[Part Two of Four]
6. Kabul is a Third World city, squalid as mud and dirty as hell. Every building that’s above the level of the people is built like a fortress; compounds with high walls topped with razor wire, AK-toting guards out front and security cameras atop Y-shaped posts. At the airport, guard towers are set in onion fields with police asleep or tending little vegetable gardens or heating tea over propane stoves. They’re keeping watch, supposedly, over cyclone fences topped with concertina wire and protected at ground level by rolls of the same, so no one can crawl under. Hesco barriers are squarish barrel-like containers made of super heavy duty cardboard and wire; fill them with rock or gravel or dirt and they make impenetrable blast walls. Stack them three or four high around a perimeter: instant Fort Apache. On bases, the quonset-shaped living tents are surrounded by sandbags piled four and five feet high. Checkpoint guards are TCNs–Third Country Nationals–from Fiji, Mongolia, Bangladesh. We circle Massoud Square again and drive past the famous Serena Hotel. “Why is it famous?” I ask SSgt Barr, our security team leader. “Because,” he says, “the Taliban keep trying to blow it up.”
The Marine Osprey aircraft can fly like a helicopter or a fixed-wing. That's BG Nicholson, back to us, in the foreground.
On the street: boys and men manning wheelbarrows, contracting themselves out; guys selling phone cards; flat wooden handcarts balance on two car tires, selling oranges and onions; goat meat hanging in sidewalk stalls. Every street is muddy, with shallow brown lakes and piles of dirt, rubble and stone ten feet high every fifty feet. Local police in beat-up Ford Rangers with machine guns guard every roundabout; they help the convoys go through. A typical run of traffic will be yellow cabs (Toyota Corollas), Toyota mini-buses carrying ten people sardine-style, hitchhikers getting picked up by kind-hearted Samaritans, motorcyles, convoys from the UN or ISAF (the International Security and Assistance Force), Tata trucks and Mercedeses and Russian Kamazes, lots of bicycles, a few horse carts, many people walking. Shops are corrugated tin sheds or mini truck containers with roll-down metal doors. Plastic jugs and jerry cans in a stack serve as a signboard for an auto repair shop or a parts fabricator. Energy comes from propane tanks, big ones, five feet tall, which you see singly on the street or in stacks of four or five, rusty and dirty. The vendors and mechanics use torches to work metal or primus-style burners to cook up lunch. We pass coffee and tea shops, carpet stores, women’s apparel shops, more than one bodybuilding gym with drawings of muscle men our front, video stores, phone emporia; signs are all hand-lettered, in Arabic (or is it Dari?) and English. Billboards advertise education: learn computing, accounting, vehicle repair. Streets are laid out like this: a main vehicle boulevard with traffic running both ways, separated by a median of mini-concrete barriers and sometimes a lane of forlorn-looking mulberry trees; then, to each side, an unpaved, muddy frontage road, on the outboard margin of which is a sunken runoff ditch. You cross by footbridge to the shops on the far side. I’m speaking theoretically of course, for us Yanks; we’re in the Bubble and nobody’s letting us out. Eating establishments look nasty but tasty: Brothers Restaurant and Hamra are two whose names I jot down. We pass good-looking women packing knockoff iPhones and Blackberries, Gucci-esque bags studded with geegaws. You see wives in burkas but not many.
My own feeling on Day One is one of apprehensiveness and Third World bummerdom. But after a few jaunts around town, even in body armor, you start getting the hang of it. You begin to see the city, grim and muddy and conflict-ravaged as it is, as a vibrant metropolis–poor as dirt, yes, but with a lot of action going on. Maj. Nelson and I share the back seat of Chase Two. “In the sixties and seventies,” he says, “Kabul used to be part of the Hippie Trail that ran across Central Asia to Katmandu.” Young Brits and Americans and Euro-freaks would backpack and bunk in villages, carrying only a few dollars; locals were friendly in those pre-Soviet days. Kabul looked good. “I bought some postcards when I was deployed here a few years ago that showed these boulevards back in the day. There were cafes and shops, the trees hadn’t been all blown up.”
7. What happens in Gen. Mattis’ meetings? Reports are given quickly, efficiently. There’s a lot of laughter. These officers know each other; they’ve dodged bullets together and gotten drunk together and lost good men together. When they greet each other today, though they’re all wearing stars, they go back instantly to when they were lieutenants and captains in the field–in Desert Storm and Ramadi, in Baghdad and Camp Rhino and Kandahar. Then they get down to business. It’s like the most efficient American or British corporation imaginable. “How can I help you?” Gen. Mattis asks. “What do you need that you don’t have?”
The background is always COIN theory–counterinsurgency–and the alteration in priorities from “kill the enemy” to “protect the people.” CIVCAS is the military acronym for civilian casualties. All hands are hyper-conscious of avoiding this. But there’s still plenty of killing to be done and a long fight ahead. Gen. Scaparotti commands the 82nd Airborne Division; his AO, Area of Operations, is Regional Command East, the run of provinces between Kabul and the Pakistani border. He tells Mattis of successes and setbacks. Gen. Scap’s State Dept. counterpart is Dawn Liberi; she’s the civilian equivalent of a three-star general and they work together as a team. Both are tremendous. Tactical victories, COIN strategy says, must be followed up at once by actions that support the people and increase good governance. They’re talking about marble deposits in one province, rail transport in another, and a particularly robust harvest of grapes in a third. “General,” I ask, “when you were a young trooper jumping out of airplanes, did you think that one day you’d be getting excited about the size of grapes?”
Marjah and surrounding countryside, seen from a Marine Osprey aircraft
8. Marjah. Day Three, we fly by KC-130 to Kandahar, then by Osprey to Camp Bastion, the huge British base and airfield adjacent to Camp Leatherneck, in Helmand province. The area is thick with history–Alexander, the Silk Road, Persian adventures–and populous. The Marine Osprey takes us down to Marjah, where the big U.S.-Afghan push has been going on for two weeks or more. The tilt-rotor aircraft touches down vertically in a field of winter grass, after jinking and juking on the approach to make it tougher on any RPG gunner to line the plane up in his sights from below. We leap off like infantry and sprint/stumble over an irrigation ditch with a footbridge to the compound where the victorious Marines, Afghan National Army and U.S. Army Special Forces have set up shop. BrigGen. Larry Nicholson commands the overall operation. Morale is sky-high. The compound is Hesco’ed up, with a half dozen or so MRAPs (IED-proof armored vehicles the size of two Humvees that cost about a million bucks each) and a machine gun nest on the roof. The gate entry has been sandbagged so you have to zig-zag to get in and out. The outer gate is sealed by an MRAP parked sidelong and a Marine sergeant operating concertina wire like a collapsible gate.
Eight Marines have been killed taking Marjah. It’s too painful for anybody to think about so the emotion is choked down to be dealt with later. In a bare dirt room, a young major gives Gen. Mattis a quick map briefing. Marines and ANA and Afghan commandoes are still involved in “kinetic” action, meaning shooting and getting shot at, a few miles ahead. But here it’s pretty much over; the stability operation has begun. Reporters are on the ground—the excellent Tony Perry of the L.A. Times, whom I know by e-mail but have never met in person, and a pair from Germany or England, a pretty girl in a head scarf and a cameraman. Marines and Afghan army commanders are gravely solicitous about each other’s casualties. This is no joke. An Afghan soldier was killed several days ago. Gen. Nicholson ordered his body to be flown by Marine KC-130, all by itself, to Kabul to the soldier’s family. Among Muslims immediate burial is of the highest spiritual importance. A tough-looking young major tells Gen. Nicholson how word of his gesture has made the rounds of the Afghan platoons, making a deep impression. Gen. Nicholson is delighted. “This is their boy’s victory,” he says, meaning the Afghans’, “as much as it is ours. Maybe more.”
We walk several miles up the dirt road that serves as Main Street in the part of town we’re in. Flat fields stretch to the horizon. Mud walls surround compounds constructed like forts. The street itself is deeply rutted and potholed. Your boots sink ankle-deep in dust the consistency of talcum powder. It’s a market town road, the country version of the boulevards in Kabul—traffic down the middle, irrigation ditches on one side, shops and stalls on the far side of the ditch and the dry side too. Tobias Elwood, our young British MP, is an expert in post-conflict stabilization operations. He’s already trying to rally the troops to re-do this road. “Hire local people, do it all by hand; pay as many people as we can. It doesn’t matter if it’s a perfect job by Western standards; what counts is to get the people involved and let them see real change happening right now. Every hour we dither increases skepticism about our intentions and our capabilities.”
As our party of generals, colonels, majors and reporters trudges along, protected by ANP (Afghan National Police) and Marine infantry providing 360-degree security, local boys and men eye them from market stalls, rooftops and margins of fields. We have heard that in another part of Marjah, the Taliban had set up such an efficient government of their own that streets were paved, homes were electrified and there were full-time courts of law. Maybe the locals aren’t too pleased to see the Marines and the ANA. “We’ve got work to do in that part of town,” says the young major running the show.
Coming home: a family returns to Marjah
One thing that doesn’t come across back home in TV coverage of the army and Marines is what great-looking, superbly-professional guys they are. There’s no way, I’m thinking, that the Marjah locals can look at these young men and not be impressed. Tremendous fighters as these Marines clearly are, it’s also obvious that they aren’t here to conquer the place or rape the resources; they’ve come to help and they intend to. Still the locals are giving us the stink-eye, skeptical about how long this new boss is gonna stick around or if they even want him to. A big farm tractor is rumbling down the road toward us like Tom Joad’s jalopy, overloaded with people, at least twenty–a big extended family, we are told. Where are they going? “Coming back,” says the interpreter. Returning to their homes now that the Taliban are gone. The family itself is a wonderful-looking bunch—boys and girls with lively, intelligent eyes; young men looking smart and strong and ready to laugh; elders who look like … like Afghan elders. The grown women are bundled up, but their eyes are quick and savvy too. Stalls in the bazaar that have been vacant or shuttered are open again and more are opening every few minutes, as in Nawa nearby where, we heard, Marines and ANA troops have done the same thing. We squint down the talcum-powder road. Here comes another tractor, also overflowing with returnees.
[Part Three continues tomorrow.]
[Photos by 1LT Joshua Diddams, MEB-A Media Officer.]
Downrange: An Informal Report on a trip to Afghanistan with Marine General James N. Mattis
[Part Three of Four]
It’s more than a little weird, participating in one of these PR walkarounds. Self-congratulation is the inevitable theme. The bubble can get pretty thick. For me, at least, it’s almost impossible to grok the street reality. Are things going great or are we all lining up to drink our own Kool-Aid? For all I can tell, the sullen, hood-eyed bandits eyeballing our procession have been cutting loose AK rounds at Marines twenty-four hours earlier—and may be doing it again three days from now. Not that that means anything. Earlier in the trip, Gen. Mattis, speaking of Iraq and the Anbar Awakening, had credited British general Graeme Lamb with the philosophical breakthrough that made that turnaround embraceable by the field commanders, the battlespace owners. “Gen. Lamb’s mental model divided the Iraqi population into two groups—those who were reconcilable and those who weren’t. The trick was to reintegrate the first group into the life of the nation–and to kill or chase the second bunch out of Dodge.”
Gen. Mattis with an Afghan commando in Marjah, 28 Feb 2010
That would be the next phase here in Marjah and in the succeeding towns and cities on the Marines’ clear-hold-build list. Will it work? Can the ANA pull it off? Can the police from the new “government in a box?” Two days earlier we’d been in a meeting in Kabul with LtGen. William Caldwell, commander of the NATO Training Mission, and his staff, who had been tasked with bringing the ANA and ANP up to speed. I didn’t envy these officers; they had definitely drawn the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
Here’s how good intentions go wrong: the Pentagon has decreed that the job of training the Afghan National Police be outsourced. Contractors will do it. So the bids go out; one company wins. But wait, a spurned bidder files a protest. “Now we’re set back,” says Gen. Caldwell, “for however long it takes to settle the dispute. Meanwhile the individual contractors—retired American law enforcement officers, police chiefs and so forth—can’t stick around waiting half a year. They’ve taken other jobs.” Gen. Caldwell’s original wish list calls for over 2000 trainers; now he’s down to 400+, and it’s no sure thing that he’ll get even those. “And this,” notes on staffer, meaning the train-up of the ANP, “is the centerpiece of the whole counterinsurgency operation!”
The Machine giveth and the Machine taketh away.
9. Lashkar Gah is our next stop. The name means “camp of the warriors.” Alexander the Great’s warriors. His columns came through here in 330 B.C., skirting the Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death, before setting up the tent city that would become Kandahar and trekking north across the Hindu Kush into the Bactrian plain. I peer down from our vertical-take-off Osprey. You can’t tell me much has changed in 2300 years. Below are mud-walled compounds, irrigated fields divided into squares, dark-eyed men in shalwar kameezes. The tribes even have the same names. Alexander and his generals sat around planning tables just like our ISAF commanders, trying to dope this theater out. The great conqueror employed the same tactics we’re using—he hired his enemies for pay, treated them with respect and sought to make them friends. He invested fortunes, built towns and cities, cut off cross-border sanctuaries (or tried to) and ran operations constituted of assault forces and blocking elements, aiming to trap the foe in between. I’m talking to a Marine colonel. “Alexander’s mother Olympias wrote him a letter once,” the officer tells me, “getting on his case for taking so long to knock off these primitive, poverty-stricken Afghans. So Alexander captured three tribal chiefs and sent them back to Macedonia, each one carrying an offering of soil from his own tribal homeland; they were supposed to deliver these tokens to Olympias as a gift from her son. But waiting outside the queen’s palace door, the three chiefs got into a fight and killed one another. Alexander’s Mom wrote back: ‘Now I understand, my son.’” I’m not sure what that story means in the current context, but I’m pondering it as we fly back to Kabul at dark.
Alexander would recognize some of the residents of Marjah
A Marine KC-130 is a cavernous, workhorse cargo plane powered by four turbo-props. You board via a rear ramp. The interior can be configured to ferry troops, in canvas seats facing inboard along the airframe wall with others facing outboard down the centerline, or for cargo on roller pallets. For this flight it’s fifty-fifty. Our nine-man troupe is joined by a platoon of Afghan commandoes, fresh out of the fight at Marjah. What a fine-looking bunch they are. The commandoes, Maj. Raymond of Gen. Mattis’ staff explains to me, are the cream of the ANA, way beyond the regular line troops. These guys are all young, no one above 22 is my guess. They look like fighters. Obviously this is their first plane ride. They’re trying to be cool, but as the huge, clamorous KC-130 starts rattling and banging into takeoff, all palms are turned heavenward in a quick prayer. Maj. Raymond shakes hands with a half a dozen of these young men; they light up with big, Chiclet smiles. The Taliban, a number of Marines have told me, haven’t stood up to our guys yet. Is the momentum shifting to the Coalition side? The enemy will mount a spring offensive, says Gen. Scaparotti of the 82nd Airborne. “He has to, because our side is getting so much traction. If the enemy lets us keep doing what we’re doing now, we’ll hit a tipping point and it’ll be over for him.”
10. Could this be true? Here, for what it’s worth, is how I see it after my trip inside the bubble:
The campaign has two extremities. At the top-end is the NATO/ISAF/American Machine. This Machine is made up of men and money, of massive bases and O’Hare-sized airfields, of vehicle parks and tarmac aprons chockablock with MRAPs and Black Hawks and C-130s and Tomcats. Its elements include drones and laser-guided missiles, satellite imaging and biometrics. It is thousands of tons of supplies and construction materials; rooms full of captains and majors manning laptops; it is PowerPoints, flow charts and projections, focus groups, think tank treatises. The Machine is also constituted of a can-do attitude, a fierce and dedicated work ethic, a commitment to integrity and transparency and an attitude of good intentions that no one who has seen it can ever doubt. All of it is powered by a will and a level of professionalism that is without peer for putting a man on the moon or a thousand-pound bomb down a chimney. That’s the input end of the dynamic. That’s the Machine.
At the bottom, at the receiving end, is the villager, the tribesman and the Afghan man in the street. From where he stands, the Machine is a marvel. It is rich beyond imagining. It can call down death from the sky or beyond the horizon; it can see in the dark and strike without warning out of nowhere. Its intentions are good. Its heart is in the right place. But what can it do for him? He has seen clever men manipulate the machine and wicked men take vengeance on those who have been reckless enough to befriend it. He may be illiterate, this man of the village or the street, but he is not stupid. He has seen great powers come and go. In his own or his father’s lifetime he has lived through domination by the Soviets, the Afghan communists, the warlords and the Taliban. Now the NATO Machine has come. If our man can tap this apparatus for a job or a contract, he will. Every little bit helps. Most Afghans, we are told, view the Coalition presence favorably. I would too. The Yanks and their allies bring in cash and development projects, and they’re a far more benign presence that Genghis Khan or the Brits or the Russians, who were there for reasons of conquest or self-aggrandizement. The Americans just want to help. The Machine wants to bring security, development, education. It wants to get Afghanistan up on its feet. Can it?
An Osprey comes in over Marjah. Note the .50-caliber machine gun aft. In foreground, beneath camo netting, are the tents where the Marines have temporarily set up camp.
In the middle lies the space between the Machine and the man of the village, the man of the tribes. Here is the payoff point. This ground is occupied by the Marines and Army troopers and allies who man the frontier posts in the mountains, who hold down the outposts in the south and east. This space is held by the Marines in Helmand who fight and camp with their Afghan counterparts, who wash in the canals and eat the same lentils and flatbread, who haven’t had a shower in the past twenty-one days and won’t have one for the next three months. These are the guys who put a human face on the Coalition effort. They’re the young warriors who make friends and learn the lingo and constitute the person-to-person payload that the Machine above (which is as remote to them as it is to the Afghans they operate beside) has come halfway around the world to deliver.
My question is: are there enough of them? Have they penetrated deeply enough? Will they stick around? Does the Coalition possess the patience and political will to give their efforts time to bear fruit?
[Part Four wraps up tomorrow.]
[Photos by 1LT Joshua Diddams, MEB-A Media Officer.]