My Share of the Task (53 page)

The Afghans' vocabulary grew to account for the diverse taxonomy of groups we lumped together as “the Taliban”: “
fighting Taliban” differentiated active insurgents from simply the pious but quiescent madrassa students; “clean Taliban” were good mannered, while “thief Taliban” used the insurgency as a guise to engorge themselves; “local Taliban” typically had a more sympathetic reception than those from even a province away, who were eyed warily because of their capacity to run roughshod; of least concern were the “Taliban sitting at home,” older members of the former regime, all but retired.

In Iraq, Zarqawi did not care whether fighters underneath him identified themselves as “Al Qaeda” so long as their sabotage and bombing fell within his strategic framework. Not so for the Taliban leadership. They needed fighters and supporters alike to think of themselves as Taliban, and be recognized as such. It was crucial to the Taliban's desired—but phony—image as a cohesive, national liberation movement on the march. Meanwhile, the perception of a unified Taliban movement benefited local fighters, who looked more legitimate and fearsome to foes and recruits. The connection between the local units and top-level leadership was the
mahaz
, or “front,” which ranged in size from as few as
twenty fighters to as many as a thousand. To have the prestige of commanding a smaller
mahaz
, a young man had to win approval from the Quetta-based leadership, who in turn provided him arms and mentorship. By co-opting these
mahaz,
the leadership made its disparate movements look cohesive, and helped them, through a chorus of spokesmen they fielded throughout the theater, claim quick credit for any and all violence that suited their interest. Even so, the links between the two levels often remained tenuous—in some areas, senior leadership was
unable to fire the local commanders.

The local nature of the insurgency meant that “the Taliban” was not a fungible group that the leadership could reposition at whim. While there were some particularly vicious roving bands of more fanatical militants who gained notoriety acting as shock troops, most locally recruited insurgents would not stray far from the property and family and tribe whose safety and dignity were often a reason for taking up arms.
Outbreaks of insurgency we were seeing in the north and west that summer were not the result of big tranches of southern Pashtun fighters infiltrating the north, but rather concerted efforts to turn local resentment into violence. While some argued that pursuing the Taliban in one area of the country would simply displace them to another—like squeezing a balloon at one end only to see the other side expand—our view of the insurgency argued against this happening to any significant degree. Insurgent field leaders were relatively mobile, and they could focus on inflaming a new area, but, as a sign of their weakness, they could not relocate whole armies of fighters.

This prevented the Taliban's senior leadership from orchestrating a national strategy with any of the sophistication we saw in Iraq. The Taliban were seeking to build a national political infrastructure, with
varying degrees of success. But their strategy was, more than anything, opportunistic, even when seeking to choke off Kandahar or control swaths of Helmand. The insurgency grew where it could grow, where the government was weakest or worst. Their reliance on local grievances, not nationalism or ideology, was a glaring liability. The introduction of minimally decent and competent governance could cause the local resistance to wilt.

But their composition also, I knew, made for a daunting tactical, intelligence, and development challenge. To our frustration and bewilderment, security and popular sentiment could often be night-and-day on an opposite ridgeline, between towns, or across far more subtle geographic features: In one of the most violent areas in the corridor connecting Helmand and Kandahar,
one of my civilian advisers reported that the few lanes of a highway formed the dividing line between relative stability in the arid stretch to its north and a vicious fight among pomegranate orchards and grape vineyards to the south. To prevail, we needed to create a counterinsurgency effort that was synchronized across Afghanistan but agile enough to adapt to the war we faced in each village and valley.

*   *   *

N
ot long into the summer, during a morning update—at ISAF, I had instituted a forum similar to the O&I meeting we'd run in TF 714—a briefer from one of the regional commands noted that there had been a civilian casualty recently in his area of operations. This death came on the heels of other incidents in the days prior, in which one and two civilians had died. I asked the circumstances of this latest event, which was forty-eight hours earlier, and the briefer admitted he had no details. Neither did my staff there in ISAF headquarters. The steady trickle of dead Afghans appeared to be an afterthought.

I slammed the table.

“
What is it that we don't understand? We're going to lose this fucking war if we don't stop killing civilians,” I said, looking at the staff and at the commanders on the screen. It was uncharacteristic for me to swear during the morning update. I took a second, and began again. “I apologize for losing my temper, but we
cannot
continue to do this.”

This was a conclusion that the listening tour had strongly reinforced. I'd watched as a focus on the enemy in Afghanistan had made little dent in the insurgency's strength over the past eight years and, conversely, had served to antagonize Afghans. Not only was Afghans' allegiance critical, but I did not think we would defeat the Taliban solely by depleting their ranks. We would win by making them irrelevant by limiting their ability to influence the lives of Afghans, positively or negatively. We needed to choke off their access—physical, psychological, economic—to the population.

In the year before my arrival General McKiernan had pursued a counterinsurgency approach. But he had faced a
shortage of Afghan and ISAF manpower, as well as limited infrastructure, like roads, that would have enabled effective operations. Additionally, NATO had no doctrine for counterinsurgency, and ISAF forces on the ground had offered a fair amount of institutional resistance to adopting the tactics and interaction with Afghans essential to an effective counterinsurgency campaign.

As Secretary Gates had stressed, protecting the Afghan population was paramount to the counterinsurgency we had to wage. This included reducing Coalition-caused civilian casualties. The year before I had arrived at ISAF, I'd watched from afar as two high-profile incidents had raised tensions between Afghans and the international mission. On August 22, 2008, a Coalition air strike near the village of Azizabad in Herat Province killed scores of noncombatants. More recently, following the May 4, 2009, air strike in Farah Province that set off riots, I'd sat with Chairman Mullen to listen to my old comrade Brigadier General T.T., who had been assigned to investigate. His chillingly detailed analysis of a series of mistakes and Byzantine command structure that had led to tragedy had stayed with me. One of my early moves after arriving to ISAF was to clean up the lines of command.

The listening tour confirmed my conclusion that Afghans' perception of our airpower had largely formed during the opening salvo of the war, in the fall of 2001, when the precision of American bombs had awed them.
Lore grew that our bombers, tens of thousands of feet up in the sky, could read the label of a cigarette pack on a car dashboard. This perception of our exacting omnipotence made it difficult for Afghans to believe that when we killed civilians accidentally, we did so truly unintentionally. “We didn't mean to” often elicited squinted, skeptical looks from Afghans. So, over time, as Coalition air strikes continued to hit misidentified targets like wedding celebrations, Afghan tolerance grew brittle. These stray bombs reminded some Afghans of the Soviets' periodic, murderous carpet bombing against the mujahideen and innocent civilians. President Karzai had been complaining
for years about civilian casualties, but over time many in the international community viewed his protests as political rhetoric for domestic consumption. Though doubtlessly motivated in part by politics, Karzai apparently believed that his responsibility to represent his citizens required that he provide a loud voice in their protection. While never completely ignored, his protests to Coalition forces appeared largely discounted. I decided it was important to reverse that impression.

The instinctive way we reacted to alleged incidents made it worse. Americans frequently responded defensively to charges of misguided strikes. Afghans viewed our skepticism about the validity of their claims as obfuscation, even if we followed our comments with thorough investigations. They thought our hesitation to quickly, publicly apologize for Afghan deaths was an indicator of callousness. Americans cared, of course, but perceptions mattered. Even when an apology was forthcoming, Afghans would rarely, if ever, see any change in our behavior. “Afghans hear with their eyes, not just with their ears,” a group of elders had reminded members of my staff on the listening tour.

I prioritized ensuring ISAF made careful use of its awesome firepower. But from the start I knew doing so would be sensitive. Resistance would come from both the take-the-gloves-off proponents of more aggressive counter-guerrilla operations, but also from thoughtful commanders and units whose experiences in Iraq were seared into their psyche.

I would ask soldiers and Marines to demonstrate what we soon termed “courageous restraint”—forgoing fires, particularly artillery and air strikes, when civilian casualties were likely—even if it meant a firefight dragged on longer, or a group of insurgents was allowed to flee only to ambush ISAF forces another day. I was emphatic that fires could and should be used if the survival of our forces was directly threatened, but in cases where the only purpose was to kill insurgents, the protection of civilian lives and property took precedence. To communicate as clearly as I could, I personally wrote the key parts of a tactical directive that was designed to explain my intent in straightforward, nonlawyerly language. I wrote it not to prescribe tactical decisions for sergeants and junior officers closest to the fight, but to help them understand the underlying logic of the approach I was asking them to employ.

“
I expect leaders at all levels to scrutinize and limit the use of force like close air support (CAS) against residential compounds,” I wrote. “I cannot prescribe the appropriate use of force for every condition that a complex battlefield will produce, so I expect our force to internalize and operate in accordance with my intent.” They were points I reinforced almost daily in commandwide VTCs.

More important, the directive did not change any part of the soldiers' rules of engagement—the military's legal code that governs how and when soldiers can use force when confronted by the enemy. I left untouched the rules by which soldiers could defend themselves. “
This directive does not prevent commanders,” I wrote, “from protecting the lives of their men and women as a matter of self-defense where it is determined no other options . . . are available to effectively counter the threat.” I wanted them to think creatively about how they could avoid getting stuck in a situation where, to defend themselves, they needed airpower. But I never took that right away from them.

Many of the lower-level battalion and brigade commanders had reached these conclusions long before I issued my tactical directive. They had been prudently restricting their use of firepower. Some made it a de facto policy to drop munitions on compounds in only the most dire situations.

But I also knew that the military coalition was an immense organization, and that there was a constant risk of misunderstanding the directive at the lowest levels, where the fight and these decisions were the most difficult. This was especially true since many lieutenants and sergeants never directly read the directives that top-level commanders, like me, put out; they often received the guidance secondhand. One young Marine, for example, told me that as a lieutenant in Iraq, he learned of new tactical guidance or directives through TV news reports about them. Thus, I used every opportunity, and leveraged the leadership and credibility of combat leaders like Dave Rodriguez and Mike Hall, to articulate the policy. Charlie Flynn, my exec, who quickly grasped the importance, also spread the gospel by
answering e-mails from battalion and brigade commanders, many whom he knew, or by talking with them frankly, commander-to-commander, when we visited outposts and regional headquarters.

My decision to limit fires wasn't primarily a moral one, although a single visit with a child, staring blankly at where her legs had been, or a widowed spouse, mouth twisted in grief, was enough to convince many people that it was the right thing to do. Rather, mine was a calculation that we could not succeed in the mission I thought President Obama had outlined for Afghanistan without the support of the people. That support was based upon the premise that we were there to protect them—and to support the Afghan government. For many Afghans, we were in their country because their government had asked us to be. Thus, every time we killed or maimed civilians, it not only made us more unwelcome but it corroded the government's reputation. We needed to curate and grow that reputation in order to make it a bulwark against the insurgency.

Additionally, as I sought to make our force more mindful of civilian casualties, I also wanted to dissuade a myopic focus on insurgent deaths. Thus, shortly after taking over, I directed that all of the units cease reporting, in their public affairs releases, tolls of insurgents killed. While these units were not using insurgent deaths as an official metric, I knew that forces performed according to what was measured and scrutinized. So I wanted to take away any incentives that might drive commanders and their men to see killing insurgents as the primary goal.

*   *   *