Authors: Matthew M. Aid
So when the Taliban recruiters arrived, almost one thousand Pashtun tribesmen flocked to their banner. According to U.S. Army intelligence reports from this period, the fact that the Taliban were able to successfully recruit such a large number of fighters in Wardak in such a short time indicated that the insurgency had become almost entirely homegrown and self-sustaining and was no longer dependent on Pakistan for safe haven, recruits, and supplies.
In the spring of 2008, these guerrillas came down from the hills and overran one district after another against feeble resistance from the few poorly trained and equipped Afghan National Police units in Wardak. By the time the fighting season came to an end in November, the Afghan government had lost control of the province. The Taliban not only controlled most of six of the province's eight districts, but they had also established their own provincial “shadow government” to administer the territory that they controlled, complete with their own governor, military commander, court system, and religious leaders.
In January 2009, the U.S. Army was forced to divert the 3,500-strong 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division to Wardak and neighboring Logar Province to try to stem the tide. The brigade was almost completely unprepared for the rigors of Afghanistan. It was supposed to have been deployed to Iraq, but because of the deteriorating security situation the brigade was diverted at the last moment to Afghanistan. In the haste to get them to the battlefield, the brigade's troops were given virtually no cultural or language training about Afghanistan prior to deployment. One of the brigade's company commanders admitted that there was no time to teach his soldiers even the rudiments of the Pashtun dialect, except for the phrase that all GI's in Afghanistan eventually learn, “
Dresh! Ka na daz kawam!
” which means “Halt! Or I will shoot!”
Upon arrival in Afghanistan, the brigade's commander, Colonel David Haight, was told that he had to make do with whatever resources he had brought with him from the U.S. There were no reserves available, and the 31,000 American and Afghan forces in eastern Afghanistan were stretched to the breaking point just trying to hold on to 43,000 square miles of mostly mountainous terrain that they were responsible for, which was equal in size to the states of Georgia and South Carolina combined, including 450 miles of border with Pakistan. Wardak was but one of fourteen provinces that the U.S. Army was responsible for, and the security situation in many of the other provinces was far worse than was the case in Wardak.
Just as in Vietnam forty years before, there were no clearly defined front lines separating the U.S. forces from the Taliban. The plastic-covered situation maps on the walls of the Tactical Operations Center at the 3rd Brigade's headquarters at Forward Operating Base Airborne outside the provincial capital of Maydan Shar reflected the tenuous and complicated nature of the Afghan battlefield. The U.S. Army held Maydan Shar and all of the district seats, which appeared on the situation map as blue “inkblots”; these were surrounded by a sea of red, which was the area the Taliban controlled or contested. There were hundreds of villages spread across the province. Some rated as “friendly” by the brigade's intelligence staff; some were classified as “sitting on the fence.” Others were overtly hostile and made no secret of their loyalty to the Taliban.
The friendliest villages in Wardak were those inhabited by the Hazara people, an ancient tribe of Shiites who speak a version of Farsi (the national language of Iran), not the Pashto dialect of their Pashtun neighbors. The Hazaras, who comprise 30 percent of the province's population, have traditionally been the sworn enemies of the Taliban. Because they are Shiites, they were labeled “infidels” by Mullah Omar's Taliban regime and treated brutally. Because of their natural antipathy for the Taliban, the Hazaras have probably done more than anyone else to help the U.S. Army hold Wardak Province over the past three years. They have also been a continual gold mine for the U.S. Army intelligence collectors in the region.
According to a U.S. Army platoon commander who served with the 10th Mountain Division in Wardak in 2009, “The Hazaras were wonderful people and fantastic sources of intel about the Taliban. When we visited their villages up in the hills, everyone came out to meet us. We had to sit down for tea with the village chief and all the old men, followed by a meal. We were there for hours. And when we finally said our good-byes and got out of the village, my intelligence NCO had a notepad full of juicy tidbits about local Taliban activities.”
These informal sit-down
shuras
(meetings) over tea with the Hazara village elders invariably produced a plethora of hard, and sometimes actionable, intelligence information about what the Taliban were up to. Two U.S. Army intelligence officers who served in Wardak in 2009 and 2010 conservatively estimated that they got about 75 percent of their best intelligence information about the Taliban from the Hazaras.
But the relationship with the Hazaras took a painfully long time to develop, in part because the U.S. Army and the Afghan government had largely ignored the Hazaras and their needs since the U.S. invasion in 2001. The harmonious relationship that the U.S. military once had with the Hazara villagers immediately after the 2001 invasion was gone, replaced by wariness, and sometimes outright hostility, because the promises that had been made a decade earlier in return for their support against the Taliban had never been honored.
So shortly after arriving in Wardak in January 2009, several of the brigade's company and platoon commanders began asking local landowners (
khans
) and village chiefs (
maliks
) in their sectors for any information about the Taliban, in return for which they promised to build schools or dig water wells. The village elders politely rejected the requests, telling the American officers that their predecessors had made similar promises but had never delivered. And they were not about to get fooled again.
There are literally hundreds of stories just like this, where in remote villages across Afghanistan young American field commanders were being denied access to basic ground-level intelligence about the Taliban because of the broken promises made by their predecessors. Because of our own obduracy, the American soldiers in Afghanistan had become, in the words of the current commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General David H. Petraeus, “an army of strangers in the midst of strangers.”
So Colonel Haight's brigade had to start from scratch to build a sense of trust amongst the local Hazara tribesmen. Seemingly small acts of kindness went a long way toward building up a sense of goodwill among the villagers. Taking a page from the Green Berets' toolkit, U.S. Army commanders in Wardak found that offering free medical checkups was a very effective way to build goodwill and trust. Showing a degree of concern for the welfare of the village's all-important livestock herds was another. One army lieutenant, who grew up in sheep-herding country in central California, proved to be an effective intelligence collector because he took the time to sit down with village elders to discuss the diseases that were afflicting the local goat and sheep herds. The officer arranged for a veterinarian to visit the village and inoculate the village's sheep herds. Within a matter of weeks, the village elders were feeding the lieutenant's platoon with tidbits of information about what the Taliban were up to around the village.
The field commanders found that the most effective way to build trust and generate intelligence information at the same time was to spoil the village children, who invariably ran out to greet the troops because they had learned long ago that the soldiers brought gifts. The rule of thumb was that every child got a toy, usually a soccer ball, as well as whatever chocolate or other candy the soldiers had received from home.
Army commanders refer to this as “Hershey Bar Diplomacy,” because spoiling the village children is an incredibly effective icebreaker. Villagers who were overtly hostile or suspicious when an American patrol entered their village relaxed and became friendlier in a matter of minutes when they saw the smiles on the faces of their children. Almost always, a village elder came out to exchange greetings with the troops, and if everything went right, the patrol commander was invited to sit down for tea to discuss local issues. If all went well after that, the intelligence began to flow.
As gratifying as the Wardak experience may have been, there were parts of Afghanistan that were far more hostile environments than Wardak Province.
Fifty years ago, French historian Bernard Fall described the doomed French military stronghold of Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam as “Hell in a very small place.” This moniker aptly describes the Korengal Valley in southeastern Afghanistan, which a number of American field commanders have said was by far the worst place they ever served in.
Located in the heart of Kunar Province, the desolate Korengal Valley, dubbed the “Valley of Death” or alternatively the “Valley of Fire” by the American troops, does not even appear on most maps of Afghanistan. It is only a flyspeck, only a half mile wide and six miles long, the equivalent of the length of the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The valley's 4,500 inhabitants, known colloquially as Korengalis, are not Pashtuns. Like the Hazaras to the north, the Korengalis are a separate ethnic group who speak their own language and have a distinct culture, reinforced by centuries of self-imposed isolation from the outside world.
According to Afghan government officials, Korengalis are the Afghan equivalent of hillbillies. They live in a dozen or so impoverished villages set high up on the walls of the valley's steep and bare mountainsides, eking out a living through subsistence farming and by smuggling timber out of the valley to Pakistan. Intensely clannish, they make no secret of the fact that they dislike outsiders, so much so that even their kinsmen from neighboring valleys know better than to visit.
The outright hostility of the Korengalis to whichever government happens to be in power in Kabul is legendary. The Soviets never dared enter the valley during their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even the Taliban had the good sense to leave them alone when they ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Since the American invasion, the Korengalis have resisted all attempts by the U.S. Army to bring them into line and refused to accept the legitimacy of Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul. In short, the Korengalis wanted nothing to do with the outside world. When the U.S. Army established a permanent presence in the Korengal Valley in 2004, many Korengalis joined the Taliban overnight.
The fierceness of the Korengali resistance to the U.S. military was intense. Many of the American officers and enlisted men who served in the Korengal Valley honestly believed at the beginning of their tours that these illiterate peasants, armed with nothing more sophisticated than their family's vintage AK-47 assault rifle, would turn tail and run when they came face-to-face with American superiority in numbers and firepower.
But between 2004 and 2010, six different U.S. Army and Marine Corps battalions tried and failed to quash the Korengali Taliban, despite the fact that they never numbered more than a couple of hundred fighters at any one time. During this six-year period, forty-two American soldiers were killed in the Korengal. To give an idea of the fierceness of the fighting: One U.S. Army unit, the thousand-man 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, lost eighteen men killed and over one hundred men wounded in the Korengal between June 2008 and June 2009.
U.S. Army intelligence officers now admit that they failed to fully comprehend the enemy they were fighting because they were never able to penetrate the veil of secrecy surrounding what the Taliban were up to in the valley. Unmanned drones were not of much use except when the Taliban came out into the open to slug it out with an American patrol. SIGINT was a vitally important tool to warn American commanders of impending attacks but next to worthless on high-level Taliban plans and intentions because the Korengalis usually sent this type of information by a sophisticated courier network that ran down the full length of the valley, which of course the SIGINT intercept operators could not access.
Four former or current-serving army intelligence officers who served in the valley confirm that they never got any viable intelligence information about the Taliban from the valley's inhabitants because, as it turned out, the Korengali villagers
were
the Taliban. A series of classified reports written in 2008 and 2009 by army intelligence officers at Forward Operating Base Blessing, the headquarters of the U.S. Army battalion responsible for guarding the Korengal Valley, revealed that virtually every family in the valley was involved with the Taliban to one degree or another.
Entire villages in the Korengal were known to be completely “bad.” Sergeant Major Dwight Utley, a Green Beret who served four tours of duty in Afghanistan with the 3rd Special Forces Group, recalled a particular sweep that his “A team” conducted in the village of Korengal at the southern end of the valley. Utley's team searched all the houses in the village, only to discover that all the men had mysteriously disappeared. As the Green Berets were leaving the village on the only road through the valley, they were ambushed by Taliban guerrillas. It was the villagers showing what they thought of the U.S. Army. According to Utley, “
We now knew where all of the males in the village were
, 400 meters away from us on the other side of the valley engaging us with machine guns and RPGs.”
And those Korengali elders who were not active Talibs steadfastly refused to provide any intelligence information to the Americans, abiding by a strict code of silence that would have impressed even the fiercest of American Mafia dons. According to Captain Mike Moretti, who commanded a company of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment in the Korengal Valley in 2009â10, “
The people here have an incestuous relationship with the Taliban
. I may be speaking to an elder whose brother or son is a fighter. He's not going to give me information that is going to enable me to kill his family member.”