Nir Rosen - Aftermath

In June 2009, in Helmand’s provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, I met a group of Americans working with the Afghan police. The Americans shared a base with the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) and the Provincial Reserve (PR), two special police units considered elite in comparison to local Afghan National Police (ANP). Authority in Helmand was divided between the British Army and the U.S. Marines. On my first day there I went to the ANCOP base and sat on the floor drinking green tea with the PR. One man asked me if I wanted to go sleep. He showed me where his bedroom was and offered to take me there. The next day he asked why I hadn’t come there to sleep with him. Jawad, another member, had been with the PR for one year. He had lost between fifteen and twenty friends in attacks since then, he said. “I like this job,” he told me when I asked if it wasn’t too dangerous. “If something is in your destiny, it’s coming, no one can save you. Every time we defeat them. It’s hard to remove the Taliban roots because some of them live here.” Many of the Americans had learned basic Farsi and Pashtu, the languages most commonly spoken in Afghanistan, and they bantered back and forth with the Afghans, teasing them with local expressions.

On my first night I had dinner with the Americans of Team Ironhorse and Colonel Saki, who headed the ANCOP in Helmand. Ironhorse was the U.S. squad training ANCOP. We found him watching Bollywood movies in his office. He brought out a pile of kabob and bread, and the Americans chatted with him through Bariyal, a thickly muscled translator the Americans called Shotgun. He was the 2002 weightlifting champion in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Like most translators who spend enough time with the Americans, he adopted their argot as well. “ANCOP are fucking badass people,” he told me. Colonel Saki and the Americans shared the same macho warrior culture, and the language divide proved easily surmountable. Ironhorse’s captain was going on leave, and he asked Saki what he wanted from the United States. Saki said he just wanted him to come back.

The next morning the frustrated Americans on Team Prowler helped the PR unload a truck full of rifles and ammunition. The Afghans had just tossed them in a pile without conducting any inventory or organization. “I’m at my wits’ end!” shouted Sgt. Ryan Kilaki. Captain Westby was exasperated because many of the cops were at home and not on the base. They are a quick reaction force, he told me, and they are supposed to live on base.

The British and Helmand police command had mismanaged a few hundred thousand dollars in back pay for the police, and the Americans had stepped in to cover the loss. “Jesus, fuck, they got a long way to go,” said an exasperated Sergeant First Class Clark. The British army had taken sixty men from the Provincial Reserve with them on a recent operation in Babaji. The PR men didn’t want to go with them, and the Americans were pissed off because the reserve was supposed to be one unit. Like many Afghans, the police believed that the British secretly supported the Taliban.

On the Fourth of July, Team Prowler set off with the PR to patrol Highway 601, the key road in the province. It connected to Highway 1, the main road in the country. All trade entering the province passed through Highway 601, and it was also the land route to supply British, American, and Afghan forces. The “skuff ” hall in the British-run base was running out of food. Villages along the road were controlled by the Taliban. The British were supposed to control the route. Sergeant Dyer, a brawny former Navy SEAL with the stern gaze, square jaw, and low raspy voice of a real-life Marlboro man, complained to me about nightly reports that Highway 601 was mined but that the police didn’t pursue the insurgents. Civilian vehicles avoided it because of IEDs. The police knew where the Taliban were but didn’t pursue them, and they were growing too dependent on the Americans. “At one checkpoint they were still wearing their man-jammies, not uniforms,” he said. “IEDs are placed two clicks from police checkpoints, they don’t go on patrol, at the sound of the first shot they request air support. But they’ve cried wolf too many times, and then they say, ‘If we don’t get air support we’re leaving.’”

Dyer was on his third combat deployment in Afghanistan. “There’s too much talk of COIN and civil affairs,” he said. “It requires security. You can’t build a school if you can’t protect the teacher.” The rules of engagement had changed over the course of Dyer’s three deployments. He worried that his men were more at risk because of limitations on when they could shoot. Like many American troops, he could barely hide his contempt for most of the other coalition members. Only the British, Australians, and Canadians were aggressive, he said. Americans joke that NATO’s ISAF actually stands for “I see Americans fighting” or “I suck at fighting” or “I stay at the FOB.” Some of the European allies, meanwhile, complained that the Americans were too aggressive.

Driving down Highway 601, an insurgent with an itchy trigger finger prematurely detonated his IED on the road in front of Team Prowler and the police. The police discovered the command wire for it and fanned around to look in vain for the trigger man. The blast slowed down the police. Captain Westby complained to me that the police were “squirrelly” and that he had to do a lot of “mentoring” to get them to go forward. They headed toward a village called Balochan. The National Directorate of Security men accompanying them—the NDS is the Afghan equivalent of the FBI—didn’t know how to get there, and none of the police had ever been there, so they got lost. Westby worried that this would be a problem when the police ran their own operations. The Americans took the lead, but when they got to Balochan, Lieutenant Farid, the police commander, insisted it was the wrong town. In Balochan they were shot at from four hundred meters away. A British contingent was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades. The Americans, I was told, “lay devastating fire” on the tree line from where they received fire—then the insurgent fire subsided. The Americans couldn’t confirm any dead insurgents. “Afghans suck at shooting,” they said. The Americans thought they were up against foreign fighters because of the accurate shots. One policeman was shot in the head. The others thought he was dead; they laid him on the ground and covered his face. The Americans saw the man was still breathing and had a pulse, so they evacuated him by helicopter. The Americans searched the maze of compounds. One policeman was killed; his friend insisted on going out to save him, but the other Afghans were too scared. The police had no radios, so they couldn’t communicate, and their fire was coming too close to the Americans. They also weren’t wearing their armor. “They don’t like it because it’s heavy,” one American explained. Another policeman was shot in the chest. The others backed off, abandoning their friend. An American tried to figure out where the fire was coming from and drag the man to safety, as the interpreter Mansur ran to help. They extracted the dead policeman, and Lieutenant Farid was wounded in his calf. He was wearing a black T-shirt without body armor. “You and I as leaders have to make the decisions to set examples for our men,” Westby told him. Farid made excuses, and Westby felt like he was talking to a kid. Armor was hot and heavy and wouldn’t have helped his leg, Farid argued. An American was wounded. Mansur picked up the American’s rifle and started firing (all the interpreters were trained to fight as well). Sergeant Dyer was disappointed with the PR’s performance. “They sucked,” he said. “They folded,” one of his soldiers agreed.