Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  The research team reached Laghman Province on December 8, 2010. After Christmas, they tramped around Kunar and Nangarhar, through the end of January. They worked on Afghan bases, not American bases. The Afghan soldiers and police they interviewed offered a critique of American conduct that did not sound very different, at times, from the Taliban’s critique. The Afghans said that the Americans carried out too many violent night raids; that their home searches looking for insurgents humiliated ordinary Afghans; that they did not respect Afghan women; that they drove local roads arrogantly; that they fired their weapons recklessly if attacked; and that they killed far too many Afghan civilians.

  “They get upset due to their casualties, so they take it out on civilians during their searches,” one interviewee said.

  “They take photos of women even when we tell them not to,” said another.

  “A U.S. [armored transport vehicle] killed six civilians traveling in a vehicle; it was intentional.”

  “U.S. soldiers killed two youths. Their mother became a suicide bomber; she was provoked by this atrocity. She went to Paradise as a martyr.”

  “They cause many civilian casualties; they apologize, but they keep doing it. This isn’t acceptable.”

  Bordin’s research team analyzed categories of complaint and built matrices to show which grievances stung most. They identified examples where the Afghan allies attributed violence to Americans that had actually been the Taliban’s responsibility.

  The American officers and soldiers Bordin interviewed also had a jaundiced view of the Afghans they were training and fighting alongside:

  “They are stoned all the time.”

  “We can’t leave anything out; they steal it.”

  “I wouldn’t trust the ANA [Afghan National Army] with anything, never mind my life.”

  “I was fired on by ANA personnel multiple times during my deployment.”

  “It would benefit Afghanistan to disband the ANA and start over again.”

  “We are interfering with Darwinian theory!”11

  —

  On May 12, 2011, Bordin published a seventy-page paper titled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility.” It provided a raw, highly detailed account of estrangement between American and Afghan allies. The testimony in the report included some from American soldiers who described lethal attacks where they believed Afghan soldiers or police had partnered or been complicit with the Taliban. Bordin found a “rapidly growing systematic threat” and a “crisis of confidence” among the Western trainers preparing the Afghan National Army and police to carry the war against the Taliban on their own.

  Bordin was particularly scathing about what he described as a pattern of denial among American commanders. Generals dismissed green-on-blue killings as “isolated” and “extremely rare,” Bordin wrote, statements that “seem disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest.” The willful “cognitive dissonance” of those leading the war “perpetuates an ongoing blindness towards acknowledging this murder problem.”12

  His judgments implicated General David Petraeus, who by now had been named to lead the C.I.A. Petraeus had a doctoral degree in international relations from Princeton. He surrounded himself with Army officers who also were graduate degree holders, many of them social scientists. Yet although he was often described as an intellectual, Petraeus did not have a particularly searching or questioning mind. He projected unshakable confidence and he was masterful at shaping his own reputation. He understood as well that in an era of global media and asymmetric terrorism and insurgency, wars turned as much on what people thought as on the territory they controlled. Bordin’s work undermined the public narrative of the Afghan war Petraeus had tried to shape.

  Colonel John Angevine had recently arrived at the I.S.A.F. headquarters to run Red Team studies. He read Bordin’s report, talked with the author about the possibility of working further together, and, on June 3, 2011, told Bordin that he was going to pass the study up to Petraeus. Three days later, Bordin learned that I.S.A.F. had ordered that his study be classified, to prevent further distribution beyond those with appropriate clearances. The command had also declined to renew his contract and withdrawn an informal offer to further study mistrust between American and Afghan soldiers.

  Petraeus said later he had never heard of Bordin, never read the study, and never took any steps to suppress its findings. Angevine had passed the study to Petraeus’s command staff but had no way to know whether the general had received it or looked at it. Angevine did conclude that Bordin had broken trust with the command by publishing the study as an open source document in a publicly accessible military knowledge-sharing database before he had authorization from the very top. Bordin thought this was a shoddy excuse for suppressing his findings; he had published through the appropriate channels, in a routine manner. He saw his work as the clarification of inconvenient truths in wartime, in the tradition he had long chronicled, and he believed his work undermined public statements by Petraeus about the war’s progress. In any event, I.S.A.F. did not renew Bordin’s contract. Someone else in Petraeus’s command—it is not clear who—ordered “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility” to be classified. Angevine and other officers in I.S.A.F. discussed Bordin’s research and debated his conclusions. The question was whether cultural incompatibility was really the cause of fratricidal violence or merely one of many contexts in which such intimate murders occurred, perhaps because of deliberate Taliban infiltration. It was a sensitive matter because the Bordin thesis of fundamental incompatibility leading to repetitious mass murder offered weary European publics and politicians a clearly lit exit ramp out of an Afghan war they no longer wanted to fight: We’ve overstayed, they all hate us, it’s hopeless.13

  Bordin had no alternative but to go home. He thought the transparent evidence he had assembled spoke amply for itself and that the Petraeus command was in denial. As he departed Afghanistan, he thought privately, “A lot of people are going to get killed unnecessarily.”

  Two weeks after Bordin was effectively fired, a Wall Street Journal reporter obtained a copy of the study and wrote about it. A spokeswoman for Petraeus’s command denounced Bordin’s work as methodologically flawed and not reliable. The position of Petraeus and his advisers was that they were aware of the problem of fratricidal violence and were taking preventive measures, many of them involving classified security procedures, to stop the killings, to the degree possible. There was no way to stop all of the insider attacks, but they were alert to the threat and doing what they could.

  As Petraeus departed Kabul for the C.I.A., he and his staff organized transition briefings for Marine General John Allen, who would take command of I.S.A.F. on July 18. Petraeus and his lieutenants presented to Allen at least three formal briefings on the Afghan war. In addition, the incoming commander dined with Petraeus almost every night. Not once—not even in staff-level briefings—did Petraeus or his officers mention the trend of fratricidal murder.14

  Sent: Friday, November 11, 2011 3:10 AM

  To: Loftis Email

  Subject: Re: Miss you

  It has gotten cold here, too. I was on duty last night, and every time I stepped outside I felt sorry for the guards who were out all night. They were bundled up, though, and one of them was watching TV in his cell phone.

  There’s another one who is really friendly and really loud about it. He only speaks Dari, and he’s illiterate. When I asked him if he could read, he said, “No, but I can really fight!” and he started maneuvering around with his gun and making sounds. He’s a real trip. I’ve been teaching him one phrase of English a day and he is tickled to death. . . .

  I’ve made really good friends with the janitor who cleans our building at ISAF. Today I introduced him to an AFPAK Hand (Larry, who is still finding his feet in Dari). At the end of our basic conversation Basir said his hope is that our children can be good friends, to
o.

  Another janitor, the one who cleans our part of the MOI building, doesn’t have his fingers on his right hand. I finally got close enough to him to ask about it, and after he closed the door he said it had been Taliban cruelty. (I had suspected that.) He then insisted that I translate it for COL Green, who was also in the room. You’re the only other ones that I have told. He shakes our hands without any shame or discomfort, though.

  He also has nine kids, and I got to meet one of them. COL Green got him a nice Eid present.

  I wish it were safe enough to bring you all here so you can see my world. But I like the one at home a lot better. . . .

  L, D2

  It had been apparent for years that Western military discipline and doctrine might be difficult to teach to Afghan soldiers and police, given that they struggled with high rates of illiteracy and impoverishment. Many American and European training officers had developed a nuanced appreciation of the problem. They did not expect Afghans to celebrate the presence of foreign troops in their country or to perform to the standards of armies in the industrialized world. The training mission was to prepare Afghans well enough to defend their own government and people against a second Taliban revolution, after the Americans and Europeans departed.

  “They smoked strong hashish and mild opium. They couldn’t map read,” recalled Patrick Hennessey, a young British officer who, in 2007, oversaw the training of an Afghan kandak, or battalion, in Helmand Province. “They lacked everything that British Army training believed in and taught—and fuck me if most of them hadn’t killed more Russians than we’d ever seen. . . . I liked that they had more balls than I ever did to just stand up and say ‘Why’ or ‘No’ or ‘I don’t care if there is a war on and a massive IED threat. I like watermelon so I’m going to steal a car I can’t drive and run a Taliban checkpoint in order to go to the market.’ I couldn’t train them at all.”15

  The potential for misunderstandings between f-bombing Western trainers and pious, prideful Afghan soldiers to erupt into gun violence was a problem “too sensitive to put in the formal briefings,” as Hennessey described it, but this gap did not seem to pose a strategic crisis.16 The murder rate grew only after 2007 as the war’s violence spread and as tens of thousands more American, Canadian, and European troops arrived to fight in Afghan towns and villages. It seemed remarkable that Afghans accepted the inevitability of American battlefield errors and the necessity of violent raids on private homes as much as they did. It was hardly surprising that personal bonds on joint bases frayed nonetheless as isolated American units lost discipline, killed civilians in the plain sight of Afghan partners, urinated on household walls in front of Afghan women, shot dogs for sport, or called their Afghan colleagues “motherfuckers,” even if the foreigners intended the phrase only in mild censorship.

  Increasingly, too, as it became clear that American and European troops would not remain in Afghanistan in large numbers for the long run, trainer and trained harbored distinct assumptions. The Americans and their Canadian and European allies were in a hurry to get the Afghan army and police organized, so they could go home. The Afghan soldiers being trained could not withdraw from the challenge of the Taliban, so they were open to local truces and other improvised, even cooperative strategies with the enemy to avoid direct combat.

  During 2011, fratricidal attacks surged in number and lethality. On October 29, an Afghan army trainee at a base in Kandahar Province opened fire on Australian soldiers, killing three of them and wounding seven others before the shooter was felled by return fire. On November 9, an Afghan soldier shot and wounded three Australians in Uruzgan Province. On December 29, an Afghan soldier shot and killed two members of the French Foreign Legion in eastern Afghanistan. Ten days later, during a volleyball game on a base in Zabul Province, an Afghan soldier murdered an unarmed American.

  In January 2012, a video of U.S. Marines kicking and urinating on Taliban corpses appeared on YouTube. It went viral and generated news coverage worldwide.

  On January 20, on a base in remote Kapisa Province, an Afghan soldier murdered four unarmed French soldiers while they ran for exercise. The killer later told investigators that he was outraged by the abuse video.17

  One problem was that Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense had no counterintelligence capabilities—no systems or trained personnel to detect Taliban infiltrators or other insiders who posed a threat. The Afghan spy service, the National Directorate of Security, or N.D.S., did have counterintelligence officers. Yet the N.D.S. had roots in Afghanistan’s brutal period of Soviet occupation, when the K.G.B. had trained and supported the security service. The Afghan army’s leaders had long memories and they did not want K.G.B.-trained officers rooting around in the Afghan National Army’s ranks, looking for Taliban spies, inevitably roughing up innocents or torturing suspects into false confessions.

  The latest murders revived attention to Bordin’s work. General Allen read summaries of the study and looked into its history but he thought that if Petraeus didn’t think the work was credible, then it probably wasn’t. Allen told colleagues that Bordin seemed too hooked on culture and misunderstanding as a problem between Afghan and American forces. Allen had commanded in Iraq on battlefields where American and Iraqi soldiers fought side by side in circumstances that were at least as challenging as in Afghanistan. Of course, there were frictions, but they were not fatal to the mission and could be overcome with deliberate work. Allen was wary, too, about how politically convenient the “cultural incompatibility” thesis was at a time when public opinion in Europe and America was swinging against the war. Was this reliable social science or just an excuse to go home? Allen’s intuition was that the murders more likely constituted an insurgent strategy of infiltration and disruption—a deliberate strike at the core of N.A.T.O. cohesion.18

  That winter, one of General Allen’s lieutenants, Major General Sean MacFarland, put together a self-protection guidebook for N.A.T.O. soldiers, called the “Green on Blue Smartcard.” It advised, “The key is for local Commanders to prevent complacency and conduct risk assessments with Green-on-Blue in mind.” The Smartcard recommended that N.A.T.O. officers include Afghan partners and promote cultural sensitivity: “Respect Islam,” the guidebook suggested, and “avoid arrogance.” Commanders should involve Afghan soldiers and officers in patrol briefings and “social/sport activities,” the document urged. Yet it also laid out procedures for how to train for gun battles with inside murderers, how to eliminate shooters decisively and quickly, and how to maintain armed vigilance, including the oversight of Afghan allies, “before, during and after military operations.”19

  Wed 2/15/2012 9:44 AM

  Holly,

  I had another Afghan Hands experience today. General Dawood invited Nea (another APH in our office) to his house for lunch today. The main reason was so Nea could talk to his wife about her health condition so we can try to set up some treatment for her if necessary. So we donned our civilian clothes and hopped in his police truck and went to his house. It was an extremely modest setup, not at all like one might think a general would live in. We had the standard Afghan meal of rice, bread, beef, chicken, and salad, and it was tasty. In true Afghan fashion they insisted we eat more and more. . . .

  We believe the reason they live so modestly is that they spend a lot of their money on education. His wife teaches geography and the other two women—I think they were daughters or nieces—teach math, all at the same high school. . . .

  Nea also pointed out that the reason he may be waiting so long to pin on his second star is that he is honest, leads an honest-yet-modest lifestyle, and refuses to pay a bribe to get his star pinned on. That’s just speculation on our part, but it’s plausible. . . .

  I just thought you’d like to know of my adventure today. . . .

  L, D2

  In early 2012, the largest American-run prison in Afghanistan was the detention facility at Parwan, adjacent to B
agram Airfield, about forty miles north of Kabul. Taliban prisoners held there used the facility as a makeshift command center, passing messages to one another and outside. I.S.A.F. had assigned a military police unit and a Theater Intelligence Group counterintelligence team to stop the Taliban prisoners from communicating. In late 2011 and early 2012, the team received “multiple intelligence reports” that the Taliban were using books in the prison library “as a medium of communication within the detainee population.”20

  On February 18, about a dozen American soldiers and civilian linguists searched the prison library. One of the linguists identified books that he thought contained “extremist content.” He concluded upon further investigation that perhaps two thirds to three quarters of the library’s books and pamphlets “should not be read” by prisoners. On this advice the American counterintelligence team pulled aside about two thousand books and decided to burn them. The team included only a handful of Arabic and Pashto speakers. Only they understood clearly that the books included copies of the Holy Koran.21

  The team hauled the offending books to a burn pit. Afghan colleagues warned them not to go forward because they feared locals working at the incinerator would recognize religious materials in the load and might react violently. The leader of the American team heard this warning but did not act.

  At the burn pit, another Afghan National Army officer and his translator saw Korans in the pile slated for destruction and again warned the Americans to stop. They, too, were ignored. Minutes later, an Afghan civilian employee operating the incinerator noticed that Islamic religious books were on fire. He shouted for help, doused the flames and tried to rescue partially burned Korans. As word spread, more Afghans rushed to the burn pit. The Americans present “became frightened by the growing, angry crowd and rapidly departed the area.”22