Nir Rosen - Aftermath

July 2009 was the worst month since the war started for the Americans and their allies, with forty-two Americans and twenty-two British soldiers killed, and a total of seventy-five foreign troops killed. Most of the casualties that month occurred in Helmand, when the Americans launched an operation for the fourth time to secure the area. More than four thousand Marines descended on the Helmand River Valley in a mission that had been planned months earlier. It was the first major operation of Obama’s presidency. Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, Marine commander for the operation, stressed that the focus was on getting the Afghan government back on its feet. He urged his men to get to know the people, to drink tea and eat goat with them. Six hundred and fifty Afghan soldiers also took part. Nicholson promised that “where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold.” The Marines hoped to win over the population. So too had the thousands of British soldiers who had been in the province since 2006. The British military was conducting a simultaneous operation in Helmand. Like the Marines, they hoped to provide enough security so that the August presidential elections could be held credibly.

About 750 Marines made it to an agricultural district called Nawa south of Lashkar Gah. Before they arrived there were only about forty British soldiers there, ensconced with some Afghan soldiers and police in the district center, unable to move outside a small secure zone one kilometer wide. Beyond that the Taliban manned checkpoints. “Everybody knew we were coming,” a Marine colonel told me, “so we wanted to deceive the enemy about what that would mean.” On June 19 three hundred Marines flew into Nawa and conducted patrols to lull the Taliban and give them ten days to think that was it, that they could handle the surge. The patrols had an average of one contact with their enemy every day. On July 2, the rest of the battalion came to block the Taliban escape and reinforcements. The Marines had expected their invasion to be more kinetic, meaning they had expected more shooting. They encountered a few days of stiff resistance and were impressed with their enemy’s combat techniques. But then the Taliban wisely melted away, laying down their arms or fleeing to Marja, fifteen miles to the west. The Taliban left poorly hidden weapons caches and poorly placed IEDs, and the Marines caught some of them fleeing. The first two IEDs destroyed vehicles, but the Marines uncovered the next twenty before they detonated. The Taliban also set up antipersonnel mines, placing an IED in a tree with a kite string attached to it as a command wire, and another IED in a wall.

The Marines were led by Lieut. Col. William McCollough, who operated out of a partially constructed brick building covered with sandbags. Although they officially had 650 Afghan soldiers with them, in private the Marines complained that it was more like four hundred and that the lack of an “Afghan face” was their “Achilles’ heel.” For an operation months in the making, it was a huge and inexplicable shortage.

Team Ironhorse and the ANCOP were to go to Helmand at the same time to increase the Afghan veneer. “We will deliver stabilization and development,” a Marine colonel in Helmand told me. “The Taliban filled the space. They took the governance high ground. The Taliban rule through intimidation and coercion. Harassment by the Taliban has become more intense, and the population is becoming more dissatisfied.” There was now a civilian “stabilization adviser” in Nawa with the Marines, the colonel told me, who was “trying to coordinate with local Afghan leadership so that the district government and police chief can organize and take the governance high ground. We’re going to deliver governance by demilitarizing it as soon as possible. The most important lesson from Iraq was the transition piece. You need to have Afghans involved at every phase and remind yourself it’s about them and their country, and remind each other we have to get our Afghan partners involved at every level.” The short-term goal was to provide security so they could deliver the upcoming August presidential elections in a meaningful way.

Major Contreras led Team Ironhorse and Prowler in mentoring the police. The ANCOP were a highly trained unit (by local standards) that took over temporarily for local police units while they were sent away for training. Contreras was excited about his role in the war. “This is in its infancy,” he said. “We’re beginning to see the military might that we as a nation can bring.” A true believer, he explained that he was fighting to protect the American way of life and because his wife had been working in the Pentagon when it was hit on September 11. Contreras was concerned about the “negative tone” of my previous article on Afghanistan for Rolling Stone and hoped I would write a more positive article this time. “We can win this,” he told me. “We were doing it one year at a time before for seven years.”

But first he would have to overcome Afghan bureaucracy. He couldn’t go to Nawa to link up with the Marines because Colonel Saki had not received his official orders from the Interior Ministry. The order had been signed and sealed five days earlier, but it had to be delivered by courier to Saki. There was no e-mail or other way for Saki to receive his orders. This was minor compared with the problems Contreras usually had with the ministry, he joked. Colonel Saki had not received supplies like radios, ammunition, and fuel, so he did not even have the logistical ability to head down. Saki met Colonel Torjan, who was in charge of logistics, and asked him for a commitment to replenish the ANCOP’s weapons and ammunition. Torjan took him to his depot to show him that he had nothing to spare. The following day Contreras went to meet Torjan in the police headquarters. He stuffed a pistol between his belt and the small of his back, just in case.

Torjan had not received the official document from the ministry ordering him to equip the ANCOP. All he had was a letter from the ANCOP. The ANCOP could have made it up themselves, Torjan said. There was fighting in many parts of Helmand, and many people were running out of ammunition, he said. He received about one-third of what he requested from the ministry in Kabul. Two British officers advising the police headquarters sat in on the meeting, as did a portly civilian contract police adviser. The provincial reserve requested eighty radios. Contreras and the British disputed how many they actually needed. Then they struggled to figure out which form they needed to fill out to get the Interior Ministry to ship supplies to Kandahar and then to Helmand, and how to make sure the staff at the Kandahar headquarters didn’t keep most of the supplies for themselves. Contreras and Torjan discussed how the ANCOP would refuel in Nawa, with Torjan suggesting they find gas stations. Nobody knew if there were any gas stations in the area.

That evening Ironhorse sat waiting to be briefed by Contreras. They were all scouts, and some were snipers, chosen by their lieutenant because they were “rough” and “shooters.” The major’s original plan called for them to go to Nawa before the Marines got there. “We would have gotten eaten alive,” one of them joked. The Marines in Nawa were attempting to provide a safe and secure environment for the Afghan government in order to facilitate the handover of the security mission to the ANSF, he explained. Ironhorse’s mission was to conduct a movement to Nawa—traveling through the eastern desert to avoid the much faster main road, which had not been cleared of IEDs—in order to link up with Marines and support their operations.

Contreras said guys in police uniforms were harassing civilians in Nawa. The men seemed very skeptical about the whole thing. “Duration of mission and number of legitimate police in Nawa, and how will ANP get along with ANCOP, and who is mentoring the ANPs there?” Staff Sergeant McGuire tersely asked without moving or looking at the major. Staff Sergeant Verdorn complained that they would be doing the Marines’ job of clearing. As the major concluded his brief, McGuire loudly muttered, “It’s a cocksuck.” Contreras left. “That was very well thought out,” McGuire said. I asked him to elaborate. “Fuel will be the biggest issue,” he said. “We don’t know where we’re gonna live, we’re not taking tents.” It was the worst operations order he had ever seen, he said, just telling them to go down there and the Marines would tell them what to do. “It’s a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ operation.” There was no plan for what would happen after they got to the school where the Marines were based. McGuire wondered what the mission was. If it was to give an Afghan face, well then there were already hundreds of Afghan soldiers there. Staff Sergeant Thacker was also worried. There were “a lot of I don’t knows” in the brief, he said, like the radio frequencies for the Marines. “A normal op order, even the lowliest private knows what everybody’s going to do,” McGuire told me.