My Share of the Task (63 page)

In addition to using strike teams to unbalance insurgents in and around Marjah, we conducted information operations to communicate what was coming. We dropped leaflets and in more nuanced ways that used other media to sow discord within the enemy, channel tribal sentiment in our favor, and build popular support for the wisdom and safety of pledging allegiance to the Afghan government. The Taliban responded with a
trump card: In their night letters, they promised the coming American offensive would reinstall Abdul Rahman Jan and his predatory police. The honor of Helmandis required they resist this man, who had robbed them and raped their boys.

There was much discussion about the risks involved in so clearly “telegraphing” our forthcoming punch. No doubt the enemy was able to prepare his defense. But we had to communicate that this operation would be different. ISAF had conducted limited-duration actions into the area before. In March and again in May 2009, Coalition forces had entered Marjah in force, only to withdraw. These incursions, although tactically successful in temporarily disrupting the insurgents and drug traffickers, actually made us look weak rather than strong. The population saw that our arrival did not herald a permanent presence—we lacked the strength to stay—and showed that the Taliban would be free to resume its control. This time, I wanted to let the population, and the Taliban, accept the idea that we would stay.

Major General Nick Carter planned and would lead the operation. Nick's concept was to rapidly project overwhelming power, while limiting the actual employment of fires, in order to reduce damage to the area and civilian casualties. That was a tricky business. Air strikes and massed artillery fires, followed by a methodical sweep by armored vehicles, would most protect troops as they advanced. But such actions would leave devastation in their wake. Instead, Nick's Afghan, British, U.S., and other Coalition forces would maneuver rapidly, much of the force by helicopter, into positions to “unhinge” any deliberate Taliban defense. They would then begin the process of clearing and securing the district. The use of fires would be tightly controlled.

A key aspect of the plan was to rapidly institute as many Afghan government services as possible in order to build legitimacy with the populace. Rod, Nick, and their teams spent months working with Helmand provincial governor Mohammad Gulab Mangal and Afghan government ministers to create a cadre of technocrats to deploy to the area. A superficial description we'd mistakenly coined “government in a box” distracted from the serious effort to bring Afghan governance into what had been enemy territory.

Establishing credible local governance in rural Afghanistan involved a number of challenges. This was especially the case in Marjah. In truth, there were rarely real power vacuums in Afghanistan—in every area, someone or some group was in charge. Therefore installing a new local administration necessarily took power, influence, and access to wealth away from either traditional or nontraditional leaders.

Identifying these power brokers often took months. Other districts in Helmand were somewhat homogenous—Nawah-ye Barakzai was the valley of the Pashtun tribe Barakzai—but
more than sixty tribes were represented in Marjah, making it one of the province's most diverse districts. As Marjah became a central processing site for opium, many of the elites depended on money from the drug trade, funds they feared would dry up if the government eradicated the crop. Many therefore opposed the change, some aggressively.

Finding competent, honest civil servants to work in troubled areas was difficult. The educated talent whom we needed to govern on the local level often had more lucrative and far safer opportunities in Kabul or other large cities. Meanwhile, in places like Helmand, locally available candidates too often lacked the education, were involved in corruption, or were caught up in tribal rivalries to function effectively.

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B
efore dawn on February 13, just hours after President Karzai had given his approval, rotor blades on more than sixty helicopters stirred the night sky. American Marine MH-53s, CH-46s, and AH-1 gunships, Army UH-60 Black Hawks, CH-47 Chinooks, and AH-64 Apaches, joined by Canadian and British helicopters, ferried Afghan, British, American, French, and Canadian forces onto carefully chosen locations around Marjah. As one part of this air assault, two mixed companies of U.S. Marines and their Afghan army counterparts landed in helicopters in Marjah itself. The idea was to suddenly present insurgents with threats from multiple directions, thwarting any Taliban effort to conduct a deliberate, phased defense. Two days earlier, on February 11, soldiers on foot and in vehicles had occupied a series of positions, including key canal crossings that controlled access into and out of the area. Neither day featured traditional prep fires; no artillery or aircraft hammered targets ahead of advancing infantry.

In the short term, it would have been vastly simpler if there had been such fires. But the rubble that the soldiers would have walked through would have been the remnants of the bodies, homes, and livelihoods of the very people we sought to protect. Instead, young soldiers and Marines, from Ottawa, Phoenix, Marseilles, and Mazar-e-Sharif, moved carefully through packed-dirt streets and rutted fields sowed with crippling IEDs and scoured by Taliban snipers.

Many civilians had fled the district, some to relatives in neighboring villages, some to refugee camps we'd established outside the zone where we expected fighting. Most were stoic but frightened by the current combat and, even more, by the uncertainty it brought. Taliban rule, financed largely with drug cultivation, was not popular. But the residents hated it less than the other rulers in their recent memory, namely Abdul Rahman Jan and his sadistic police. Early rumors of his impending return piqued local anxieties.

The first day, February 13, went well. By nightfall, Afghan soldiers and U.S. Marines had settled into the center of Marjah. Initial Taliban resistance was less organized than feared. But, as anticipated, this was just the beginning of the clearing phase. On Sunday, Valentine's Day in America, two Marine companies in Marjah continued to clear the town, whose roads were thickly laid with IEDs and whose buildings were booby-trapped. The fighting evolved into a series of small but intense and complex engagements, and the painstaking removal of the enemy's carefully hidden, homemade mines made it
slow, dangerous work. Likening it to Fallujah, experienced Marines found these Taliban fighters far more tactically proficient than other
Taliban they had encountered.

During the fighting that Saturday, a U.S. rocket launcher called HIMARS targeted a compound, killing twelve Afghan civilians. Initial reports indicated the normally accurate system had impacted three hundred meters short of its intended target. But further investigation pointed to likely engagement of a Taliban-controlled compound that Coalition forces later discovered was also occupied by civilians. To protect the credibility of our commitment to Afghans to conduct operations with their protection foremost, we temporarily suspended use of HIMARS pending investigation. I also directed my staff to issue a statement
apologizing for the incident.

To some, issuing an apology to Afghans—for whom our soldiers were risking their own lives, often displaying extraordinary “courageous restraint” in the process—symbolized the inherent contradictions in much of the Afghanistan war. Afghans' resentment of mission-critical actions often mystified soldiers and those who sent them to combat. Such an attitude can strike the military as ungrateful. I recognized and respected those feelings and frustrations, but I also knew improving Afghan perceptions was critical to victory.

The coming days saw continued fighting, interspersed with signs of success.
On Wednesday, February 17, while Governor Mangal was briefly in town, Afghan soldiers hoisted a red, black, and green Afghan flag
on top of a bamboo pole in one of the city's bazaars. As they raised the flag, forces continued clearing other parts of the district.

A week later, on Thursday, February 25, Governor Mangal and Brigadier General Zazai, commanding the Afghan 205th Corps, hoisted the Afghan flag in the center of Marjah. At the new government center, a proper flagpole replaced the bamboo
staff from a few days earlier, and almost
seven hundred Marjah residents watched the flag rise. The town's new administrator, Abdul Zahir Aryan, who had been sleeping in the town
that week, was in attendance.

Nick Carter, walking without helmet or body armor, told a nearby reporter that “
the point at which you have enough security to do something symbolic like this is the point at which the hard work of delivering governance starts.” His counterpart, General Zazai, addressed the obvious concerns of the people who had come out for the ceremony. “We promise we won't abandon you,” he said.

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E
ven before my arrival in June 2009, I believed an important component of President Karzai's role as head of state and commander-in-chief of Afghan military forces would be his willingness and his ability to travel around the country providing visible leadership, particularly to troubled areas. Since the increase in violence, he'd left the Kabul palace less and less, except for rumored late-night rides in the passenger seat of a beat-up sedan to see the city that was changing outside his view. I felt he needed to break free of the often-cloistered environment of the palace, where he developed his perspectives based on secondhand, often biased, information, and the routine pummeling he took from the media often inflamed his frustrations. Inside the palace walls, he was also susceptible to the manipulation of members of his inner circle, who stoked his emotions to their benefit through whispers and innuendo. While retaining a balanced perspective was a common challenge for many national leaders, the situation in Afghanistan multiplied both the difficulty and importance of such balance. Further, the population needed to see and hear Karzai. Too often they were informed by rumors and propaganda, rather than direct communication with their leaders. I judged that he needed regularly to visit locations ranging from the battlefields of Helmand to northern provinces like Kunduz.

Such trips were easier proposed than done. Afghanistan's insecurity made adequate protection an extensive effort. Additionally, each trip's location and timing had domestic political ramifications that required Karzai's input. My staff dedicated a large amount of its time to scheduling, coordinating, and executing these trips. We planned them to align with prominent events over upcoming months—central military operations as well as international conferences and decisions. We also sought to visit lower-profile areas and to continue to strengthen his connections beyond the Pashtun south, where his family and tribe were prominent.

The logistics mattered, not least because the Taliban were anxious to kill him. A poorly executed trip risked undermining President Karzai's stature, and could reduce his willingness for future travel. To reach most locations in Afghanistan required a series of vehicle, airplane, helicopter, and ultimately foot movements, each phase of which had to be resourced and integrated into what we hoped would feel like a seamless string of coordinated actions. Each stage involved more than moving just the president. An entourage of selected ministers, aides, and presidential security people always accompanied him.

Although Afghanistan was in the process of fielding a small air force, to include presidential aircraft, the yet-nascent fleet meant that we normally had to use ISAF planes. We had nothing equivalent to Air Force One to fly the president in, so initially he buckled in shoulder-to-shoulder with fifty or sixty Afghan government and ISAF personnel in the noisy cargo bay of a U.S. Air Force C-130. The roar of the aircraft's engines made conversation impossible, and Karzai would maintain as much dignity as possible as we droned toward our destination.

One of the passengers on many of these flights was then-Major Khoshal Sadat, or Kosh, who had joined our team that January. Since taking command, I had been anxious to bring a young Afghan officer onto my staff as an aide-de-camp. Too often, we discussed Afghanistan without a single Afghan in the room. After a few months, a British special forces officer recommended Kosh to us. He came from a military line, like so many of the Americans in his country: Kosh's grandfather had been a senior non-commissioned officer in the king's guards, and his father had been a pilot in the Afghan Air Force. But when his father died in an accident in 1988, Kosh's mother had to raise him and his siblings during the long decade of war that followed. It was a childhood few of us could imagine, one hitched to the weathervane fate of Kabul. As a boy during the civil war anarchy, he caught a ricochet in his arm. As a teenager, he went to get bread but soon wandered over to a crowd, and saw what they saw: the bloodied body of Najibullah, hanging from a candy-cane striped traffic beam. As a young man under the Taliban's dystopian regime, he evaded an unknown fate by escaping out of the back of a pickup after the Taliban had arrested him for carrying cassette tapes. Through it all, his mother insisted that he get an education and learn English. He did well in both, and after joining the military in 2003, he soon won a spot at Britain's Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He now came to us after several years of combat as a squadron commander of an elite all-Afghan commando unit trained and mentored by the British SAS.

Kosh was the first and only Afghan to work full-time in the ISAF headquarters building. It was a necessary cultural change, but was not as easy as it should have been. Although he was an important symbol of a new level of partnership and trust, inside the headquarters Kosh often received suspicious looks or requests for identification papers. I watched him closely, impressed that he intuitively understood the importance of his role and handled the friction with impressive maturity. In his shoes, I would have been less good-humored.

After a few such trips on the C-130s with everyone including the president strapped in, we requested and received a “pod,” a small capsulelike room that sat five or six people and could be loaded inside a C-130. Although President Karzai had never complained about riding on normal nylon seats in the cargo bay, the pod was quiet enough that we could have substantive conversations while traveling to and from our various destinations. On several occasions, two Afghan government ministers, my NATO civilian counterpart Mark Sedwill, President Karzai, and I were able to frame key issues during uninterrupted flights in a way that hectic palace schedules often prevented.