One Hundred Victories (11 page)

Daoud did not want the Taliban to take over again—they had shot and wounded his brother, and he did not agree with their strict Islamist rule. He was not fatalistic so much as practical. “If a central government is established, I am willing to work for it. In the time of the king the laws were obeyed, and the maliks took care of the problems. If there is no government, we will need to adapt,” he said, adding, “We are good at quick adaptation.” His brother Mahmoud chimed in. “We have to live here. That means we have to have an understanding,” he said.

As they prepared to hand off Ezabad to the incoming team, the special operators took satisfaction from the projects that had come to fruition. The school was a wild success. Even the poorest Afghans were eager for their children to be educated, knowing that it was the path to a different future. The school in the qalat was bursting at the seams with boys of all ages—girls attending school was still a bridge too far in this most conservative Pashtun bastion. The teacher, who had come from Kandahar, was assisted by the educated adult son of one of the ALP commanders. The road to the district center was now humming with traffic, although the new gravel road led to speeding, and at least one crash that took the lives of two of the ALP children who worked in the qalat as kitchen helpers. Abdullah Niazi, the gifted Category 3 interpreter who worked with the team, waved the papers triumphantly as he concluded the laborious process of obtaining thumbprints from every Ezabad head of household to complete the formal application for a ministry-funded school with schoolteachers.

All the men were exhausted after a grueling eleven months in the outback, and many wives were ready for their husbands to leave the force. The team had been deployed for nineteen of the past twenty-four months. Dan Hayes and his wife were hoping to start a family, and Parker’s first child had been conceived during their brief six months at home. He had not yet seen her. Rob, the weapons sergeant, had only seen his daughter for six weeks of her young life. “She thinks I’m a computer,” he said. “She walks over and points to it and says ‘Daddy.’” Jimmy, the medic, joked about ordering his three young children to stand at ‘parade rest’ in the kitchen at home, but he could not wait to see them. As he shaved his tattooed arms, Parker speculated that their last few days would be uneventful. “I think fighting season is winding down. The Taliban are focused on getting their crops in.” Although the insurgents still held most of Maiwand, Hayes believed they had created an inkspot that would spread, if tended properly. Time would tell if their hard labor had produced a lasting foothold in one of the toughest districts.

SUMMER OF ASSASSINATIONS

There was no such glimmer of light next door in Panjwayi, however. Scott White, the company commander who oversaw the teams in western Kandahar, liked to go on the resupply convoys because it gave him a chance to see his teams and assess the threat environment firsthand. Powerpoint briefings at staff meetings could never fully convey the gritty realities. But the supply trips were risky. The road through Panjwayi was a virtual shooting gallery, with one especially ideal ambush point formed by the convergence of walls, a hedge, and a building just after the road crossed the river. The brigade commander in Zhari had built a concrete wall that was twelve miles long, with the aim of impeding insurgent movement between Zhari and Panjwayi. White was skeptical that this tactic, which had been successfully used by US units in Iraqi cities, would work here. It seemed to be pushing the enemy further into the Panjwayi area and making it more dangerous.

One day as White’s convoy approached the bridge, it slowed down to pass two checkpoints, an American one and an Afghan one. He radioed the two vehicles behind him to be ready to hit the gas as soon as they were off the bridge. Their last trip through this spot had been a close call. They had come under attack by insurgents with RPGs. They passed through the ambush without taking a hit, but unfortunately, a Stryker behind them was struck, and men inside were killed. This time, the men floored the gas and sped through the chokepoint without incident. Later that day as White returned through Panjwayi from Maiwand, he stopped at the Panjwayi district center to talk to the team there. Just after he left, a car bomb went off at the gate of the district center. The Panjwayi district governor had been the intended target. The governor escaped, only to be killed in another attempt the next spring.
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The gauntlet successfully run that day, White rewarded his comrades with a stop at their favorite restaurant in Kandahar City for a grilled chicken dinner before they returned to their base at the airfield. Their armored RG vehicles pulled up in front of the restaurant, and White went in to order the meals while a few soldiers stood guard by the trucks. The others carried the takeout cartons of chicken and rice pilaf to the median and sat down in the grass to eat. Curious Afghan men crowded around, and bold children sat down next to the soldiers, who were digging into the cartons and pulling apart slabs of chewy
nan
bread. Only a few moments passed before the first soldier shared his meal with a doe-eyed little girl at his elbow.

It was a lively Saturday night. Colored lights festooned shop awnings as Afghans strolled the sidewalks. The city was safer in 2011 than it had been the year before, and Kandaharis had begun to go on weekend jaunts—but it was still not at peace. The violence was targeted, and it very often found its mark. Earlier that very night, the Provincial Reconstruction Team next to the governor’s palace had come under attack.

The Taliban, which was taking a beating in the countryside, soon turned to a strategy of assassination. Four killings in the spring and summer of 2011 had profoundly shaken Kandahar and the Karzai power network stretching from Kandahar to Kabul. Kandahar’s police chief, its mayor, the president’s half-brother, and Karzai’s oldest confidant and family friend, Jan Mohammad Khan—the former governor of Uruzgan—were assassinated one by one. Khan was killed by attackers, including one suicide bomber, who stormed his home in Kabul. At the funeral, the grief-stricken Karzai fell sobbing into the old Pashtun’s grave. As the drumbeat of killings continued, the governor of Kandahar, never a brave soul, refused to come out of his palace. The president’s half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai had been the real power of the province, and now that he was gone a power vacuum opened up.

The only leader in Kandahar left standing was Abdul Raziq, the controversial young border policeman who became the acting provincial chief of police. It did not take long for the Taliban to target him. On January 11, 2012, Bill Carty, the special operations battalion commander who had replaced Chris Riga, visited Raziq at the police headquarters in downtown Kandahar to discuss increasing the number of recruits permitted to join the growing ALP force. An Afghan in the outer office demanded to see Raziq but was denied entry. Suddenly Carty and the US officers with him heard a loud boom. The blast shattered the windows of the one-story building and blew the door off its hinges and into the office. Carty, who was sitting next to Raziq, threw himself on top of the police chief. He was reacting instinctively, but the thought also flashed through his mind that both Raziq’s predecessor and Karzai’s half-brother had been killed by their bodyguards. Was the explosion a single event—an inside attack—or the start of a sustained assault? With the help of Carty’s interpreter, Dee, the two men scrambled to their feet and dashed into a side room.
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After a quick huddle, they decided to move into the outer office, where their body armor was stacked. The next move would be to get Raziq out of the headquarters and to a safe location. Carty pulled his pistol and led the way through the smoking debris. When the group reached the outer room, the Americans donned their bullet-proof vests. Raziq’s was in his vehicle outside. Carty shoved his own vest at him. “Put this on,” he said. Raziq shook his head. “No, you can’t go out there without your vest,” the Afghan protested.

There was no time to argue. Carty and Dee strapped the vest onto Raziq and hustled him outside into a waiting armored Afghan police vehicle. The rest of the Americans piled into their armored vehicles with a lightly wounded member of their security detail, then headed to the hospital. Carty and Dee cleared the grounds on foot, parting the crowd that was gathering in the chaos. They saw several wounded Afghan policemen who needed first aid and transport to the hospital. Once that was under way, Carty jumped in beside Raziq, and their armored convoy sped to Mundagak Palace, where security reinforcements were arriving from the Afghan army and RC-South.

Afghan officials began to come by to check on Raziq, and his cell phone started ringing as word of the attack spread. The interior minister and then President Karzai called to make sure he was all right. As the press converged on the palace to find out what had happened, Carty’s tactical  team arrived from Camp Brown to take him back to the base. Raziq wanted him to wait so they could eat lunch. “Why did you give me your vest?” he asked. “There are thousands of me in the US army,” Carty replied. “But there is only one of you.”

The special operators had been working with Raziq for years; Mahaney had considered him an effective and courageous leader in combat. Raziq had by all accounts made a lot of money from the hefty smuggling trade through his Spin Boldak border crossing, and he was reported to have overseen massive ballot-box stuffing to ensure Karzai’s 2009 reelection. Yet Raziq had left his border post and stepped forward to lead the Afghan charge against the Taliban across Kandahar in 2010,, and in the past two years he had been greeted in many towns and at bazaars by hordes of well-wishers. Ambassador Eikenberry and other US officials in Kabul wanted him to be cashiered or at least sent away, but Terry and others believed the police could fold without him. The 205th Corps army commander in Kandahar was a sterling character, a modest man with a squeaky clean reputation who lived in a bombed-out barracks built in the Soviet era. But the army did not have enough forces in Kandahar to cover the populous province, and the general’s retiring persona did not rally the population the way Raziq could.

The coalition military officers in Kandahar did not see many alternatives. Security had to be accomplished by warriors leading the fight. Many of the appointed governors and other civilian officials were expatriates who had returned home in a patriotic gesture, but most of them had little ability to rally Afghans or broker deals with the tribes, subtribes, clans, and factions that constituted Afghanistan’s political world. Faced with the vacuum caused by the assassinations, President Karzai chose to leave the governor in place and make Raziq acting provincial police chief. He also sent Asadullah Khalid back to the south temporarily to compel the police, army, and intelligence service to work better together. Karzai’s brother Qayum began to spend more time in Kandahar as well.

Afghanistan is an extremely bloody place, and wishing it weren’t so would not change the facts. Disputes were often resolved at the barrel of a gun, as Terry frequently noted. Kandahar still bled, but Terry felt he had made headway, especially given that most of the conventional forces of the surge had gone to Helmand next door. He had a greater number of special operations teams than any other province, and had used them to the hilt. But hardcore Taliban areas such as Panjwayi were unyielding. These were not ratlines or transit zones; they were the Taliban’s home.

Reflecting on his tour, Carty noted three factors that limited the success of special operators in parts of Kandahar. First, the teams had been asked to do “forced entry” in some places, contrary to the prescribed method of villagers inviting special operators in to help them resist the Taliban—and this was true of Panjwayi. In these cases, a high level of Taliban presence meant operators made little or no headway. Second, in some cases district residents were happy to have special operators provide security and coalition money to pave their roads and refurbish their mosques, which were popular destinations and sites of festivals, but they would not take up arms against family members who were Taliban. Carty saw this as a “paradox of security.” Villagers felt more secure when special operations teams moved into their area, but they did not want to provide for their own defense; only if they saw the special operators as temporary assistance would this paradox be resolved.
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The third factor was the “false start,” which occurred when a team relied on the wrong elders or factions to select commanders or recruits, so that those whom they chose ended up exacerbating rather than resolving security problems. This had happened in Shah Wali Kot, one of Kandahar’s districts. Intertribal and interclan conflict, most often based on a property or water dispute, was a fact of daily life in Afghanistan. When the special operations forces arrived in a village or district, they had to peel back these issues to understand and then try to address them. If they did not, trouble would ensue.

The conclusion that Carty drew was that teams could not take shortcuts or be asked to produce defense forces in places where the population incentives were not in place. The teams had made headway in many districts of Kandahar, but in Taliban strongholds people remained intimidated. As he packed up to go home, Carty believed further progress in Kandahar would not come easily, but was possible—​and essential to the nationwide chessboard. If insurgents controlled Kandahar, they would be halfway to victory.

CHAPTER FOUR

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PAKTIKA