotiate an exit from America’s longest war. The two sides traded a few more desultory notes, but in early March 2012, the Taliban announced publicly their withdrawal from negotiations with the United States. In the Taliban’s own strategy of fight and talk, they were returning to war.
THIRTY-TWO
The Afghan Hand
Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2011 7:40 AM
To: Loftis Email
Subject: RE: Arrived in Kabul
. . . We finished our classes today. The language classes were very useful, and some of the culture classes were interesting, but there was a lot of PowerPoint as well. Worse yet, it was Afghan PowerPoint. The older I get the harder it is to stay awake during boring presentations.
We have so far had a mullah, some elders, an Afghan general, and a member of parliament come and speak to us. They were all very interesting. . . .
We had a mock shura for the last day of language training. I had to play the part of a village elder, and I had to speak Pashto and sometimes Dari, since the other students are split across both. There’s a picture of me in an Afghan hat and shawl looking really tired. . . .
Remember my joke: What kind of Mexican food may or may not happen? (Inshallada.) An Arab American who lives in California liked it and he asked permission to use it. I of course agreed.
John Darin Loftis, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, was forty-three when he arrived in Afghanistan on his second tour. He had been drafted into the AFPAK Hands program (for Afghanistan and Pakistan) as a specialist in Afghan languages and culture. He was about five feet eight inches and had a stocky “Celtic build,” as his wife Holly put it, referring to his Irish heritage. He had a soft neck, brown hair, and an open face. He was straitlaced, a committed Christian who seemed to go out of his way to identify the best in others. He avoided even mild profanity but could be forthright and direct, even when speaking to superior officers.1
Officers who became AFPAK Hands committed to at least two field tours in Afghanistan. Loftis studied foreign languages avidly but he had been reluctant to join because it would require long separations from Holly and their two daughters, Alison, who was twelve, and Camille, who was almost ten. Ultimately, however, senior officers in the Air Force had all but insisted that he become a Hand because of his language ability; he was one of a handful of Pashto speakers in the Air Force. He and Holly felt he had no choice but to serve.
Holly and the girls remained at the family home in Navarre, on the Florida panhandle, near Hurlburt Field, home to the Air Force’s First Special Operations Wing. The base had a view of a nearby bay. Airmen enjoyed picnics on the Gulf of Mexico’s immaculate beaches. Loftis had been posted at “The Schoolhouse,” a facility at the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School. He taught officers and airmen about what they would encounter in Afghanistan. He shared the teaching load with a female Air Force intelligence officer who had immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan at the age of twelve. She spoke native Pashto. Loftis had learned his Pashto at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. The pair became fast friends while devising skits and role-playing games for their curriculum. When new military students arrived, Loftis and his partner would separate the men and women to introduce Afghanistan’s gender segregation. They would ask the men to hold hands, as Afghan men do. They dressed female students in burqas so they would know what it was like to wear one. They walked their students through pretend Afghan villages so they could practice talking to wary residents. They recited poems in Pashto and Dari. Among the many roles Loftis played during Schoolhouse skits, he was particularly brilliant as a tea server—even when bantering Air Force generals tried to induce him to speak or break character, Loftis would bow his head and refuse to glance up, to demonstrate
his socially prescribed subservience.2
He painstakingly taught departing American generals an icebreaker they could memorize in Dari. A man knocks on his neighbor’s door and asks to borrow his donkey. The neighbor says he has no donkey. “But I heard it braying.” Nope, no donkey, the neighbor insists. Just then arise the sounds of a donkey knocking around inside the house. “Who are you going to believe?” the exasperated man asks. “Me or the donkey?”
The purpose of the AFPAK Hands program was to leverage the expertise of American officers who served multiple tours in Afghanistan, to help win over Afghan hearts and minds. It was a phrase Loftis didn’t like “because it can be twisted to just about anything,” as he once put it. The Schoolhouse curriculum was one aspect of the counterinsurgency campaign, but it also had a defensive purpose, to prevent misunderstandings between Americans and Afghan partners that might escalate into intimate violence. By 2011, this was a rising problem in the war.
“Everything over there is about relationships,” Loftis and his teaching partner emphasized. Yet there was an obvious tension in their curriculum. On the one hand, they taught: Build relationships with Afghans who are your counterparts. At the same time, they warned: Watch your back.3
Loftis had grown up in Murray, Kentucky, a town of about fifteen thousand in the southwestern corner of the state. He was the first in his family to attend college, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He met Holly Brewer there. They lived in the same foreign-language hall as sophomores; the residents were supposed to speak Spanish as much as possible. She was the daughter of a cardiologist and a schoolteacher. He had little money and made it through Vanderbilt on scholarships and loans. They bonded deeply. They both were children of divorce. They yearned to live abroad. The summer after they graduated, they married and applied to the Peace Corps. They assumed they would go to Latin America because they both spoke Spanish. One day they got a call reporting that they had been assigned to Papua New Guinea, the island nation near the equator in the Pacific, one of the poorest countries in the world.
In 1992, they arrived in the Southern Highlands, a remote forested area populated by the Duna people. They lived for two years in a village that had no electricity and no piped hot water. They both learned Melanesian pidgin, a patois of English, German, and tribal languages. They also acquired a little Duna. The long months of working side by side amid such ingrained poverty “changed our perspective on things—not bleeding heart but more in just learning about development, to see how slowly things can happen and how everything can get caught up in local politics.”4
In 1994, toward the end of their Peace Corps work, Darin thought about joining the military. He was twenty-six. The Air Force accepted him into Officer Training School in Alabama. Loftis had studied engineering as well as languages at Vanderbilt. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, he became a missile man and worked on classified space and nuclear programs. Holly taught preschool for a while as they moved from base to base. On September 11, 2001, they were living at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Holly heard the news of the attacks on National Public Radio, then turned on CNN and sat in front of the television most of the day, shocked and transfixed. As George W. Bush’s global war on terrorism unfolded, Darin was ordered to Schriever Air Force Base and then Cheyenne Mountain, the Cold War–era nuclear command bunker near Colorado Springs, Colorado. He hoped for a position in the Air Force that would use his gift for languages and enthusiasm for foreign cultures. Eventually, Darin applied to become a regional affairs strategist, an Air Force role that would require him to study a foreign language at Monterey. The application form asked what language he would prefer. Loftis wrote “needs of the Air Force” as his answer. His superiors chose Pashto.5
—
Major Jeffrey T. Bordin arrived in Afghanistan on his latest tour in June 2008. He was a research psychologist who specialized in the causes of failed military and intelligence decision making. He had also spent more than three decades serving in various branches of the military reserves, law enforcement, and the Air National Guard. Among other projects, Bordin had conducted war crimes and human rights investigations in combat zones. After September 11, he deployed to Afghanistan as a civil affairs planner, an adviser on law enforcement issues, and a trainer of the Afghan National Police, working with U.S. Special Forces. He deployed in areas that saw significant combat, such as the Pech Valley, the Korengal Valley, and Nuristan.6
Bordin’s work contained an emphatic streak of skepticism about commanding generals. His doctoral dissertation at Claremont Graduate School had explored “how elite governmental decision makers come to ignore or refute valid information during their deliberations.” The paper began by recounting how, during the late 1930s, naval officers discovered serious quality problems in torpedo manufacturing, yet the officers “acquiesced to both political and organizational pressures to ignore” the defects. Then, in 1942, at the Battle of Midway, nearly a hundred American airmen flew torpedo-armed planes against a vastly superior Japanese force. “Despite the Holocaust they were flying into,” Bordin recounted, “every aircrew pressed their attack—many while literally engulfed in flames.” Yet their bravery came to naught because “not a single torpedo detonated against a Japanese warship.” This failure “enabled the Japanese to launch a devastating counterstrike that culminated in the loss of the USS Yorktown and 141 American lives. The title of Bordin’s work signaled his perspective on these and similar cases: “Lethal Incompetence: Studies in Political and Military Decision-Making.” Early in his career, Bordin worried that he had been too hard on the commanders he chronicled. Later, he decided, “I wasn’t hard enough.”7
By 2010, Bordin had become all too familiar with a disturbing trend: a rising incidence of murder of American and European soldiers by uniformed Afghans who were supposed to be allies. The military called these murders “green on blue” killings. Since the spring of 2007, there had been more than two dozen murder or attempted murder cases in Afghanistan where soldiers or police working alongside American or European forces had turned their guns on their partners, killing at least fifty-eight. By 2010, the pace of fratricidal killings was rising, to the point where an Afghan ally murdered an American or European soldier once a week, on average, according to Bordin’s findings. In July, an Afghan soldier killed three British troops in Helmand and then fled to the Taliban. A week later, an Afghan soldier killed two American civilian trainers in northern Afghanistan. The next month, an Afghan employee shot dead two Spanish police officers. Yet no one had ever ordered a study of the problem and its causes.
Bordin had been out on operations with the Afghan National Police in remote areas since 2004. On patrol, he had sometimes felt that he was just as likely to be shot in the back by an Afghan police officer as to be killed by a Taliban insurgent. There were always a handful of Afghan comrades alongside him who had a hard stare that Bordin felt as hostility. He decided that an ethnographic study of the attitudes of Afghan and American soldiers toward one another might be insightful.8
The green-on-blue murders rising during 2010—and the shock effect they had on public opinion, particularly in Europe—threatened President Barack Obama’s strategy to try to engineer an exit from the Afghan war without leaving violent chaos behind. At the heart of Obama’s plan lay the counterinsurgency campaign now led by General Petraeus, which sought to suppress the Taliban long enough to train and equip Afghan security forces so that they could replace American and European troops and allow them to go home, starting in 2011. This expanding training mission required closer and closer interaction between American and European soldiers and Afghan allies. If such collaboration repeatedly gave rise to misunderstandings or resentments that led to cold-blooded murder, the strategy might fail.
It required another tragedy to jolt the Army to take an initial step to investigate as Bordin proposed. On November 29, 2010, in the Pachir Agam district of eastern Nangarhar Province, an Afghan border police
man participating in a joint operation with U.S. soldiers turned his gun on his allies and killed six Americans—the worst mass-murder case involving the United States in the Afghan war to date, and among the worst of its kind in American military history. That attack at last led U.S. Army commanders to authorize a “Red Team” research project about the apparent alienation between Afghan trainees and foreign advisers. Red Team studies at the C.I.A. or in military intelligence seek to step outside prevailing assumptions. Regional Command–East, as the section of the Afghan battlefield to the Pakistani side of Kabul was known, commissioned Bordin to conduct a Red Team study into fratricidal violence in Afghanistan.9
He designed his ethnographic research so that it would meet the peer review standards of social science, but in essence the design was simple: The Red Team researchers would ultimately ask more than 600 Afghan soldiers, police, and interpreters, as well as about 120 American soldiers, to talk openly about how they felt about one another. (The team also asked another 136 American soldiers to fill out a questionnaire assessing their Afghan counterparts.) Bordin directly solicited comment on misunderstandings and grievances between the two groups. “Okay, we won’t give you the regular ‘Smiley Face’ answers; we will tell you the truth,” an Afghan National Army sergeant told his interviewers.10