The good captain, p.40
The Good Captain, page 40
It was not to be. Halfway through the fall semester my old commander, now-Major General Mike Scaparrotti, called me at home. Scap had recently taken command of the 82nd Airborne Division and was slated to take the All Americans to Afghanistan in the summer. He had a job in mind and needed a quality senior colonel with brigade command and 82nd experience. Did I have any suggestions? Reading between the lines, I asked for a day to think about it.
I had much to ponder. I had already asked more of Beverly than any reasonable spouse should have to endure. The family had not seen much of me in recent years. Another combat deployment would not be career enhancing, as further promotion so late in my career was not a realistic proposition. And I was no longer a young man. Now in my early 50s, I couldn’t lie to myself. I had lost a step.
But there were other considerations. I remembered my father, in a similar situation, going to Beirut in his 29th year. I thought of Ladd Pattillo, well into retirement, volunteering to come back and deploy. My oldest son Chris had elected to defer college and, like me, had enlisted as an airborne infantryman. His unit, the 173rd Airborne Brigade (my old outfit from Vicenza), would deploy to Afghanistan the following fall as part of Combined Joint Task Force 82. The opportunity to soldier with my son in a foreign land was compelling. Nostalgically, I was tempted to return to the 82nd Airborne, where I had begun 33 years before, to end my career. I would have nine months to rest and spend with the family before going downrange. I thought of the wonderful younger officers I had served with—McFarlane, Fenzel, Burleson, and many others, now commanding battalions of their own and slated to go back into the box for their 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th combat deployments. I was a professional soldier. It did not seem right to shirk when others were continuing to sacrifice and serve. Finally, I was drawn to work once more for Scap, a great leader and valued friend.
As she always had, Beverly smiled bravely and offered her full support. I called Scap the next day and told him I thought I filled the bill and would be glad to go if he’d have me. The next six months flew by as I studied Afghanistan—its history, geography, politics, tribal dynamics and most importantly, the enemy. After the initial successful phase, Operation Enduring Freedom evolved into an “economy of force” mission as Iraq moved to center stage. The Taliban, badly damaged, hunkered down in the tribal areas just across the border in Pakistan to regroup and plot its return. For some four years, violence was relatively low, and U.S. and coalition troop strength were accordingly modest. In 2004, Hamid Karzai was elected president of Afghanistan following the drafting of a national constitution. Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) composed of both military and civilians were established in each province to plan and execute local reconstruction projects to benefit the local community.
On the surface, Iraq and Afghanistan seemed to have much in common. Both were Islamic states with long-standing conflict histories; both suffered from weak governance and ethnic strife; both faced dangerous local insurgencies; and both hosted large international coalitions on their soil. But there were major differences as well. Afghanistan was significantly larger in both land area and population. Its transportation network was far less developed than Iraq’s and its terrain was far more challenging, above all the famous “Hindu Kush,” the towering mountainous region that bisected the country from East to West. Unlike Iraq, there was little human capital in Afghanistan, as most technocrats and university graduates had been killed or run out during the years of Taliban rule. Much of the population lived in poverty in the countryside, unlike Iraq with its many cities. Warlordism, drug trafficking and corruption were rife and distrust of foreigners—all foreigners—was genetically imprinted in all Afghans. Not for nothing was Afghanistan called “the graveyard of empires.”
In 2006, at the height of the war in Iraq, violence in Afghanistan began to spike. Suicide bombings and IEDs, at one point relatively rare, now became more common. Financed by foreign money and supported clandestinely by the ISI—Pakistan’s notorious internal security service—the Taliban established “shadow” governments in many Afghan districts and provinces, murdered local officials and challenged the central government in the countryside. With Iraq in the spotlight, U.S. forces attempted to maintain control with only about 20,000 troops and a few smaller international contingents. The Afghan security forces, also hampered by lower priority, were plagued by low numbers, poor leadership, ramshackle logistics and lack of heavy weapons. By the spring of 2009, the U.S. commander, General David McKiernan, was forced to ask for a major troop increase and by May of that year his force had grown to just over 50,000.2
I had not anticipated any difficulties, but by the spring it became clear that the war college leadership did not support my detail to Afghanistan. Although I had secured the assignment of a well-qualified backfill, I had not considered the larger implications. Almost every military organization had been hit hard to provide officers to man our large headquarters in Iraq and Afghanistan, but somehow the war college had been overlooked. There was little interest on the campus in breaking that precedent. I was first asked, and then pressured, to withdraw from consideration. I persisted and the matter was eventually elevated to higher levels. Marine Lieutenant General John Allen, one of the heroes of the Awakening, was now the deputy commander at U.S. Central Command. An old friend, he became personally involved and, quite late in the game, the decision came down in my favor.
In mid-June, I boarded a commercial flight via Ankara to Uzbekistan. From there I caught a C17 and flew into Bagram, the home of Regional Command or RC-East. (Afghanistan was divided into Regional Commands—South, North, West, East and Capital.) An old Soviet air base, Bagram was located about 30 minutes’ flying time from Kabul, the capital, at 6,000 feet. In all directions, the mountains of the Hindu Kush towered above us. I was assigned a small one-man room, with a communal bathroom down the hall, that would be my home for the next year. The accommodations were spartan, but I considered myself lucky. As a full colonel I rated a private room. I stacked my gear and slept for 10 hours. Early the next morning, I began.
Just before I arrived, General McKiernan was abruptly relieved of command of ISAF, apparently because the new administration felt that a new commander with a stronger background in counterinsurgency was needed. He was replaced by General McChrystal. Overcoming the Tillman fiasco somehow, he had stayed in command of special operations units for some years before a short tour on the Joint Staff and was promoted into the ISAF job as the military’s youngest four-star.
McChrystal was, I thought, a questionable choice. My dismay was based on more than our prior history. Most of his time as a general officer had been spent in the insular special operations community, far from the media glare, interagency wrangling, interaction with diplomats and fractious allies, and command of large organizations that were the necessary skill set for successful theater commanders. A more seasoned general with more diverse experiences was the ideal. He had also been tainted by the Tillman affair, and by allegations of torture conducted at “black” sites under his purview in Iraq. Nevertheless, we hoped for the best. After McKiernan’s firing, we would need strong and sound leadership to succeed.
In the preceding months, I had worked hard to get up to speed on our mission, but I would have much to learn. General Scaparrotti, in a departure from earlier commanders, had elected to focus on the “information fight”—the struggle for the support of the Afghan population—as our top priority. For many years, influencing audiences in support of the Afghanistan enterprise had been poorly coordinated and synchronized. Recognizing the critical importance of information, his Combined Joint Task Force or CJTF-82 made it the centerpiece of the campaign plan. Traditionally, the different “messaging” entities found in the division headquarters—the public affairs (PA) and information operations (IO) sections as well as a newly created Key Leader Engagement (KLE) cell—reported to different heads, complicating coherent messaging. To fix this, Scaparrotti created the Communications Action Group (CAG), a small but powerful command and control node chartered to integrate and coordinate the information line of operation in support of the campaign plan. My assignment was to serve as its chief.
My background as a former brigade commander with multiple tours in the 82nd was helpful in bridging the gap between the Fort Bragg regulars who formed the permanent division staff, and the many reservists and augmentees who joined us to flesh out the CJTF staff. I set about trying to “build the airplane in flight.” My immediate staff included a senior Department of the Army public affairs civilian, two Army Reserve lieutenant colonels (both former battalion commanders with Iraq experience and both future general officers) and a master sergeant (E-8) as my Noncommissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC). This was none other than Nick Keane. Scap had somehow pried him loose from SOCOM. He had served extensively in Afghanistan since our last deployment together with Special Forces, seeing heavy combat in Uruzgan province. He knew as little about information operations as I did, but he knew the Army and he knew war. Once again, he would be my warhorse.
Now deep into the Global War on Terror, the Army still pressed on with its “modular brigade” concept, through Rumsfeld had long since departed. The practical effect was that none of the combat brigades task organized under the 82nd were “organic” to the division. Scaparrotti would command unfamiliar brigades with unfamiliar commanders—it would be “discovery” learning for all from the outset. The 4th Brigade (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, commanded by Colonel (later Lieutenant General) Mike Howard came out of Alaska and was responsible for Khowst, Paktia, and Paktika provinces. The 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, commanded by Colonel (later Lieutenant General) Randy George, was based in Colorado and held responsibility for Kunar, Laghman, Nangarhar, and Nuristan provinces. The 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, commanded by Colonel (later Major General) Dave Haight, covered Logar and Wardak provinces.3 A National Guard headquarters with support troops from the 38th Division was responsible for the quieter Bamyan, Kapisa, Panjshir, and Parwan provinces, while a French regiment worked Kapisa province and a Polish battlegroup held down Ghazni province. In all, counting support units, CJTF-82 included some 24,000 troops and covered an area the size of New York state with 10 million inhabitants. With poor roads, towering mountains, and bad flying weather for much of the year, we would find ourselves stretched very thin indeed.
One of the causes of General McKiernan’s relief had been his refusal to import a corps headquarters to handle the tactical and operational fighting, so that ISAF could focus on the politico-military, theater strategic and coalition aspects of the campaign (more than 30 nations were present and on the ground at the time). McChrystal moved quickly to establish a provisional corps headquarters, calling it “IJC” for “ISAF Joint Command.” Later, trained standing corps headquarters would be provided, but for the coming year IJC would have to serve. Its commander was Lieutenant General Dave Rodriguez, another former 82nd commander. I knew him well; his daughter had babysat regularly for us on an earlier tour.4 Rodriguez would make the most of his pickup team, but forming a trained battle staff out of a collection of individuals would take time.
Very quickly, I learned that Afghanistan was different from Iraq in at least two key ways. In Iraq, with its many all-weather, hard-surfaced roads, movement by vehicle was the norm. While IEDs were a major threat, they were usually not dug into the concrete/asphalt roadbed, an engineering task beyond the capabilities of most insurgents. Instead, they tended to be sited just off the roadway and triggered as the target vehicle moved past. Because we moved at speed, more often than not the IED blast was slightly early, or slightly late. Except for the EFP, the chances of survival were good.
In Afghanistan, with its sparse, unimproved roads, the IED would usually be buried in the roadway, triggered by a pressure plate and with its blast directed straight up. Thousands of culverts, used to divert mountain runoff, dotted the roads and provided ideal IED locations. These weapons tended to be much larger and, because they did not miss, very destructive. Accordingly, in Afghanistan helicopters were the preferred mode of transport.
But here, too, we faced difficulties. Dangerous mountain terrain and frequent bad flying weather degraded our ability to use our helos to best advantage. Our standard troop-carrying assault helicopter, the UH60L Black Hawk, had not been designed to carry heavy loads above 10,000 feet. Typically, only six fully loaded combat troops could be carried instead of the normal 12 in the Hindu Kush. To compensate, units often used the CH47D Chinook, a much larger and less agile helo not well suited for combat assaults. Occasionally, one would be downed with catastrophic results, as when a Chinook was shot down in Wardak province in 2011, killing all 38 aboard, including 25 Navy SEALs. (Eighteen ISAF Chinooks would crash or be shot down during our sojourn in Afghanistan.) In a long career, I had trained and fought all over the world. No place on earth was worse than Afghanistan. It was as if mother nature herself conspired against us.
In the months leading up to the deployment, I had studied the CAG concept thoroughly. It represented a novel approach, but one with real potential. The specified mission of the CAG was to “develop, synchronize and execute the RC-East communications strategy to gain and maintain the initiative against the enemy and maintain the public support necessary to achieve success in Afghanistan.” Its work was principally carried out through weekly meetings with public affairs, information operations and key leader engagement chiefs (all lieutenant colonels), as well as the Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) company commander; weekly communications strategy working groups; and participation in all other major staff events.
To prepare for the mission we had studied The Quranic Concept of War, written by Pakistani General S. K. Malik. In his book, Malik identified the human heart and will as the primary object in warfare, inferring the primacy of the psychological domain. This view, which is foreign to traditional Western perspectives, is inherent in virtually all insurgent warfare. The enemy in Afghanistan rarely fought to take or hold ground; every operation was conducted with an information objective in mind. The object of the insurgent was to convince the population that the government could not provide security or basic services, an approach often used to highlight ethnic tensions and rivalries. For example, the insurgency in Afghanistan was (and is) a Pashtun-driven phenomenon, propelled by fears of domination by a minority, Tajik-controlled military or state structure and by historic Pashtun nationalist aspirations.
This did not mean that the Taliban were monolithic. In fact, though loosely controlled by the “Quetta Shura” (a group of senior Taliban leaders sequestered inside Pakistan and led by Mullah Omar), the Taliban was composed of many different groups, some—like the brutal Haqqani network—almost autonomous. Though not integrated with al Qaeda, they had never renounced their ties with our mortal enemy. Other Afghan warlords, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, wavered between attacking ISAF and seeking office inside the government. A particularly nasty case was Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan Uzbek and Northern Alliance leader. In a checkered career he had fought with the Russians against the mujahidin, switched sides again and again, been tried for war crimes, and ultimately rose to become vice president of Afghanistan. (He was removed from office in 2017 amid charges of sexually assaulting an Afghan male.) In Afghanistan, the cast of characters was an inscrutable mosaic, hard to comprehend and wargame against. Many of the players had fought as mujahidin against the Russians in the 1980s. Though they lacked airpower and artillery, they were combat-hardened and knew the ground intimately. And they were ruthless, unencumbered by our rules of engagement and always ready to kill civilians to further their goals.
We communicated with the population in three primary ways. The most important was by radio or television broadcast. Some of the RC-East population (mostly in the more urban areas such as Jalalabad, Ghazni, Gardez, and Khowst) had access to television. The rest of the population relied on radio for much of their information and entertainment. Accordingly, we handed out hundreds of thousands of hand-cranked AM/FM radios, mostly in rural areas. Building on an existing network, CJTF-82 expanded to more than fifty 300-watt systems and added four 1,000-watt AM systems as well, greatly extending the reach of our messaging. These commercial systems, called RIABs (for “Radio in a Box”), employed locally recruited Afghan DJs and operated from NATO bases throughout RC-East. Using Afghan programming obtained through commercial contracts, the systems enabled coalition forces to reach into all but the most mountainous areas with local news, poetry, music and religious content, as well as with public service announcements crafted in accordance with our overall communications strategy. We also purchased airtime from commercial radio stations to augment their broadcasts. While ISAF headquarters conducted broadcast messaging nationwide, we focused on regional themes that were of more immediate interest to each specific local population. We supplemented broadcast messaging with print products such as posters, handbills, billboards, and leaflets, which were designed to communicate visually to a largely illiterate population.
As with radio and television spots, print products employed local Afghan staff to ensure coherent and culturally authentic messages. Our 40-man Afghan staff also promoted pre-testing, using focus groups throughout the local community. Prepared by the supporting PSYOP company, print products were vetted at our level during weekly boards (which included legal and cultural advisors as well as human terrain staff) and were then approved by me. In the weeks preceding the national elections in late summer of 2009, we disseminated a million “get-out-the-vote” print products every week—more than the Afghan government distributed across the entire country.
