My Share of the Task (65 page)

In Iraq, perceptions had a very real ability to be self-fulfilling. Matt Sherman was a State Department official who joined my strategic advisory team that January after a yearlong tour advising a U.S. brigade in Logar and Wardak provinces. Matt noted that when he was in Iraq during the winter of 2006, he'd seen that as the American debate over whether to surge grew louder, it seemed to affect Baghdad's security prospects: Muqtada al-Sadr fled to Iran, sectarian designs on Sadr City quieted, and political calculations among Iraqi leaders altered. We hoped something similar might nudge Afghanistan, though we knew we could not rely on it.

Though no single center of gravity existed in Afghanistan, if the south had a nerve center, it was Kandahar. And the citizens there reflected all the very human contradictions of a people long under the duress of war's whim. Thirty years of it had made them both more stoic and more conspiratorial. They wanted better security, yet many had made a perhaps necessary peace with their plight that made them skittish about any operations there.

This anxiety we would now have to confront: Kandahar was next.

*   *   *

I
n truth, the fight to secure Kandahar had begun in Helmand. Our effort to expand contiguous areas of security between them was meant to stitch together key districts of what was known as Greater Kandahar, and before that Zabulistan—a subregion formed by the provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, and Oruzgan whose economies, tribes, and politics were interlinked. The key node was Kandahar City itself, which sat at the juncture of immemorial trade routes between Kabul in the east, Herat and Persia in the west, and India to the south. The modern Afghan Ring Road that circles the nation, connecting Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, and Kunduz, added to the city's economic importance, as did its proximity to the agricultural breadbaskets along the Helmand and Arghandab rivers and the import lanes from Pakistan.

The city had been the site of many of Afghanistan's most historical pivots. Alexander the Great reputedly laid out the city in the fourth century BCE, and it bore his mark—it's said Kandahar is a corruption of “Iskander,” the locals' name for him. It was also where the modern Afghan state was born, thirty years before the United States. In 1747, a nine-day-long council of elders elected Ahmad Shah Durrani their leader, and he went on to congeal Afghanistan into the Duranni empire. His Durrani tribe produced each of Afghanistan's rulers for the next two hundred and forty years, until the coup in 1978. The city hosted a massive Soviet garrison during the mujahideen war of the 1980s, and was later the seat of the Taliban government. The Afghan government's ability to secure the nation's second-largest city—Pashtun, Afghanistan's most important center, and President Karzai's family home—was an important measure of its capacity to assert sovereignty.

Long before Operation Moshtarak launched forces into Marjah, Rod had identified the importance of securing Kandahar to convince its residents and the wider population of Afghanistan that the city was neither a Taliban-controlled enclave nor perpetually threatened with strangulation by insurgent forces. In the spring of 2010, although Kandahar bustled with daily activity, security had deteriorated in the previous four years. The city was not under siege, but mortars and attacks had harassed the August 2009 elections. And the insurgents waged a meticulous assassination campaign against key leaders that sent a clear message to the population that if they didn't call the shots, neither did the government.

While, unlike Marjah, Kandahar did not need to be recaptured from the Taliban, its sheer scale defined the challenge. The city's population had swelled in recent years to over five hundred thousand, and the area grew dramatically when we considered the need to secure the environs around the city. Much like the belts that Al Qaeda had sought to dominate and use as staging grounds to funnel violence into Baghdad from 2005 to 2007, the districts that encircled Kandahar were the traditional keys to controlling the city. Since 2006 and 2007, the Panjwai, Zhari, Daman, Shah Wali Kot, and Arghandab districts had been grinding battlegrounds. ISAF forces, led by a Canadian task force, had been struggling for several years to gain firm control over these critical approaches to Kandahar. But after a series of stiff fights, the districts remained unstable and contested in the face of growing insurgent strength. The fate of Kandahar City rested largely on our ability to secure these avenues, particularly the Arghandab River valley.

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A
t the end of February 2010 I received an e-mail from a staff sergeant serving in the valley. He led a squad in an infantry battalion task force in the Zhari district, west of Kandahar. I'd made several trips to the districts around Kandahar, particularly Arghandab, where one of our Stryker units, an organization built around wheeled armored vehicles, had suffered significant casualties. But any note like his struck a chord inside me.

I don't believe you fully understand the situation we face in this district, and I think you should come down and see it up close,
Staff Sergeant Israel Arroyo wrote. Senior commanders don't get many notes directly from squad leaders, particularly notes like that. I told Charlie Flynn to arrange for us to go down the following day.

We flew by C-130 cargo aircraft to Kandahar airfield and transloaded to UH-60 helicopters for the flight to their battalion's main base before driving the final miles in Strykers to a sandbagged outpost on a small rise that overlooked an expanse of farm fields. There I met Arroyo's platoon. After a short brief we went on a combat patrol. Departing from the outpost, we moved on foot for several hours, sweeping the area until we reached a small Afghan village, then returned. As we moved, I listened to the young leader's thoughts and got to know members of his squad, in particular one of his team leaders, Mike Ingram—a corporal responsible for four soldiers. It was difficult ground to soldier in, and always had been. Southern Afghanistan had been the site of
the only known mutiny of Arab troops during their global conquest thirteen hundred years earlier. Now both the physical and human terrain seemed to resist the platoon's best efforts. The Afghans were distant in their demeanor, but that wasn't uncommon. It was the cultivated fields that were striking. I felt as though I were walking through the grooves of corduroy: Instead of using wooden trellises to support fruit vines, the local farmers used packed mud. In long lines, they built walls six feet tall, four to five feet apart at the tapered tops, and narrower at the ground where the supporting base was wider. For soldiers, it was like operating in a maze, each corridor of sun-caked mud perfectly designed to channel them into waiting IEDs or well-placed ambush positions. It was still too early in the year for the vines to have fully bloomed, but by late spring the corridors would become like tunnels under a canopy of foliage, any movement inside largely hidden from the air.

The corduroy terrain of Zhari was almost a metaphor for these infantrymen's war. The could see eighteen inches to their left and right, and rarely more then fifty feet to their front or rear. Above, only a slice of sky. Fighting was bloody, and unsatisfying. Rarely was there a hill to take, or a stalwart enemy to take it from. Any progress I could see from a wider view of Afghanistan was impossible to discern from their mud-walled world. War has often been that way. Like leaders before me, I was asking soldiers to believe in something their ground-level perspective denied them. I was asking them to believe in a strategy impossible to guarantee, and in progress that was hard to see, much less prove. They were asked to risk themselves to bring improvements that might take years to arise. Although war is a product and instrument of national policy, that reality feels distant and theoretical to the soldier leaning exhausted against a mud wall. As a commander, I was asking them to believe in me. Whether they did was often hard to judge.

Later that evening I got two more e-mails, one from Arroyo, and another from Corporal Ingram, the team leader. Both thanked me for patrolling with them that day. I responded, thanking both for all they were doing. I was grateful to Sergeant Arroyo for having the courage to send his initial note to ensure a fellow leader understood the situation on the ground.

A month later I got another e-mail from Staff Sergeant Arroyo informing me that Mike Ingram had been killed not far from where we'd patrolled. I remembered the young corporal's quick smile and agile movements through the muddy terrain, and his mature insights on the local population. I traveled back to the outpost in Zhari. I felt like I needed to see and listen to the platoon again. I knew it would be a difficult visit—they would be smarting from a big loss. With us would be a reporter from
Rolling Stone
who was periodically interacting with our team, to give him an appreciation for the difficulty of the task they faced.

We met on a hot afternoon, gathering inside the fortified walls of their small compound. The body armor was off. Some quietly sipped water as I spoke, then invited questions. As on so many visits, there were a few standard questions before the queries became blunt and frank. As I expected, they were frustrated. Some were openly bitter over their loss and the seeming impossibility of their mission.
Why are we here, Sir? What's the point?
I listened and we talked. I couldn't solve the platoon's problems that day, or curtail their mission. The district had to be secured. For many, I lacked the eloquence to assuage their concerns and could only explain the strategy they were a part of. I tried to show them I understood, and cared.

As we flew back that night I compared in my mind leading these soldiers in this counterinsurgency campaign with my experience in TF 714. There were many similarities. America's military in 2010 was stunningly professional and the past decade of combat had produced a seasoned force. But there were also differences. In TF 714, most notably in Iraq, although our special operators had fought almost every night, we largely chose the time and place of the fight. When our helicopters landed, our operators normally had the benefit of surprise, the cover of night, and intimate knowledge of whom they would find on their objective. Over time, even as friends were given over to Arlington, we could both see and feel the impact we were having on Zarqawi's organization. The bulk of fighting in Afghanistan in 2010 yielded no such mental analgesic. Progress couldn't be measured by direct attrition of a terrorist network. Combat often erupted unexpectedly: A boom and a plume of dust or the crack of bullets from the distance, yelling, rushing to maneuver, return fire, then silence. Then the same thing the next day. And the day after that, until the geysers of dust claimed a friend, or the bullets clipped a mentor. And then back out yet again.

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T
he Kandahar Convention Center was a world apart from the sun-cracked mud trenches of Zhari only a few miles away. But it was here within the whitewashed plaster walls and the low ceiling of its basement meeting room that much of our ability to secure Kandahar rested. In an expansion of the pattern we'd set with Moshtarak, we sought to prepare the ground for securing Kandahar by fully engaging President Karzai and leveraging his influence with Kandahari leaders to solidify their support. Now, on April 4, 2010, some fifteen hundred of them filled the room. I felt out of place in my light green combat uniform in a sea of traditional Afghan clothing: Blacks, grays, dark maroon, and, at one point, a flash of azure as three burkas shuffled through and settled to the ground in a curtsy. I compared it to my small February meeting with Marjah elders; Hamkari, as the effort to secure Kandahar was called, was a whole new, and vastly different, ball game.

In Marjah, uncontested Taliban control required shaping operations, followed by a dramatic initial seizure, before the lengthy process of erecting a local government could truly begin. Kandahar would need shaping, and this
shura
was part of that. But operations would involve little drama. Instead, we planned deliberately to increase security-force density and effectiveness in the city, and to clear then hold the strategic environs.

The distinction between our concept for Kandahar and more traditional military operations was critical. Much as the residents of Marjah had expressed their fear we would destroy their district to liberate it, Kandaharis trembled at the thought of full-force battles. The term “operation” brought anxious looks, and triggered memories of a nasty time in their history. In 1986, the Soviets began the
decimation of Kandahar, and nightly the sky would erupt with tracers and flares and fires from aerial assaults and blanket bombing runs. By 1987, they reduced much of the city to ash and rubble, and when they moved inside, they conducted urban patrols with punishing tanks. “Operations” there devastated the city's population, which dispersed from
two hundred thousand down to about twenty-five thousand in less than two years. Through that lens, most Kandaharis I met viewed the Taliban threat as significant but not overwhelming. When asked about it they nodded, “Yes, security must be improved,” but then went on to highlight issues of governance and corruption as equally important. The meeting here was meant to soothe their fears, and gauge their sentiment.

One corner of the basement had a platform about twelve inches high that had been furnished with flowers and lined by several large wooden chairs. Beneath a large photograph of President Karzai, Mark Sedwill and I were in two of the chairs. We sat self-consciously, fearful of looking like feudal lords above the sea of Kandaharis. A podium rested on the edge of the platform closest to the assembled audience. The crowd was like earlier
shuras
I'd attended, but larger. Rows of impressive looking elders sat cross-legged on carpets laid for the occasion, and I could see them craning their bodies to see around the television cameras interspersed throughout the hall. Despite the hall's size, the overflow gave the gathering an unexpected feeling of intimacy.