by Steve Coll
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Darin Loftis turned forty-four years old on February 22, 2012. He spoke to Holly that day for ten or fifteen minutes. His colleagues were planning a surprise party for March 28—which Loftis knew about—to celebrate his return home to Florida.
Darin worked for Jean-Marc Lanthier, a Canadian brigadier posted at I.S.A.F. headquarters. He held a shura for I.S.A.F.’s operations group leadership, known as the J-3, most Saturdays. He regarded Loftis as “one of the most brilliant human beings I’ve seen, in or out of uniform.” Loftis could afford to be skeptical about “ambitious generals,” as he once called them. He planned to retire from the Army soon and go back to school. In Afghanistan, he would not hesitate to challenge the most senior officers if he felt they had the wrong assumptions. Some of his American and Canadian colleagues “would be dismissive of the Afghan point of view,” as Lanthier put it, but Loftis “would always bring us back to the truth.” He tried to make them understand why it was important to let the Afghans do it their way, and yet “he hadn’t gone native.” He would also challenge the Afghans about their assumptions.
Lanthier struggled to assess the rising incidence of fratricidal murder. It was uncomfortable to think the Taliban had the ability to threaten the coalition by placing infiltrators in their midst. But Lanthier and his colleagues felt exceptionally safe at the Ministry of Interior. They assumed the ministry’s security guards were reliable because Afghan security had vetted the guards to protect Afghan generals who also worked at the compound.
The Ministry of Interior was a downtown Kabul fortress ringed by iron fences, concrete walls, barbed wire, and armed guards. There were hundreds of Afghan and international troops on the premises or nearby. When Lanthier visited, he walked around without body armor and asked his bodyguard to stand outside his office, to signal to his Afghan colleagues that he trusted them. Afghans were not allowed to carry guns. The compound seemed as secure as any place in Afghanistan.23
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At Forward Operating Base Lonestar, near Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, American soldiers and military police trained Afghan units. T. J. Conrad Jr., of Roanoke County, Virginia, the married father of a one-year-old son, served as an instructor. He had arrived in Afghanistan only in January. During calls home, he told his father “he felt like on some of the patrols they went on that they were being set up” by the Afghans they were training because they would arrive at target compounds and it seemed that the enemy had been tipped off beforehand.24
On February 23, hundreds of shouting Afghans gathered outside the gates of Lonestar to protest the Koran burnings at Parwan.
The Americans shouldered weapons and watched the protesters warily, but held fire. Suddenly an Afghan soldier on the base trained his automatic rifle on his American colleagues.
Conrad sought cover and fired back but the Afghan soon shot him dead. The shooter killed a second American, Joshua Born. Other American soldiers returned fire and wounded the assailant, but he stumbled off the base and into the crowd of protesters.
The base’s intelligence unit had launched a surveillance drone that day to watch the protesters. The drone’s cameras now followed the shooter as he escaped. Outside Lonestar, four people helped him before a large Pashtun man in civilian dress, who had apparently been waiting for the killer, hoisted the wounded man over his shoulder, carried him half a mile on foot, and then loaded him into a white vehicle. The drone followed as the vehicle sped away but it escaped.25
General John Allen called his counterpart, Sher Mohammad Karimi, the Afghan chief of army staff, and proposed that they fly together to Lonestar. In the base’s small mess hall, where a large American flag had been hung on the wall, they spoke to survivors.
“There will be moments like this when your emotions are governed by anger and the desire to strike back,” Allen said. “These are the moments when you reach down inside and you grip the discipline that makes you a United States soldier. And you gut through the pain. And you gut through the anger. And you remember why we are here. We are here for our friends. We are here for our partners. We are here for the Afghan people. Now is not the time for revenge.”
Karimi spoke. “Your sacrifice is not wasted,” he said. “This enemy fighting against us is not an enemy of Afghanistan. It is an enemy of the whole humanity. I think we are fighting together for a noble cause.”
“We admit our mistake,” Allen concluded. “We ask forgiveness. We move on.”26
—
On the afternoon of Saturday, February 25, Darin Loftis went to work in the Interior Ministry office he shared with Major Robert Marchanti, a logistics specialist. Marchanti was forty-eight, a bear-size man with a crew cut. He had served in the Maryland National Guard for twenty-five years. At home in Baltimore, where he had grown up, he had taught physical education in public schools. This was his first Afghan tour. He was trying to learn Dari and Pashto. He ate regularly with Afghans at their dining hall at the Ministry of Interior.
His church back home sent coats and children’s gear to him in Kabul that winter. Marchanti distributed the gifts to a local orphanage. For the U.S. Army, his job was to order supplies and manage deliveries around the country.27
The room Loftis and Marchanti shared was on the second floor of an auxiliary building on the Interior Ministry compound. Marchanti had mounted a Baltimore Ravens pennant on one wall. A map of Afghanistan hung on another wall. Both men had been caught up that week in conversations about the Koran burnings at Parwan. Loftis had pledged to Lanthier to draft a paper that explained Islam and Afghan culture to I.S.A.F. soldiers so that, among other subjects, they might better understand the significance of the Koran.
Darin Loftis routinely lingered with Afghans on the Interior Ministry compound. He had only a passing acquaintance with Abdul Saboor, a slight man who kept his head shaved.
Saboor had managed two months earlier to win a transfer from duty as a soldier to a job as an Interior Ministry driver. The new position allowed him greater access to compound buildings.
Early in February, Saboor knocked on the door of the office Loftis shared. He asked to have his picture taken with Loftis, Marchanti, and a third American, Colonel Jim Green. They smiled for the camera.
“I’m checking the Taliban Web site tonight,” Loftis joked when Saboor was gone. “Our pictures will probably be there.”
Saboor was an ethnic Tajik who spoke Dari and hailed from the Salang area of Parwan Province. This was a profile that seemed to mark him as a reliable American ally, because he belonged to one of the northern Afghan ethnic groups that were in the main ardent enemies of the Taliban. It later emerged, however, that Saboor had left Afghanistan and studied at a Pakistani madrassa before returning to Kabul to take his position at the Interior Ministry.
Shortly after 2:15 p.m. that Saturday, Saboor again entered the office where Loftis and Marchanti worked. They would have had to let him in because a coded lock secured the door; no Afghans were provided with the code, but they routinely were invited in to access the snacks, bottled water, and medicine stored in the room.
Saboor crossed the room, raised a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol and shot Marchanti in the head.
He shot Darin Loftis in the back; Loftis fell facedown. The killer leaned down and fired again into the back of his victim’s head.
Saboor descended the stairs. At the building entrance he told an Afghan colleague that the two American advisers had just shot each other. He walked past security guards and concrete barriers into the streets of downtown Kabul and disappeared.28
General John Allen arrived at the compound in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected transport vehicle, a hulk of plated metal designed to shield occupants from even the heaviest improvised bombs planted on roads by the Taliban. Allen stepped out in full battle gear and climbed to the office where Loftis and Marchanti still lay in pools of blood. He kneeled and prayed over the bodies.29
; —
Allen ordered American advisers withdrawn from all Afghan ministries and pledged to develop new protocols that might keep American and European trainers safe. The murders of Darin Loftis and Robert Marchanti on one of the most heavily guarded compounds in Afghanistan, a short walk from the American-led war’s command center, stunned I.S.A.F.’s leadership. Despite Bordin’s warnings, a few dozen Afghan killers working behind American fences had managed to call the exit strategy of the world’s most formidable military alliance into doubt.
It would require another eighteen months of secret intelligence investigations to identify the causes of the green-on-blue murder wave, and to start to stymie its effects.
“What do I tell his family today?” Senator Barbara Mikulski asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a hearing on February 28, 2012, addressing the death of Robert Marchanti.
“Was it worth it? Because they’re angry. People in Maryland are angry.” Mikulski added of the now decade-old Afghan war, “We went there with the best of intentions.”30
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Holly Loftis flew to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to receive Darin’s remains. She met Peggy Marchanti. An honor guard carried their husbands’ caskets from the plane.
On March 8, at Hurlburt Field, another dress guard carried Loftis’s casket across a tarmac to a funeral service with full honors. The Air Force awarded Darin Loftis a posthumous Bronze Star, his second. The base named a classroom at the Schoolhouse in his memory. Holly’s brother, the Reverend Dr. Brian Brewer, led the remembrances. He remembered a photo of Loftis taken during his first Afghan tour, in 2009, when he had served on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Zabul Province, in the Taliban’s heartland. The picture showed Darin offering himself playfully to a group of Afghan children. Referring to the image, Brewer told the mourners, “It is representative of the ideal.”31
THIRTY-THREE
Homicide Division
Abdul Saboor’s murder of Darin Loftis and Robert Marchanti moved the American war command to restudy the threat. That two senior officers could be dispatched with pistol shots to the backs of their heads in a heavily guarded compound in the heart of Kabul suggested that no one or nowhere could be considered safe. The crime recalled nationalistic Afghan uprisings against British occupations of the nineteenth century. In the weeks that followed, the C.I.A. circulated analysis in Washington pointing out that the frequency of insider murders against American and European forces had surged to a rate ten times greater than during the first decade of the war. The murders were on pace to constitute a quarter of all I.S.A.F. fatalities in 2012, an astounding percentage. Nothing like this had happened in Vietnam or during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In fact, as far as the C.I.A.’s analysts could determine, Afghanistan’s insider killing spree after 2011 had no precedent in the history of modern counterinsurgency.1
Following murders of its soldiers late in 2011, France announced a withdrawal of two thousand combat soldiers from Afghanistan. Australia, Britain, Germany, and Spain all lost soldiers to killings by Afghan soldiers or police they worked alongside. The murder wave pulled at the foundations of every “line of effort” in N.A.T.O.’s campaign—the training of Afghan National Security Forces, the mentoring of Afghan police and technocrats in the ministries, and the resilience of political will in N.A.T.O. capitals to fight on after a decade of effort. The Taliban—or whoever or whatever was the cause of the insider killing—had located “exactly this political-emotional milieu we are in,” as a N.A.T.O. diplomat in Kabul put it. “All our capitals are tired. We lost the battle of public opinion three years ago, anyway.”2
More vexing still, there was no consensus about why these insider killings had surged. Were the killers Taliban infiltrators who had slipped through the N.D.S. vetting system designed to weed out enemy sympathizers from the Afghan National Army and police? Or were they non-Taliban who had become personally aggrieved over slights or insults from N.A.T.O. soldiers and decided to take violent revenge? This was a murder mystery that had become the war’s most important strategic puzzle.
Murders of American and European soldiers by Afghan allies spiked slightly in March 2012, and then ground along at an alarming rate of at least several per month into the summer. That year, Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting and celebration, took place from July 20 to August 19. Ramadan is a time of self-purification, of rituals of affiliation with faith. For individuals susceptible to the call to violent jihad against foreigners, the fasting and celebration in 2012 seemed to have a stimulating effect.
On July 22, in Herat Province, an Afghan policeman shot and killed three N.A.T.O. trainers and wounded a fourth. The next day, in Faryab Province, an Afghan colleague shot and wounded two N.A.T.O. soldiers. Between August 3 and the end of Ramadan, Afghan soldiers or policemen committed at least nine more murders or attempted murders against N.A.T.O. and American troops, killing ten people, including five U.S. Marines, two of those Special Operations officers. During those final two weeks of Ramadan, Afghans attempted to kill Americans or Europeans they worked alongside about once every other day.3
Marine General John Allen’s chief of intelligence, Mike Flynn’s successor, was Robert Ashley, a two-star Army general. He was a silver-haired, sober-faced man whose highly secured offices lay a short walk from Allen’s command center at I.S.A.F.’s headquarters in downtown Kabul. Ashley knew well that solving the insider murder problem had become critical. At August’s rate of killing, the American plan for a slow, gradual drawdown from Afghanistan looked implausible.
Ashley and Allen established a program of “guardian angels,” in which Western commanders appointed armed guards from their own ranks to watch over Afghan allies during joint activities. As the murders picked up during Ramadan, Allen authorized field commanders to appoint even more watchmen if they felt it was needed. But it seemed obvious that the more the Americans tightened their internal security protocols—the more Afghan allies were stripped of their weapons before meetings or endured armed American surveillance on patrol—the more likely it was that these allies would conclude that the Americans were their enemies.
One night that August, Ashley’s counterpart in the Afghan National Army, General Abdul Manan Farahi, the head of military intelligence, telephoned. It was unusual to hear from Farahi so late. Ashley stepped outside to take the call.
“My friend, I just want to make sure, with Eid coming up,” he said, referring to the celebration of Ramadan’s end. “Just minimize the contact with the guys in the field and take care.” These were haunted times, Ashley told colleagues, as he relayed Farahi’s message.4
Ashley decided he needed a fresh mind to analyze the crisis. He turned that autumn to one of the more unusual, naturally gifted characters in the American intelligence community. Marc Sageman, who was then in his late fifties, was a bald, white-bearded forensic psychiatrist and former C.I.A. operations officer. He sometimes favored bow ties and spoke with a still-noticeable French accent. He had been born in Poland but raised as a refugee in France, where his parents had landed after surviving the Holocaust. Sageman matriculated at Harvard University at age sixteen, became a medical doctor, earned another doctoral degree in political sociology, served as a Navy flight surgeon, and then joined the C.I.A. as a case officer. He worked in Pakistan during the 1980s, running frontline C.I.A. contacts with Ahmad Shah Massoud’s aides, among other mujaheddin commanders. Later Sageman served as a psychiatrist on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied murder, crime, and terrorism. Sageman was already conducting intelligence investigations for the Army, but not everyone in the command was a Sageman fan. Like some other very smart individuals, he could be dismissive of opinions he found wanting. He was an independent operator, “not a team player,” as one general in Washington warned Ashley.
“I have nothing but team players and we don’t understand what’s going on,” Ashley replied.5
Sageman
agreed to take on the Afghan murder project as a contractor—his title in Ashley’s intelligence shop would be “political officer.” He flew to Bagram Airfield in mid-October. Sageman had never been in Afghanistan, at least not meaningfully. As a C.I.A. case officer, he had accompanied mujaheddin rebels he armed and financed to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and symbolically stepped a few yards onto Afghan soil to have his picture taken, but that was it. (The C.I.A. banned case officers from traveling with rebel clients inside Afghanistan, for fear they would be captured and turned into tools for Soviet propaganda.)
As he touched down in Kabul, Sageman was ambivalent. He had a wife and son at home in the Washington suburbs. He had never bought into Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan; it was too ambitious, too disconnected from reality, he believed. But the opportunity to work as a kind of homicide detective was intriguing. And Sageman felt a quiet sense of purpose—to save as many American and European lives as he could by developing insights that might reduce the murder wave, to get as many soldiers and officers as possible safely home from a misbegotten war.6
Ashley had won approval for Sageman’s assignment in part because the psychiatrist had recently impressed the Army’s leadership with his work on another classified, high-priority counterintelligence project. On November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas, Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, carried out a mass shooting against colleagues on the base, killing thirteen people and wounding more than thirty before he was subdued. It turned out that Hasan had been in contact over the Internet with Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American of Yemeni origin who had become a charismatic Al Qaeda preacher. After Fort Hood, the F.B.I. and American intelligence agencies identified and reviewed American residents who had previously clicked on Awlaki’s Web sites or exchanged e-mail with him. The investigations revealed, among other things, that Awlaki’s audience included about one hundred active service members in the U.S. Army. This looked like a classic counterintelligence threat. What if, during the Cold War, the Internet had been around and the Army had discovered that a hundred soldiers and officers were clicking through to the K.G.B.?