Military history

12. Afghanistan

I WAS LYING in a hammock flying into Afghanistan. The hammock hung from two carabineers, one clipped to the metal wall of the aircraft and the other clipped to a cargo box full of weapons. The plane flew full of a tangle of men and boxes packed with gear. Men read in hammocks, slept on crash pads, and sat in the webbed seats of the aircraft with their feet up and headphones on as we flew into a combat zone. I was rereading a book about the Taliban.

On September 11, 2001, I don't know that I'd ever heard of al Qaeda before. In graduate school I had studied—briefly—the history of Afghanistan. I knew that the Russians had invaded the country and I knew that they had failed. I knew that Afghanistan was littered with unexploded ordnance and land mines and that these weapons often exploded and left civilian men, women, and children without limbs. I knew that Afghanistan was ruled by a vicious tyranny called the Taliban and that the Taliban was famous in the West for its brutal treatment of women. In 2001 that was about all I knew. If you'd pressed me then, I don't think that I could have even named all of the countries that border Afghanistan.

As a kid, I had read with awe about Alexander the Great. He had conquered a territory stretching from Macedonia to Egypt and across to the northern territories of modern India. After September 11, when I started to educate myself about Afghanistan, I read that Alexander's toughest battles took place in the Hindu Kush Mountains on the border of modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, where thousands of his men were slaughtered. Alexander's fibula was broken when an Afghan warrior shot him with an arrow, and in another battle, he suffered a concussion when an Afghan fighter smashed a rock on his head.1

Other foreign armies followed Alexander. Outside East Asia, Genghis Khan and his Mongol warriors suffered their only defeat in the province of Parwan, Afghanistan. The British invaded in 1839 with relatively few casualties, but by 1841 the people of Afghanistan were in open revolt of the British occupation. The approximately 16,500 remaining British troops and their families attempted to retreat in the dead of winter to Jelalabad. By the end of the two-week, ninety-mile journey only a single man stumbled through the gates of Jelalabad. More than 16,000 others lay dead on the roads, frozen by the winter cold or slaughtered by the Afghan tribes in two feet of snow piled in tight mountain passes. By the end of the year, the British withdrew their troops, only to invade again thirty years later.

In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up an unpopular Communist government on the verge of collapse. Instead of defeating the rebellious tribes, the Soviet troops served only to unite the Afghan warlords into a new movement: the Mujahideen. The sole goal of the Mujahideen was to evict the Soviets from the country by means of raids and ambushes.

With overwhelming force, the Soviets pushed the Mujahideen into the mountains. To root out the fighters, the Russians began brutal aerial assaults to "depopulate" Afghan village hideouts. The Russians carpet-bombed the mountainside. They unleashed fearsome Mi-24 helicopters, loaded with missiles and powerful machine guns that fired thirty-nine hundred rounds per minute. They napalmed green valleys into a naked and fire-charred countryside. They dropped millions of mines onto Afghan farmland, some of the mines disguised as toys to attract children.2

The Mujahideen—who fought back with World War II—era equipment—seemed trapped and helpless under the assault of the overwhelming aerial firepower of the Russians. The United States then began to supply the Mujahideen with the Stinger, America's latest heat-seeking antiaircraft missile, and the Mujahideen began knocking the dreaded helicopters, fighter jets, and other aircraft out of the air. The tide of the war shifted. By the time the Soviets withdrew in 1989, they had lost nearly fourteen thousand troops and hundreds of tanks and aircraft.

The Russian withdrawal left a power vacuum, and in 1992 an alliance of tribes wrested the capital city of Kabul from the remnants of the Communist government. Throughout Afghanistan, warlords fought other warlords for territory, looted civilians of their meager possessions, and kidnapped young boys and girls.3 The opium trade was used to finance military operations,4 and the people of Afghanistan suffered horribly in the crossfire as tribes and drug kingpins and local warlords fought for money and territory and control of the drug trade.

Out of the chaos arose the Taliban. The Taliban originally gained power because they promised to be a force for good. "Talib" means student, and the Taliban were students of the Qur'an who promised to root out corruption and establish a strong Islamic state. The Taliban defended the general population from the violence, rape, and pillaging of warring tribes, and they spread rapidly across Afghanistan as thousands of young idealistic men joined their ranks.5 The growth of the Taliban brought stability and order, and the Taliban nearly eradicated opium production by early 2001.6

But the Taliban also brought about their own brutal repression. In a Taliban-ruled country, a hungry child who stole bread lost a hand. Women fared worst of all. Communities gathered to watch women accused of adultery be wrapped in white cloth, buried in the ground up to the shoulders, then stoned to death. Thousands packed into soccer stadiums to watch women publicly hung from the crossbars of soccer goals for "crimes" against Islam. The Taliban banned television, music, photography, and kite flying. They beat women who allowed even an inch of their skin to show.7 The Taliban also famously harbored a terrorist by the name of Osama bin Laden.

By the spring of 2001, the Taliban controlled 90 percent of the territory in Afghanistan. The remaining tribes who opposed them were united into the Northern Alliance, led by the charismatic and brilliant Ahmad Shah Massoud. Known as the Lion of Panjshir, Massoud was the key leader holding the tenuous Northern Alliance together. On September 9, 2001, Massoud was assassinated by al Qaeda suicide bombers posing as Algerian journalists (they had bombs hidden in their fake video camera). Two days later, planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

On September 14, 2001, Congress granted President George W. Bush the power to find and kill anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks. "The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."8 President Bush demanded that the Taliban surrender Osama bin Laden. The Taliban refused.

Paramilitary forces infiltrated Afghanistan. They carried with them stacks of hundred-dollar bills to bribe tribal leaders of the Northern Alliance, and they also promised the assistance of fearsome American air power. U.S. Special Forces arrived in late October and joined their Afghani allies.9 From horseback, American soldiers called in coordinates for air strikes, and tribesmen of the Northern Alliance galloped in to kill scattered Taliban troops. With the help of a handful of U.S. Special Forces and CIA officers, the Northern Alliance defeated more than fifty thousand Taliban soldiers, pushed the Taliban out of power, and drove them into the mountains. It was one of the most effective campaigns ever waged by the United States. By the time we took Kandahar, we had lost only twelve lives, and the entire effort cost just $70 million.10 Bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda leaders were still at large, but if we had paused in early 2002, we might well have assessed that we'd already won the war, and that we'd done so with deadly efficiency.

It was now the summer of 2003, and as I flew into Afghanistan, I was worried about the U.S. mission. Afghanistan had always been easy to invade and impossible to conquer. We had already driven the Taliban from power and denied al Qaeda the ability to conduct operations out of Afghanistan. We still had men that we needed to kill, but that required well-placed sources, possibly the cooperation of allies in Pakistan, and well-trained commando forces, not occupation.

We were flying into a huge base that was now manned by tens of thousands of Americans. Even during periods of relative peace and prosperity, Afghanistan had no history of centralized control. If we intended to subdue the country and build a democracy along American lines, that seemed like a mission that would take decades, and it was unclear when or how we'd ever be able to declare victory.

I was with a team of SEAL commandos and our mission was clear: to hunt and kill senior al Qaeda targets. This required local cooperation, intelligence, and a functioning network of allies. It did not require us to build a democracy.

Before we left the States, I received a brief on the rules of engagement—the rules that govern the use of force in Afghanistan. In almost all cases, we could use deadly force only if the enemy engaged in a hostile act or demonstrated hostile intent. There were, however, a few targets who were "declared hostile." I had remembered from my SEAL training what it meant to declare a force hostile:

Declaring Forces Hostile. Once a force is declared hostile by appropriate

authority, U.S. units need not observe a hostile act or a demonstration of

hostile intent before engaging that force.11

Bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda leaders had been declared hostile. Explaining rules of engagement can sometimes be complicated. In this case, it was very simple: if you see Bin Laden or one of his associates, kill him.

We were about to test the proposition that using disciplined force and doing good can go hand in hand in a confusing, chaotic country. When we arrived in Bagram, I walked into a makeshift briefing room and sat on a stack of brown-boxed MREs and listened as a SEAL senior chief gave a brief. "We're here to kill Bin Laden and his chief associates. If Bin Laden is here"—he pointed to an area high on the briefing board—"and we're here"—he pointed low—"and we are able to take down some of his key lieutenants, and get closer to Bin Laden"—he pointed to the middle of the board—"then we will have succeeded."

The group around me nodded their heads. These men were members of an elite SEAL team. They wore nontraditional uniforms with almost no insignia, and the majority of them wore beards. Many of them had served in the SEAL teams for more than a decade. They were the very best special operations commandos in the world. In comparison, I was fresh out of SEAL Qualification Training. Imagine a guy who has just been drafted into the NFL sitting in the locker room at the Pro Bowl. While I had been in field training exercises, assaulting mock compounds guarded by Americans dressed like Afghanis, most of these men had been conducting real operations, spilling real blood. I had a tremendous amount to learn.

I had come to join this mission at the invitation of Captain Campbell, then the commanding officer of the team. I'd come to know Captain Campbell through a friend and colleague, Dr. Aaron Rawls. Rawls and Captain Campbell told me that given my time working in war zones overseas, they wanted me to take a fresh look at our work in Afghanistan and see if there might be ways to improve our interactions with potential allies. SEALs had spent thousands of hours training to kill their enemies, but to win this war we also needed to win friends. Alliances had been key in defeating the Taliban, and we needed allies to help us hunt individual men in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Another key element in defeating al Qaeda was human intelligence. The United States of America had the best signals and electronic intelligence in the world, but we were fighting an enemy that often passed messages via couriers who rode on horseback through the mountains. There was no substitute for intelligence won through interpersonal contact with Afghanis. How could we adjust our operations so that we could win friends?

Before leaving the base, we piled into a convoy of Toyota Hilux pickup trucks. As we drove on a practice range, a small explosive charge went off to simulate incoming fire. Men stepped out of the trucks, took cover, and the mountainside erupted in bullets and rockets as we returned fire against an imaginary enemy.

When we walked back to our barracks, I saw pinned to a board a printed picture of a Navy SEAL operator—a member of this team—who had died fighting in Afghanistan. The men I was driving with had been at the very tip of the spear of American military operations for nearly two years. They had paid a price in blood, but their experience had made them sharp.

Later, as we drove over rocky ground, a tire went flat on one of the trucks. I jumped out and grabbed a lug wrench and squatted on the rocky soil and started to change the tire. I was glad to be useful. My dad had taught me how to change a tire on our Ford when I was sixteen years old. After all my years at Oxford and my experience in SEAL training, it was my dad's lesson on the driveway that allowed me to do my first positive thing serving in the military overseas.

I went to Kabul with the headquarters element of the team, and after a few days of work there I left for a firebase. The firebase compound was surrounded by high mud walls. There was a dirt field inside the compound—just about the size of a baseball infield—and parked there were a dozen Humvees and Hilux trucks. Inside the firebase headquarters, beat-up desks were loaded with computers and the glow of the monitors lit the faces of the men who stood up periodically to move pins on a map to indicate where American teams were moving on the battlefield. Atop the highest wall of the compound, satellite antennas reached into the air beside the flapping flag of the Chicago Bears, a testament to the presence of troops from the Illinois National Guard.

Each day our team, dressed in battle armor, riding military vehicles, carrying our weapons, drove out of the compound to try to make friends. We met with local businessmen, village elders, pharmacists, informants. We worked in a mixed team of SEALs, members of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal experts, Air Force Combat Controllers, Air Force Pararescue Jumpers, Army Civil Affairs personnel, and members of other government agencies. Each person brought his own skill set to the team. The FBI agent, trained to speak with witnesses and suspects, was often good in conversation and was trained in evidence collection. The Air Force Pararescue Jumpers were some of the best combat medics in the world. The SEAL teams were incredible assault teams, and in the event that we had actionable intelligence, they could plan, brief, and execute a complex tactical capture/kill operation better than any force in the world.

We tried to put on a friendly face yet be ready for violence at a moment's notice. On one of our first trips out of our compound, our convoy entered a traffic circle. As we drove around the circle, I looked to my left. "Man with an AK-47, passenger seat, white Toyota." The man had black hair, an unkempt beard. He looked back at me with brown eyes and his lips parted to show yellowing teeth. I laid the barrel of my rifle to rest on the open window, and I tilted the muzzle so that I could take a shot if he raised his weapon to fire. We turned right, his car turned left, and he was gone.

We turned onto a narrow road paved not quite wide enough for two trucks to pass each other. Each time we passed another vehicle our convoy ran along the side of the road and our wheels kicked up dust. But for the occasional transmission to let headquarters know our position, there was minimal radio traffic. I sat in the back seat of one of the pickups on a thick green ballistic blanket meant to provide some protection in the event of a blast.

Before us, brown mountains stood in the distance like sentries. The landscape had a desolate beauty: sun, rocks, clean air, mountains. We passed a caravan of camels, their shaggy humps laden with bulging sacks, water jugs, blankets. At the head of the caravan rode a man on a donkey. As we passed him, he turned his head, wrapped in a clay-red turban, and squinted into the sun, and I saw the deep lines etched into his bearded face. We drove past the charred skeleton of a burned-out Volkswagen, and we turned off the paved road and onto a dirt track.

We pulled into a village—a warren of mud-brick homes surrounded by fields sprouting green from the baked brown earth. Here, we acted like Doctors Without Borders. Our team medics unzipped bags of gear and medicine and they listened with a translator as villagers came to them with complaints: "This boy cut his hand," or "This man's elbow is bleeding," and our medic cleaned the wounds and wrapped them in fresh bandages. Our medics could treat minor ailments, but when the translator pointed to an older man—"He says that his chest is in pain, his heart is not strong"—there was little the medics could do but offer the man a vial of aspirin.

I walked around the village with an Army Civil Affairs officer and one of the village leaders. I guessed the village leader to be in his forties. He was thin and wore a broad black turban and walked with sure-footed vigor. He made wide gestures at the land around him as he talked more quickly than our translator could interpret. He talked about his need for a well and the Civil Affairs officer asked some basic questions about how the villagers got their water now. How do they irrigate their crops? Is the drinking water clean? To the elder, we were a potential source of money and services.

The leader asked us about our lives: Did we have children? How long have we been freedom fighters? I told him that I used to do work caring for children and communities, but that now I had become a soldier. He replied to me through the translator, and the translator and two other Afghanis started to laugh. "He says you are the same as him, but backwards. First, he is commander who fight the Taliban. Now, he is to be chief of village. He says much easier to fight the Taliban. There was less yelling and complaints."

Later that day in another village I stood outside a medical clinic with other members of our team on guard. We held security while a meeting took place in the clinic. Children slowly approached us with friendly banter.

"America, good!"

"Afghanistan, good!" I yelled back, and more children came around. For a moment I was reminded of being surrounded by the children in Croatia as I walked into the refugee camp, and of the children in Cambodia who swarmed around us when we stepped into their villages. I felt strange here now, body armor on, rifle in my gloved hands, magazines loaded. There were some older teenagers in the group, and I scanned the crowd for threats, looked for weapons. I made a note of where the other SEALs were standing and I thought, What should we do if someone shoots at us from that house to the north? What if someone drives by in a truck on that road to the south and opens fire? What if... Only a few years ago I would have been holding a camera and organizing a game. Now I was holding a rifle and planning contingencies in case of attack.

Our convoy left in a cloud of dust. I sat back in the truck next to my "go bag," a small bag containing basic essentials we'd need if we had to make a quick escape—a survival radio, extra med gear, extra ammo. We drove to another village and met with a shop owner who was a former associate of the terrorist we were hunting. His shop had been blown up several months ago, and he described with a few phrases in reasonable English that everything he owned had been destroyed. He was friendly but unhelpful; his eyes darted left and right as he spoke, and I left feeling sure that he was reluctant to talk with us because he was afraid of the consequences of cooperation. We walked out of his shop with few answers and stepped back into our trucks.

Much of our schedule was dictated by members of other government agencies who wanted to meet with potential sources and track down leads. The other government agencies lacked the trucks, weapons, and security they needed to move freely and safely around Afghanistan. These other government agencies sometimes had, however, more language ability, a better cultural understanding of the environment, and, most importantly, more financial freedom than the military.

The military requires stacks of paperwork for even the most meager financial transaction. Members of other government agencies had more freedom to pay for information, to pay local contractors to build wells in villages, to pay for a host of projects that might help to open relationships.

The money worked. You can't buy peace, but you can sometimes make a down payment on it, and it struck me that it was much cheaper to invest money in relationships with potential Afghani allies than it was to house, feed, arm, water, transport, and supply tens of thousands of American troops. Not every investment paid dividends, but if we could pay one man a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars to give us quality information on a high-level terrorist, and we could use that information to capture or kill our target, it was cheaper and more effective than spending millions of dollars on complex signals intelligence collection platforms that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate and rarely gave us a clear line of attack on our targets. If we could pay a local leader a few thousand dollars a month and buy safe passage for our forces, the goodwill of a village, and information on al Qaeda, it was far more effective than sending twice-daily patrols of kids from Missouri rolling through villages to project "presence," in the hope that the people of Afghanistan would become enamored with Americans.

I love American idealism. I love the hopeful spirit of Americans endeavoring to shape the world for the better. A lot of times, though, many Americans—especially those in senior positions in government and the military—who have never spent a day working with people who suffer, can be blinded by the bright shining light of their own hopes. You cruise through a town where you don't speak the language and offer someone a conversation about freedom or fifty bucks, most people will take the cash, thank you very much.

I'd learned, working in Croatia, Rwanda, Albania, Cambodia, and Gaza, the very simple lesson that people were smart enough to know what they needed, and if we wanted to have credibility with them, we had to be able to help them directly.

As we sat in villages under a fierce sun and talked with haggard, scarred, and bearded men who looked to be in their mid-fifties, they often smiled at us and told us that they were in their early thirties. The average life expectancy in Afghanistan was forty-three years old. The infant mortality rate was estimated to be about 257 out of every thousand. In the United States, by comparison, the infant mortality rate was six out of every thousand.12 In graduate school I had often looked at the United Nations Human Development Index, which ranks countries on the basis of "three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living."13 Full statistics were hard to come by for Afghanistan because of the movement of refugees across the borders and the ongoing war, but generally speaking, Afghanistan ranked approximately 174 out of the 178 countries of the Human Development Index; one of the poorest, harshest, and most brutal places to live in the world.14

The men on the SEAL teams were impressive. The days were long, the air full of dust. Often our visits seemed fruitless, and as we drove from one village to another we ate meals of MREs in hot pickup trucks. Yet even at the end of a long day every radio transmission was crisp, every potential threat was noted. We drove one early evening as the sun was fading, when a call came over the radio, "Stop him! White Toyota, the passenger, that's our guy!"

"Get him!"

I jumped out of the truck, stepped into the street, and pointed my rifle at the chest of the oncoming driver. A white compact car with two Afghani men was rushing toward me. I shuffled two steps backward so that I could move behind our truck while firing if the car accelerated at me, but the driver applied the brakes and the car slowed. The passenger and the driver threw their hands into the air. I held my rifle on them as other men on our team opened the doors to their car and pulled both men from the vehicle. We searched their car and emerged with a blue notebook; did it have intelligence value? As we questioned the driver, a crowd began to form on the road. Afghani men approached to see what was happening. They stood with their arms crossed on their chests, and then they would shout and point at us as they yelled to other Afghani men joining the crowd. Eyes narrowed.

"Two cars stopped on the road, one hundred meters south. Men emerging."

"I've got three men on a rooftop, two hundred meters east, one of them with a stick or an AK in his hands."

More people began to step from their stopped cars. Children and young boys inched closer.

"There's a truck stopped on the road to the west, blue truck, about fifty meters back. Has five guys in it, all young, all full beards, all black turbans."

We released the driver and quickly ushered his passenger into one of our trucks. Every man on our team jumped in a truck and one second later our convoy was accelerating away.

I sat in the room while Chris, a professional interrogator working with our team, spoke with the detainee. "Assalaam alaikum," Chris said and shook the hand of the man who was now our prisoner. Chris touched his hand to his heart. Chris handed the man a candy bar, opened it for him, and asked the prisoner if he'd had enough to eat. Yes, he had, he said, thank you.

So tell me about yourself, Chris said, what is your profession? The man said that he was a farmer.

"Where is your farm?"

The man answered. "And what kind of crops do you grow?" The man answered. "And where were you going when my friends stopped you?" The man explained that he was returning to his village in a car driven by the friend of a relative. He had been on a trip to sell something and he was now on his way home.

Chris sat comfortably, and he occasionally asked the man if he needed anything to drink, if he was sure that he wasn't hungry. As they talked, Chris covered the same ground as before, often with slightly different questions: "Do you often make this trip? What kind of crops did you grow last year?"

Chris talked with the man for a few hours, and by the end of the conversation Chris assessed that we had detained the wrong man. Our prisoner was, it seemed, indeed a farmer, who had been on a personal errand when at the end of a long day we mistook him for a terrorist and yanked him from his vehicle. Chris explained to the man that we were very sorry to have caused him this inconvenience. Chris explained that our prisoner looked similar to a known terrorist who had been murdering innocent people in the area, and that we were doing our best to protect the local population. Chris said that the American people have a great respect for the people of Afghanistan, and that we had a desire to work with them. Chris said that we would provide this man money in the morning to help him make the trip back to his village and to pay him for the trouble we had caused him.

I later watched other young Army interrogators try to intimidate detainees into talking, and I never saw one of those interrogators get a single piece of useful information. Chris was a professional, and he knew what worked. The world's best interrogators proceed not by fear and intimidation, but by establishing rapport with their prisoners and learning from them over time. We'd learned in Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school that the world's most effective interrogators, from World War II to the present day, are men who use their intelligence to establish rapport and gain information.

There is a famous picture from World War II of the legendary interrogator Major Sherwood Moran of the Marine Corps "breaking" Japanese POWs.15 In contrast to images of dogs held several feet from prisoners to scare them, Moran is sitting on a cloth foldaway chair across from a Japanese prisoner. He is listening intently, his body leaning forward and eyes focused on the prisoner. This practice of highly effective, respectful, intelligent, and noncoercive interrogation has been applied effectively to al Qaeda, too.

Jack Cloonan, a special agent who worked at the FBI's Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002 described the following incident of "breaking" a terrorist.

One man we captured was Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, an al-Qaeda operative behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Ali Mohamed had fully expected to be tortured once we took him in. Instead, we assured him that we wouldn't harm him, and we offered to protect his family. Within weeks, we had opened a gold mine of information about al-Qaeda's operations.

Ali Mohamed wasn't unique. We gave our word to every detainee that no harm would come to him or his family. This invariably stunned them, and they would feel more obligated to cooperate. Also, because all information led to more information, detainees were astonished to find out how much we already knew about them—their networks, their families, their histories. Some seemed relieved to reveal their secrets. When they broke, the transformations were remarkable. Their bodies would go limp. Many would weep. Most would ask to pray. These were men undergoing profound emotional and spiritual turmoil—the result of going from a belief that their destiny was to fight and kill people like us to a decision that they should cooperate with the enemy.16

The professionals who I was working with also understood that the man we had just brought in for questioning was going to go home and tell his entire village about his experience with the Americans. There was a good chance that this man would be the first person in his village to have any interaction with Americans, and he might well live in a village with no newspapers, magazines, or TV news coverage. His story would likely be the story of Americans in Afghanistan. What happened to you? How did the Americans treat you? Are they like the Russians? The British? This man—by our best estimate—was a farmer on a personal errand being driven home by a friend when I stepped into the road and pointed my rifle at him and my teammates yanked him from his vehicle. If we were going to be able to catch real al Qaeda targets, we would need the kind of human intelligence that only men like this farmer and his friends and family could provide. In every interaction that we had, we had the opportunity to create enemies or to create friends.

Treating Afghanis well was not only essential to the conduct of the campaign to win the intelligence war. I also began to see that it was essential for ourselves. The Taliban were often well trained, arguably often better trained to fight in Afghanistan than many American troops. So what makes us different from the Taliban? What distinguishes a warrior from a thug? Certainly it's not the quality of our weapons or the length of our training. Ultimately we're distinguished by our values. It would have been easy to abuse a prisoner, but any act of wanton personal brutality is not only unproductive to defeating a group like the Taliban, but on a personal level it degrades the warrior and turns him into a thug. Any man who tortures a prisoner, who shoots an innocent person, might escape formal justice, but he can never escape his own self-knowledge. As I worked with this small group of professionals in Afghanistan, it became clear to me that men need to have the strength to conduct themselves with honor on the battlefield.

Every day the men on this team went out to meet with allies and to hunt enemies, and every moment of every day was filled with a low-grade tension. Is somebody gonna take a shot at us here? Is this guy telling us the truth? Are we driving into an ambush?

One day we stepped into our trucks and drove for an hour until we came to a collection of mud-walled buildings that were home to a local leader who had in the past provided information on al Qaeda targets. When we walked into the center of his compound, a few boys wearing skullcaps dashed away. Our contact came striding out to meet us dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and sunglasses. He talked with one of our colleagues from another government agency, and then he directed us out of the compound—he wanted our help. We walked fifty yards down a dusty lane shaded by overhanging trees. One of the members of our team pointed to opium fields on the hillside. We spread out for security, and I took a knee about twenty yards from a compact car parked under a tree. Our contact and one of our teammates walked up to the car. I watched our teammate bend at the waist and lower his sunglasses to peer through the dust-covered windows of the car, and then he started to walk away quickly while talking with his Afghani contact. The American called for our Explosive Ordnance Disposal expert, and as the EOD tech walked toward the car, I walked away from it. The car was filled with explosives. Old unexploded artillery shells lined the seats. It was unclear if the car had been parked outside the compound as a bomb but had failed to go off. Some of the men from the village had pushed the car down the street to move it away.

"Well, tell everyone not to touch it again."

The man wanted our help to safely blow up the bomb. Our team could destroy small amounts of explosives, but we had only one EOD tech and he assessed that the explosives were too unstable, and the bomb was too close to the village for him to safely blow it in place. We called in to headquarters to have an EOD team sent out to the village to destroy the bomb. By the time we jumped back into our pickup trucks we had information about a possible Taliban bed-down location nearby. Our contact explained that there was a group of young Taliban fighters in the area.

As we drove for the suspected Taliban site, we called back to headquarters and had an unmanned aerial vehicle diverted to look at the campsite for any human activity. As we bounced along the road, our team leader worked at a ruggedized laptop computer to plot our position in relation to the target site. The site appeared empty, but it was daytime. Should the team plan a night reconnaissance, possibly an ambush?

When the UAV had been deployed, we turned and drove to meet with another potential ally in the area. The police station was set on a relatively well-manicured compound that hosted a set of white-painted buildings, and we talked with the head of the local force as he smoked a cigarette. What had he learned since our last conversation? Did he have any information on the targets we were tracking? Had he heard about a suspected Taliban camp in the area? Sitting in a disheveled Afghani police uniform and filling a tray with ashes, the officer talked about how difficult it was to train and feed and equip his men. Someone from the government had promised him more money, but it had not arrived. He asked, could we help him?

This police chief wanted money, and he probably had information that we needed. At first glance, it seemed a simple question: should we pay him?

Every interaction in Afghanistan was, however, more complicated than it first seemed, and the success of our campaign depended upon tens of thousands of individual human interactions just like this one.

The police chief—and every Afghani we talked with—had his own allegiances, to the government, to the Taliban, to his ethnic group, to his tribe, to his personal financial gain, to his family's honor, to his professional career. He had his personal loyalties, his personal quirks. In order for us to win here, we had to have friends and allies, but building those friends and allies could only happen if we worked through barriers of language and geography and culture and custom.

Most of the professionals I knew had made an effort—as I had—to brush up on their history of Afghanistan. But just when we thought we understood the history of the Taliban, we began to learn that we also had to pay attention to ethnic differences in Afghanistan—between, for example, Tajiks and Pashtuns. And just when we thought we had begun to understand ethnic groups, we learned that we had to understand tribes.

Of course, once we began to understand tribes, we realized that we had to try to understand the particular issues and difficulties of the communities and individuals with whom we were interacting. And of all the incredible men on my team, there wasn't a single one who spoke more than twenty words of Pashto or Dari—the major languages in Afghanistan—or more than twenty words of Arabic—a predominant language among al Qaeda fighters.

The stakes involved in every interaction were incredibly high and we learned fast, but American forces usually deployed for three, seven, or twelve months. Because of the frequent rotation of forces in and out of Afghanistan, knowledge was lost.

I felt like I was just beginning to get a sense of the fight. Afghanistan is about the size of the state of Texas, and depending on how you count refugees, the population is generally thought to be about 30 million people. The population is overwhelmingly rural. If you took twenty-five of the major cities in Afghanistan, they would only encompass about 20 percent of the population.17 In contrast, 80 percent of America's population lives in an urban/metropolitan area.18

The population, moreover, was spread out over one of the most mountainous and inaccessible countries in the world. If we wanted allies, they'd be difficult to find and difficult to supply. And when we did make it to their villages, we'd find a population that was 70 percent illiterate, living in an economy that was—next to Somalia—one of the worst in the world.

More difficult still, this fight involved Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, where at that very moment, much of al Qaeda was waiting, training, organizing, equipping, and rearming, just over the border.

All of this suggested that the mission in Afghanistan would be complicated and difficult, but perhaps the most difficult aspect of the fight was that it was not at all clear what our long-term mission actually was. Was our aim to defeat al Qaeda? Was our aim to defeat the Taliban? Was our aim to build a functioning democracy and prosperous economy in Afghanistan?

I felt that—even in 2003—we had begun to misremember what happened in Afghanistan in 2001. We began to think that we had defeated the Taliban and driven al Qaeda into Pakistan. It was true that American financing, air power, and military personnel had been essential to the effort, but the ground forces in that fight were Afghans. Our allies, the Northern Alliance, were the predominant forces that had defeated the Taliban on the ground, and it concerned me that now, just a year and a half later, the American "campaign" didn't seem to have a clear enough plan for recruiting and supporting our allies. We also seemed to confuse the Taliban with al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda was a foreign force, made up of men like Bin Laden, from Saudi Arabia, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, from Egypt. Of the nineteen hijackers who had participated in 9/11, fifteen of them were from Saudi Arabia. The Taliban, by contrast, was an Afghani force. And it seemed to me that they both required a different approach. Al Qaeda terrorists had attacked the United States. They represented a threat and they needed to be killed. Some of the Taliban also needed to be killed, but the Taliban was a wide and diverse group with many competing interests and a history of shifting allegiances, and it seemed to me that we had better determine for certain who among them needed to be fought before we launched a shooting war with tens of thousands of men spread throughout a mountainous country.

The Taliban and al Qaeda were associated, but not the same, and in order for us to fight effectively, we had to be laser-focused on killing and capturing the right people, and building as many allies as we could.

Some people argued that in order to defeat al Qaeda and secure American interests we had to defeat the Taliban, and that in order to defeat the Taliban we had to build a democracy in Afghanistan. This seemed to me like arguing that in order to rid your house of rats you had to replace the walls in your home and then build an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the backyard. To turn Afghanistan into a country with a highly functioning democracy, a well-run economy, and a prosperous population is a noble vision. But defeating al Qaeda is a more pressing and more modest mission, not to mention a clear mission that we could achieve. But it also seemed to me that it would require us to keep our efforts in Afghanistan focused.

If our strategy to defeat al Qaeda was going to require us to build democracies and economies, then we had to do that work not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in Somalia, Yemen, and a dozen other enclaves and countries around the world.

We returned to the firebase that night while a UAV patrolled over the site of the suspected Taliban camp. Our phone rang, and I answered it. The commander of our unit in Kabul was on the other end. "I talked with Bruce. SEAL Team One and Special Boat Team Twelve want you to go back and take command of the Mark V detachment before the next field training exercise." In other words, they were sending me stateside already.

I shut my eyes in disappointment.

"Yes, sir. I'll be ready to go."

I had spent only a few weeks in Afghanistan. I had only just begun to feel that I had my body armor riding well. Before I had come to Afghanistan, I had taken command of a Mark V special operations craft detachment that was preparing to deploy to Southeast Asia. The deployment wasn't scheduled to leave for several months, and we thought that I'd have all that time to spend in Afghanistan. No luck.

I left Afghanistan through the main base at Bagram, full of the French, Dutch, Polish, and German flags of our allies. I passed the giant chow halls where thousands of meals were prepared for soldiers every day, walked past the huge bunkers, the oversized TVs, and I sat through briefings on counterdrug initiatives, legislative plans, civil affairs efforts. I remembered the village leader who said that it was much easier to fight the Taliban.

When I got back to San Diego, I learned that a SEAL who served in the unit I deployed with had been killed right after I left.

Now, the bullets were real.

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