One Hundred Victories (14 page)

In a place as intimidated as Paktika, villagers were not going to come forward unless they were convinced the new leaders stood a chance of winning. The climate of fear had to be dispelled by demonstrating a willingness to fight fire with fire; this is what Hutch meant by saying firebase diplomacy alone would not work. They had to establish their warrior credentials before people would begin to have hope. The pervasive belief had been that the Taliban would inevitably come back to rule the province; a new dynamic had to be set in motion for the people to believe they could shape their own fate.

The team’s success quickly outstripped its ability to provide quick reaction forces for all of the mushrooming local defense groups from the base at Shkin on the border. After an elder in Surobi was kidnapped and executed, Hutch realized he should have enlisted the help of the 1-187 infantry company at Orgun as a 911 responder. From the team’s base in Shkin it was a two-hour drive to Surobi. It was not so much deaths as the lack of support that mattered to the Afghans; having someone come to back them up showed that they had allies and thus superior strength and standing vis à vis the insurgents. Hutch had been in enough firefights to know this; it was all about standing with those who stood up. He would have to construct a better support network, using the conventional forces, his team, and the Afghan partners to shore up Surobi’s fledgling defense force.

The team managed to reach an agreement with the elders in Pirkowti, with the district governor’s help, but the elders in this insurgent-dominated area buckled under the pressure, finding legal loopholes in their agreement that allowed them to continue business as usual. The team would have to take on Pirkowti again in its next tour.

CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS

The members of ODA 3325 went home to North Carolina for a short hiatus in late 2010 before returning in 2011 to pick up where they had left off. The command had finally learned how critical it was to send the teams back to the very same places they had been before, as they had with the team in Maiwand. Aziz greeted the team warmly, and the various ALP commanders were ecstatic to see them again. Although Pirkowti remained solidly in enemy hands, the team’s plan had survived and flourished in the central corridor of eastern Paktika running from Shkin to Orgun. The observation posts were like a magic talisman. Once they were established, the Taliban, in the great majority of cases, effectively conceded the area.

Hutch had heard insurgent talk on the radio many times: “Why haven’t you attacked yet? You have over fifty men.” “They built OPs, we can’t do anything.” Villages along the route clamored for observation posts to be built. Hutch and his team obliged where it made sense to do so—that is, when the area was strategic and not within range of an existing OP. In the end the team built fourteen posts, manned with local Afghan police. The structures were simple affairs made of the same Hesco barriers that the Americans used to ring their bases. Someone had likely made a mint on the simple design: canvas was stretched over a collapsible metal frame that formed a box; the men popped the box open and filled it with dirt or sand to create a five- to ten-foot-thick barrier, depending on the size. It was impenetrable to the insurgents’ firepower; the only way to inflict casualties was by indirect mortar or artillery fire or by overrunning the post. The roof was a simple plywood sheet overlaid with sandbags. Concertina wire was then strung around the top of the Hescos as an outer perimeter. The Afghans could fill the barriers by hand, though the work was more quickly done by a Bobcat, if an engineer battalion was around to loan the team the machinery.

ODA 3325 had adopted its own unorthodox approach to building local police forces. They had departed from the village stability operations model in that they did not embed in a single community but instead worked to raise village defense groups all along their corridor and beyond. They had determined that embedding with one tribe or subtribe would only inflame tensions among the other tribes of Paktika and limit their reach. They were experiencing catastrophic success with their approach, and they needed to manage it carefully to ensure it did not go off the rails. Instead of “one tribe at a time,” the formula advocated by an early proponent of tribal engagement in Afghanistan, Major Jim Gant, Hutch and his team wound up winning over twenty-five subtribes with a population of more than 100,000 in a 1,200-square-kilometer area. In this way, they achieved more than local, tactical impact.
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To mentor Paktika’s burgeoning local police force, which now numbered 550 in all, the team split into two and sometimes three units. They maintained a split team in Shkin and one in Orgun. The team scouted various locations as Hutch debated where they should expand next. The border was too hot to expect locals to risk their necks: conventional troops at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Tillman and Combat Outpost (COP) Margah right on the border were getting hammered daily by artillery from Pakistan. The frequency of this cross-border fire quadrupled over the course of 2011 as US-Pakistan relations deteriorated. Using a map that covered the wall of his office at Orgun, the battalion commander pointed out a dozen locations where the fire was coming from. These “points of origin” had been definitively located by radar, thermal, or video detection. They were all within sight of, if not directly emanating from, Pakistan Army or Frontier Corps outposts.
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Hutch decided to keep his focus on the most populated area of the province and expand his current corridor of security west from Orgun to link it with Sharana, the provincial capital. Greg took a few team members to Sar Howza, outside Sharana, to lay the groundwork for expansion of the Afghan Local Police. In Sar Howza, the conventional battalion commander was eager to get involved, so Greg was happy to give him and his company commander the lead in expanding the local police initiative there. This would ease the burden on the team, which was already geographically stretched to its limit. The tempo of activity was also beginning to wear on the men.

Greg and Hutch improvised by relying on partners, whether conventional forces or Aziz and his men. Greg and the team would provide oversight and mentoring, while the training would be conducted by Commander Aziz’s men. The team had no hesitation about outsourcing the training: all of the special operations teams who had worked with Aziz judged his men to be the most tactically proficient of any force in Afghanistan—more so than the regular army and even the commandos. The reason was continuity: for a decade Commander Aziz had been their leader, and most of his men had been part of the original Afghan Militia Force recruited by special operations teams and had partnered with them through every rotation since 2002.

The combined effort would expand the security zone through the last rugged mountain range separating Orgun from Sharana, a pass that was jokingly called the Gates of Mordor from Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
by the unlucky soldiers who had to drive resupply convoys through this guerrilla-infested zone. The Taliban had planted the mother of bombs here, so large and powerful that it had flipped one of the mammoth 52,000-pound RG-33 armored vehicles end over end. Since the soldiers inside were all strapped into their five-point harnesses, no one was killed. But two of them had not been riding with their feet on the foot straps hanging above the floor. Instead they were resting their feet on the floor, and the gigantic blast had broken their legs. A gaping twenty-foot crater at the scene of the attack served as a reminder to all who passed.

The road from Shkin to Orgun became passable thanks to the defense pacts between the tribes and the district governors and the constant vigilance of the local police standing guard in their checkpoints. Hutch then launched his team into development and governance activity in earnest. He believed that paving roads was the development initiative that would pay the greatest dividends. The road was the economic lifeline of the population, so Hutch first sought to pave the entire stretch and make other infrastructure improvements. This would help Afghans get their crops to market and improve commerce, which in turn would stimulate the businesses of shopkeepers and others.

Hutch railed at new restrictions on their contracting authority that had been imposed after contracting abuses received widespread attention. The problem was real, but the fix was wrong. The team had a better grasp of which contractors were reliable and what work should cost than a distant contracting officer in Kabul, who inevitably went to an Afghan company with ties in the capital, which allowed several layers of middlemen to take their slices of the pie, greatly inflating the final price. The team, the US officials in Kabul, and the Afghan contractors in Orgun wrangled over the final stretch of unpaved road for months.

Afghans were also keen to expand cell-phone coverage in eastern Paktika, so Hutch’s team got involved in pushing for this. The towers that did exist were turned off at night by the cell-phone companies at the Taliban’s demand. The Taliban knew that one of the principal ways they were tracked was through their cell phones. The companies were not about to risk their investment when the government provided no help to rebuild dynamited towers.

The effect of the road improvements and increased security was dramatic: Shkin became self-sustaining once it was connected to the rest of Paktika, and Orgun in particular. Orgun’s bazaar grew from 5 shops to 1,500. The complaints that used to revolve around shootouts in the bazaar suddenly were about sewage and lack of parking. Motels sprouted along the highway, and the number of gas stations grew from one to seven. So many jingle trucks plied the route that traffic jams even occurred. The towns with OPs did not fight each other, and in fact began to serve as quick-response forces for those who were attacked. In a watershed moment, a Tajik OP came to the aid of a Kharoti OP and evacuated the post’s wounded to the hospital in Orgun. It reaffirmed Hutch’s view that the Tajik minority and the welter of Pashtuns—Kharotis and Waziris, with their two main subsets of Ahmadzai and Utmanzi—could, with the right incentives, start to see themselves as Afghans. The self-interest of each tribe along the highway was now aligned, and they had a vested interest in maintaining their newfound security.

Although Hutch’s sergeants would much rather be out hunting bad guys, they set to the tasks they were given. One sergeant was assigned to help draw up a city management plan for Orgun, and another worked with the civilian agricultural experts at Orgun’s base to understand what the most effective programs were. The civilian district support team included Mary Kettman, a veteran USAID official who had spent years in conflict-ridden corners of Africa—including Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia. She had arrived in Paktika in September 2009 and would extend her tour to stay for two and a half years, making her the American on the ground in Paktika with the longest tenure by far. “We started to make a lot of progress, so I wanted to stay on,” she said. One evening, Hutch and a sergeant came to her tent to ask if they could use her Internet access, as theirs was down. She realized as she overheard their discussions that Hutch was serious about stability operations, not just bagging Taliban trophies. Of course, he was also interested in the latter, and his team was quite proud of having rolled up five of the high-value targets on the JPEL (Joint Prioritized Effects List) that the special mission units had hunted.
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Kettman was impressed that Hutch even knew what her part of USAID—the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI)—was. For their part, the team members came to see Kettman as an impressively intrepid civilian who could hold her own with them. Hutch joked that she had originally seen the team members as wild-eyed killers, but had wound up being as enthusiastic as they were after a successful mission. Outwardly an odd match, the peace-loving development expert and the rowdy team forged an effective partnership and even friendship over their two years in Paktika.

When Hutch’s team organized its first big shura with the provincial governor, the chief of police, and all the district governors to formally kick off its ALP/VSO effort, Kettman realized that the initiative, if it worked, would facilitate her entry into many communities that she had not been able to work in before. She arranged to send her Afghan partners into a village right after the team conducted a mission. USAID is a hydra-headed organization with many divisions and projects; the one Kettman represented, the OTI, focused on small-scale, grassroots projects that would have an immediate impact in rural areas or conflict zones. OTI was the most expeditionary of all the civilian agencies; it prided itself on recruiting adventuresome souls who were ready to work in war zones or other disasters. OTI was unique in that it maintained control of its program design and could overhaul programs that were not working; most other USAID programs were entirely outsourced to implementing partners. In the case of Paktika, Kettman used Development Alternatives, Inc., which hired Afghans to enter the communities and do the work, but she trained them and kept oversight of all of it.

OTI projects were funded through small grants of no more than $50,000 each. This was far more than the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) money the team could readily authorize, so the team would usually start off funding whatever small project the elders agreed upon, and OTI would follow on with more sustained programs. Some grants went to improve roads, but many were used to train farmers in more productive agricultural techniques; to construct
gabians
—simple wire-mesh baskets of rocks that slowed erosion and reduced flooding; and to clean
karezes
of trash and debris so water would flow to more communities. Shkin was the easiest place to start, since a relationship had already been forged with Waziris there who supported the government. OTI helped to pave the road to the border and also trained local farmers in beekeeping and orchard techniques. Work farther north, in Bermel, was stopped after a bomb killed construction workers. Kettman then focused on Rabat, Surobi, and, with three different governors, Orgun for the rest of her tenure. She was even able to do some work in Pirkowti after the initial agreement was signed with the elders, with farmers from the area going to Orgun and Khost for training. She held seminars in conflict mediation also, which the feuding Utmanzai and Ahmadzai Waziris attended. Although Pirkowti remained problematic, she believed these seeds might later bear some fruit.