Intel Wars Read online

  The opium poppy, the main ingredient in the manufacture of heroin, still dominates Helmand’s political, economic, and social landscape. Virtually everybody who lives in the province is tied into the illegal narcotics business. According to British intelligence reports reviewed by the author, virtually every family in Helmand has its hand in the illegal narcotics trade, either growing opium poppies, processing them into heroin, or moving the finished product out of Afghanistan. And according to Elizabeth Lee Walker, the ISAF Rule of Law adviser in Kabul, “Almost all officials [in Helmand Province] are assessed to be in some way involved in, or dependent on, narcotics trafficking.”

  Take any road out of Lashkar Gah and within minutes you are driving through thousands of acres of hauntingly beautiful fields of green, pink, and white opium poppies stretching as far as the eye can see. Local farmers freely admit that the local Afghan police will not touch the fields because the owners are variously Afghan government ministers in Kabul, some of the country’s most powerful warlords, and a host of local government or police officials in Lashkar Gah, all of whom earn enormous sums of money from the illegal opium trade. Army Lt. Colonel Michael Slusher recalled that in 2006 during Operation River Dance, the first large-scale opium eradication effort in Helmand Province, the Afghan contractors hired for the project refused to plow under the opium poppy fields owned by the province’s then governor, Mohammad “Engineer” Daud. According to Colonel Slusher, “When they got into the area that Daud controlled, they just went around his fields.”

  In this incredibly hostile and chaotic environment, a number of senior American and British civilian and military intelligence officials admitted that they were continually frustrated trying to figure out just who was the enemy in Helmand. According to Major Stuart Farris, who commanded a Green Beret “A team” in Helmand, “It was hard to determine if folks were actually no-joke Taliban or just criminals … We had to figure out who the bad guys were, whether they were [Taliban] versus just being criminals and thugs. Sometimes, though, they’re tied together. It was a very complex environment and was difficult at times to determine who the enemy was.”

  Intelligence was only marginally useful in terms of separating the good guys from the bad because reliable sources in Helmand were few and far between. Unlike in Wardak Province, where the Hazara tribesmen were willing to cooperate and provide intelligence on the Taliban, the Helmandi villagers were reluctant to provide intelligence on the Taliban, going to extraordinary lengths in some cases to avoid even the perception that they were cooperating with U.S. and NATO forces. The village chiefs knew from long and bitter experience that the Taliban would exact terrible reprisals on anyone who collaborated with the U.S. military.

  The U.S. military’s problems with collecting intelligence from Afghan civilians date back nearly a decade to the early days of the Taliban insurgency, when U.S. Army intelligence personnel were restricted to their firebases in order to hold down casualties. Barred from leaving their bases, the army intelligence personnel typically set up a shack outside the main gate of their firebase to meet with local villagers who wanted to pass on information about the Taliban. The Taliban quickly figured out what was going on, put the “safe house” under surveillance, noted which villagers went in and out, and then killed them or blackmailed them into passing false information.

  As a result, gathering intelligence about the Taliban has become progressively more difficult as the insurgents have expanded and tightened their control over the remote villages in the rural areas of Helmand. A marine platoon commander who served a tour of duty in the Garmsir District in southern Helmand Province in 2009 described a patrol to reconnoiter a village located not far from his battalion’s firebase that was assessed by the battalion’s intelligence staff as “sitting on the fence” in terms of where its loyalties lay. The purpose of the patrol was to “show the flag” by reminding the villagers of the presence of American forces in their neighborhood, demonstrate goodwill, and pick up any intelligence on Taliban activities in the sector.

  But the patrol revealed that in the two months since the village had last been visited, the Taliban had taken control of the village. There had been no pitched battle. As best the Americans could figure out, one day the Taliban had arrived and the loyalties of the village had changed overnight without any apparent bloodshed.

  According to the lieutenant, “When you enter a Taliban village, the first thing you notice is the silence. There is no music playing. Maybe dogs barking. No children run out to try to get candy off us … never a good sign. Then you notice that all the young men are gone. No one comes out of their homes. All that was left were the old, the sick, the women, and maybe a few stray dogs. That’s it … We knew things were bad when the village chief was sent out to politely encourage us to get out of the village … No invitation to sit and chat or have a cup of tea. Just leave please!”

  If the Obama administration and General McChrystal had seriously hoped that they could turn the tide in Afghanistan in 2009, they were sorely disappointed. Classified intelligence assessments produced by the DNI, the CIA, and the ISAF all said basically the same thing—that despite the doubling of the size of U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 34,000 to 68,000 troops, the United States and its allies had failed to arrest the Taliban’s momentum. The size of the Taliban guerrilla forces inside Afghanistan had grown; the insurgents had expanded their military presence into 160 of Afghanistan’s 364 districts; the tempo of Taliban attacks against U.S. and NATO forces jumped by a staggering 75 percent in 2009; and U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan doubled from 151 in 2008 to 304 in 2009, making it the single bloodiest year since the U.S. invasion of the country. According to a senior American intelligence officer in Kabul, “The metrics were definitely against us.”

  With few tangible results to show for all the effort, the Obama administration was forced to go back to the drawing board. After a sobering meeting of the National Security Council in the White House Situation Room on September 30, 2009, National Security Adviser Jim Jones and his Afghan “war czar,” General Doug Lute, quietly began a ten-week review of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. When the review was completed in late November 2009, its conclusion was simple. More American troops—a lot more troops—were needed to stave off defeat in Afghanistan.

  On Tuesday night, December 1, 2009, President Obama gave a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to announce that he had signed a directive ordering an additional 30,000 U.S. combat troops be sent to Afghanistan on top of the 68,000 troops already there. All of these troops were expected to be on the ground by the end of the summer of 2010, with all troops to be withdrawn by the end of 2011.

  Back in Washington, not everyone on the president’s staff was confident that more troops was the answer. Richard Holbrooke remembered thinking that the speech was comparable to what Spartan commanders were told before they marched off to battle, “Come back victorious or come back on your shield.”

  Going into 2010, all the top U.S. and NATO generals in Afghanistan, from General McChrystal on down, promised Washington a quick, decisive victory that would publicly demonstrate that the tide was indeed turning in Afghanistan. The place chosen by the generals in Kabul for the decisive battle was Marjah, the sole town of any size still held by the Taliban in Helmand Province.

  Early on the morning of February 13, 2010, the combined U.S., British, and Afghan offensive to take Marjah began. About 5,000 British and Afghan troops seized the neighboring town of Nad Ali, while 5,000 U.S. Marines and Afghan troops seized Marjah and the surrounding area. The operation was supposed to have been a cakewalk. It did not turn out that way. It took two weeks of intense fighting before the marines announced that Marjah was secure.

  If one were to believe all of the pronouncements from ISAF headquarters in Kabul, Marjah was a strategic victory of the first order. But as it turned out, Marjah was nothing close to being the kind of victory that the generals claimed it was. If the purpose of the operation was to draw
the Taliban forces into a major battle and destroy them, then it was a complete failure. The Taliban had known for months that the attack was coming. According to a British military intelligence officer, intercepted Taliban radio traffic revealed that the insurgents knew as early as November 2009, more than three months before the offensive began, that the U.S. was planning to attack Marjah.

  The Taliban got their advance warning directly from us. Not only were White House and Pentagon officials, like Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, telling reporters that they were going to take Marjah, but several Afghan newspapers and TV networks actually broadcast the outlines of the attack plan in December 2009, two months before the offensive kicked off. The commander of Marine Corps forces in Helmand Province, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, even told a reporter for the New York Times that “the overt message we’re putting out is, Marjah is next.” A U.S. Army intelligence officer stationed in Kabul at the time later stated, “We might as well have just broadcast the date and time of the attack. The element of surprise had already gone straight to the crapper.”

  Going into the Marjah offensive, U.S. intelligence knew very little about the number of Taliban forces they were facing, or what their dispositions were. U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officers estimated that there were roughly a thousand Taliban fighters situated in and around Marjah, but this was only a guesstimate, with a British report confirming that “little was known by ISAF about the human terrain and insurgent dispositions in Marjah.”

  The reason was that every November, after the Afghan fighting season officially came to an end, most Taliban fighters in Helmand Province quietly slipped away from the battlefield and returned to their villages and farms to plant a new crop of opium poppies and rest up during the long winter. So no matter how hard the U.S. military’s HUMINT collection teams, unmanned drones, and SIGINT teams scoured the countryside looking for their elusive enemy, the fact is that over the winter months it is virtually impossible to find the enemy. Come the spring and the beginning of the fighting season, the U.S. military typically knows very little about the enemy they are facing.

  Once the attack on Marjah began, the Taliban refused to engage the superior U.S. and British forces arrayed against them, with the vast majority of the Taliban fighters managing to escape because the U.S. Marines for some reason made no effort to cut off their escape routes. So ninety days after the fall of Marjah, the Taliban had managed to reinfiltrate the town. Sniper fire and IED attacks on marine patrols around Marjah resumed. Local villagers suddenly became uncooperative, with some elders going to extraordinary lengths not to be seen talking with the marines for fear that it would prompt Taliban retaliation against them and their families.

  Attempts to get the Afghan government to take over responsibility for administering Marjah stalled because the administrators and police officials who were supposed to restore the Afghan government’s presence in the town refused to take up their posts. From the elaborate excuses given by the officials, it was clear that Marjah was seen as a life-ending rather than a career-enhancing assignment.

  In a move that shocked American military and intelligence officials, the Afghan government announced that Abdul Rahman Jan, a notoriously corrupt official who formerly served as police chief of Helmand Province from 2003 to 2006, was to be the new police chief in Marjah. Jan was infamous for making his private militia and his police available to guard opium and heroin shipments in return for a cut of the profits, according to CIA and U.S. Army intelligence reports. The announcement brought immediate howls of protest from Marjah’s village elders, who told marine commanders that they would refuse to acknowledge the authority of the Afghan government if Jan was to be their police chief. Under immense pressure from the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Karzai withdrew Jan’s name from consideration, but the incident showed U.S. officials that, according to a senior ISAF intelligence officer, “Karzai doesn’t get it.”

  Panic over Marjah set in at ISAF headquarters in Kabul. Bombarded by negative press reporting, on May 24, 2010, General McChrystal flew down to Marjah to make his own assessment of the situation. With time running out on his mandate to reverse the course of events in Afghanistan, McChrystal did not like hearing that the Taliban were creeping back into Marjah. He wanted results and he wanted them soon. “This is a bleeding ulcer right now,” McChrystal told his commanders, according to an account of the meeting published in the Miami Herald. “You don’t feel it here, but I’ll tell you, it’s a bleeding ulcer outside.”

  The marines quickly staged a photo op three days later for a visiting CBS News film crew to try to demonstrate that all was normal in Marjah by erecting a tent that was to be a new school. Everything about the event bordered on the farcical. Lt. Colonel Brian S. Christmas, the commander of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, which was responsible for guarding Marjah, half-dragged the white-turbaned village chief out of the crowd, put a shovel in his hand, and encouraged him to break ground on the foundation for the new school while the CBS crew filmed the scene. The mortified village chief, perhaps thinking that he had just been involuntarily drafted into a work gang, looked like he was going to have a heart attack.

  Off to the side, a bemused group of marine intelligence officers videotaped the event, paying special attention to a cluster of black-turbaned men who were intently watching. The marines’ interest in these men was heightened when they suddenly became camera shy when video cameras were pointed at them, covering their faces with the edges of their turbans. One of the marine intelligence officers present muttered to his sergeant, “They’re back”—meaning the Taliban.

  While officials continued to put on a brave face for the public, by the spring of 2010 deep concern about the situation in Afghanistan had begun to creep into the highest levels of the U.S. government and its NATO allies. Public opinion polls showed that support for the war in Afghanistan was slipping among the American people. In Western Europe and Canada, support for the Afghan war, which had never been very high to begin with, plummeted. In March 2010, after a lengthy public debate, the Dutch government had collapsed because of the vast unpopularity of the war in that country, which according to a confidential CIA report “demonstrates the fragility of European support for the NATO-led ISAF mission” in Afghanistan. The Canadian, Dutch, and Polish governments all announced that they were pulling their troops out of Afghanistan at a time when the Obama administration was pressing the NATO governments to increase their troop levels there.

  The situation on the ground was increasingly grim, with the April 2010 ISAF intelligence staff’s assessment of the security situation showing that in the NATO zone in southern Afghanistan, only one district, the city of Kandahar, was rated as “sympathizing with the Government of Afghanistan,” while thirteen districts were assessed as actively supporting or sympathizing with the Taliban. In the American zone in eastern Afghanistan, the situation was better, with fifteen districts rated as being supportive of the Afghan government and twelve as actively supporting or sympathizing with the insurgents. All of the remaining districts were “on the fence,” waiting to see who would come out on top.

  Despite all of the bad news, a small but determined group of officers at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, snidely referred to by their colleagues as “Team Victory,” continued to resolutely believe in eventual victory in Afghanistan. One of the leading members of “Team Victory” was Major General Bill Mayville, General McChrystal’s operations chief, who confidently predicted in a March 17, 2010, blog posting that “there are growing fissures between [the Taliban] groups and we believe they are starting to experience considerable stress due to the increased operational tempo on both sides of the Afghanistan and Pakistan border.”

  This statement was met with disbelief by a number of ISAF intelligence officers. Not only was there no tangible support for the general’s statement in any of the intelligence reporting they were reading, but it actually ran contrary to all of the official internal estimates they had been sending to Mayville and
General McChrystal. Even the Pentagon’s April 2010 assessment on Afghanistan sent to Congress admitted that the security situation was “far from satisfactory.”

  Speaking at a closed-door NATO defense ministers’ meeting in Brussels in June 2010, General McChrystal admitted that only 5 of the 121 districts in Afghanistan that he deemed to be essential if the war in Afghanistan was to be won were rated as “secure,” while 40 of these key districts were rated as “dangerous.” Moreover, a document prepared by his staff admitted that ISAF did not expect any major improvement in the military situation in Afghanistan for the rest of the year.

  A number of American, Canadian, and European defense and intelligence officials attending the meeting left the briefing believing that General McChrystal’s “protect the populace” strategy in Afghanistan was not working. Not only had the new strategy failed in its primary objective of securing the most heavily populated areas of the country, but the officials feared that by ceding the rural areas of Afghanistan to the Taliban, McChrystal was tacitly admitting that the U.S. and NATO forces would never be strong enough to take on the Taliban in their backyard.

  A senior British military official summarized the sentiments of many of his colleagues during a coffee break: “McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is predicated on the belief that in the time allotted to him by the White House, it was impossible to take back the countryside from the Taliban. So the only alternative was we had to save what we could of the country if we were going to try to negotiate from a position of strength at a peace conference with the Taliban.”

  The British general was right, of course. President Obama had put General McChrystal in an untenable situation when he announced on December 1, 2009, at West Point that he had ordered that an additional 30,000 troops be sent to Afghanistan on top of the 68,000 troops already there, but that the first of these troops were to be withdrawn by July 2011. Even if they did not say so publicly, everyone at the NATO summit meeting knew that McChrystal had been saddled with an impossible task. In essence, the president had given the general only a year and a half to turn the battlefield situation around before he had to begin drawing down the size of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In the time allotted and with the forces at his disposal, McChrystal could not militarily defeat the Taliban, given the amount of territory that the guerrillas then controlled. The best McChrystal could reasonably be expected to do was to degrade the strength of the Taliban’s guerrilla forces and try to secure the major cities and towns of Afghanistan. And now, McChrystal was admitting to NATO’s top commanders that he might not be able to accomplish even this very limited goal.