The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (39 page)

The team was attached to an Army unit:
Vanessa M. Gezari, “Rough Terrain,”
Washington Post Magazine,
August 30, 2009.

The brigade’s other battalions were stationed:
In January 2008, an independent Canadian panel determined that “the most damaging and obvious deficiency in the ISAF mission in Afghanistan is the insufficiency of military forces deployed against insurgents. Therefore, Canada’s military mission in Kandahar should be conditionally extended beyond February 2009—
the extension to be expressly contingent on the deployment of additional troops by one or more ISAF countries to Kandahar province
.” (Emphasis is mine.) The deployment of the 2–2 to Maiwand in the summer of 2008 was an attempt to meet Canada’s demand for one thousand more troops in Kandahar after no other coalition partners stepped forward, Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hurlbut, the 2–2’s commander, told me. “The point of the report and the point of the request was specifically for non-U.S. countries, other coalition partners, to increase their investment  . . . in Afghanistan,” Hurlbut said. “At the time, for whatever reason, no country said, ‘I’ll do it.’ So the prime minister of Canada went to [President George W. Bush] and said, ‘Hey look, these are the things that my country is dealing with politically. The Manley Commission is
being received, these are the requirements  . . . and President Bush said, ‘Okay, you can have a battalion.’ ” Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009. The panel was known as the Manley Commission after its chair, former Canadian cabinet minister John Manley. “The Canadians call us the Manley Battalion,” the 2–2’s executive officer, Major Cale Brown, told me. “RC South has been the economy of force [theater] for years, and only now people are figuring out that this is the hotbed.” Brown, interview by author, March 22, 2009. See Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan, “Final Report,” January 2008, 35,
http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2008/dfait-maeci/FR5-20-1-2008E.pdf
, accessed August 1, 2012; CanWest News Service, “Troop Shortfall Persists in Afghanistan: Manley,” September 11, 2008; and Ian Austen, “Panel Questions Canadian Role in Afghanistan,”
New York Times,
January 23, 2008. The rest of the 1st Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team was based in Jalalabad with operations in Kunar, Nuristan, Nangarhar, and Laghman.

At first, the Americans thought Maiwand was tame:
This misconception was shared by soldiers of the 2–2 whom I met in Maiwand in 2009 and members of a different unit stationed there in 2010. Said the 2–2’s executive officer, Major Cale Brown: “I actually thought it was going to be worse. I thought it was going to be more kinetic, getting shot at more. But I can understand why we don’t. There aren’t a great number of places to hide around here as opposed to Zhari and Panjwai, where the Canadians get into firefights quite a bit. It’s pretty open. Someone shoots at you, you’re going to see them and be able to shoot back, and we always have overwhelming firepower.” Brown, interview by author, March 22, 2009.

East of the half-built American bases and north:
In a 2001 account of the battle, Ali Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan army who served as Afghan interior minister in Karzai’s government, and Lester Grau of the Foreign Military Studies Office described the British defeat at Maiwand as “one of the major military disasters of the Victorian era.” The authors write that, for the British public, the combined impact of the defeat in Maiwand and another loss the previous year in the Zulu wars was similar to what Americans felt after Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn. Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces: Superior Technology Defeated—The Battle of Maiwand.”

“a military rat-trap”:
Personal Records of the Kandahar Campaign, by Officers Engaged Therein,
edited and annotated with an introduction by Major Waller Ashe (London: David Bogue, 1881), 57. The same British officer described Kushk-i-Nakhud, the Maiwand district center where the American base overlooked the ruins of a British fort, as a place “where a clever and artful enemy knowing the country could give or refuse an attack at discretion. The ground when I saw it last year was cut up with small canals, watercourses, small but frequent stone walls, gardens, vineyards, and ruined houses, affording every facility for a sudden attack, and placing the attacking party, from the scattered nature of these obstacles, on a complete equality with the defenders.”
Personal Records,
56–57.

On a blistering summer day in 1880:
Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces,” and
Personal Records of the Kandahar Campaign
, 71. The British force included 2,599 combat soldiers, six nine-pound cannons, some 3,000 “service and transport personnel,” and “[m]ore than 3,000 transport animals—ammunition ponies, mules, donkeys, bullocks and hundreds of camels—[which] were required to move the baggage. The animals required drovers, usually locally contracted Kandaharis. There were many other noncombatants, including cooks, water carriers, tailors, servants and stretcher-bearers.” Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces.”

Local volunteers had joined Ayub’s forces:
The British also lost some two thousand Afghan forces to Ayub after they mutineed and crossed the Helmand River to join him.
Personal Records,
48–52, 68–70. For other tribal fighters joining Ayub and details about their weapons as well as the significance of the
ghazis’
white clothes, see Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces.”

By the day of the battle, the Afghans:
Jalali and Grau write that the differential was not so severe, about 5,500 British troops (including Indian and Afghan forces) facing about 8,500 Afghan troops and irregular volunteers loyal to Ayub. But other accounts suggest that the number of Afghan irregular forces was higher. See Sarah Chayes,
The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban
(New York: Penguin, 2006), 128.

They hid in shallow wadis, surprising the British:
Personal Records,
74–82. For the story of Malalai, see Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces,” 12. Malalai was killed in the fighting and buried in her native village of Khik, in the northern part of the plain, where a domed shrine stands in her memory. See also “The Second Anglo-Afghan War 1878–1880: Malalai, Afghan Heroine of Maiwand,”
http://www.garenewing.co.uk/angloafghanwar/biography/malalai.php
, accessed August 1, 2012.

The Afghans rolled over the British line like a wave:
Nearly two thousand mostly Indian soldiers on the British side were killed. Those left alive fled in terror toward Kandahar city. Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces,” and
Personal Records,
78–85. One British officer wrote that the defeat was a result of “the same overweening confidence in our invincibility, the same contempt of an unknown foe, the same attempt at scientific strategy, when the simplest old-fashioned British tactics would have won the day.”
Personal Records,
75.

A century later, a pious peasant arrived:
This account of Omar’s early life closely follows Ahmed Rashid’s in
Taliban,
23–25. See also John F. Burns and Steve LeVine, “How Afghans’ Stern Rulers Took Hold,”
New York Times,
December 31, 1996, and Steve Coll, “Looking for Mullah Omar,”
New Yorker
, January 23, 2012. In the lawless era between 1989 and 1996, warring militia commanders killed some forty thousand people in Kabul alone. “Every warlord had a fief, and every fief had its own checkpoint, where neither a man’s cash nor his daughter was safe.” Filkins,
The Forever War,
23. See also Chayes,
The Punishment of Virtue,
70–73. Omar’s first companions in his fight against the warlords were his religious students, or Talibs, from which the movement takes its name. Today, Singesar lies in Zhari, a new
district created after the U.S. invasion, but when Omar lived there, Singesar was in Maiwand.

In the beginning, there had been a sense of possibility:
Anyone who spent time in Afghanistan in the early years after the invasion experienced this widespread optimism. Of a moment just before the U.S. invasion Chayes writes that Afghans “were electrified by the belief that, with American help, the nightmare was going to end, and they would at last be able to lay the foundations of the kind of Afghan state they dreamed of: one united under a qualified, responsible government.” Immediately after the invasion, Kandahar “shimmered with a breathless hope.” Chayes,
The Punishment of Virtue,
20, 105.

In 2001, the American-supported governor:
Chayes,
The Punishment of Virtue,
63–68, 73–75, 77, and James Traub, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
Foreign Policy,
May 19, 2010: “Like AWK, Sherzai was deeply implicated in the drug trade, had shadowy relations with the insurgents, and ran roughshod over the concerns of Kandaharis, making him a loathed figure. But he had men and trucks at his command and delivered intelligence the Americans trusted.” In addition, when I was reporting in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, at least one U.S. official, among other sources, discussed Sherzai’s ties to the drug trade with me.

Sherzai’s chief factotum:
This is based on my own meetings and interviews with Pashtoon in 2003, but Pashtoon’s power with the Americans is borne out by other accounts. According to Chayes, Mohammad Akram Khakrezwal, a former police chief in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif, told her: ‘The Americans were such amateurs. They were honest to the point of simplemindedness. Anyone Shirzai or his interpreter told them was a Talib, they would take it on faith—and act on the accusation’ (77). On Pashtoon’s role as Sherzai’s “interpreter” and his closeness with the U.S. Special Forces, see Chayes,
The Punishment of Virtue,
78–79.

But many powerful Afghans and their allies:
Governor Sherzai “applied all of the well-meaning Western aid—lavished on him in his role as a representative of the Afghan government—to the purpose of building up a
personal
power base. . . . Gul Agha Shirzai diverted much of the plunder he extracted from his own province, and much of the subsidy he extracted from international representatives.” Chayes,
The Punishment of Virtue,
169. For the specific targeting of rural people on the outskirts of Kandahar and especially in Maiwand, Hajji Mohammad Ehsan, Maiwand district representative to the Kandahar Provincial Council, interview by author, October 12, 2010.

With the Taliban gone and the soil parched:
Ehsan, interview by author, October 12, 2010. Chayes recounts that after the American invasion, when she was helping to rebuild a village outside Kandahar that had been destroyed by American bombs, she went to Governor Sherzai’s office to ask for stone from a quarry he controlled. While there, she saw among the petitioners a “sinewy old man” who tried to get an official’s attention by “positively begging—kissing his fingertips and touching them to his own eyes in entreaty—saying he had come three days in a row, please give him his opium back.” Chayes,
The Punishment of Virtue,
165–66. She also mentions
the visit of an Amnesty International delegation “asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about the treatment of prisoners in private jails.” Chayes, 167.

Afghans connected to the Kandahar government also ran a kidnapping scheme:
Ehsan, interview by author, October 12, 2010.

The road and its tributaries cut east to west:
Although opium cultivation fluctuates from year to year, it reached a record high in 2008, the year the 2–2 arrived in Maiwand. By 2010, opium production in Helmand had decreased significantly, but the province nevertheless remained Afghanistan’s largest opium producer, responsible for 53 percent of the country’s total opium cultivation. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2010: Summary Findings” (September 2010), 10.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/30_09_10_opiumsurvey.pdf
, accessed August 2, 2012.

The U.S. military called it Highway 1:
The United States was the biggest funder of the Kandahar to Herat section of the highway, contributing about $200 million to pave 325 of its 556 kilometers. Saudi Arabia and Japan also contributed about $50 million each to rebuilding this section of the road.

It was so quiet—more truck stop than town, an in-between place:
Lieutenant Kirsten Ouimette, one of the sharpest officers I met in Maiwand in 2010, supplied an apt description of the place: “You’re driving down the highway and you stop at a gas station, and there’s a little town just to support this one truck stop. That’s what this feels like on Highway 1.” Ouimette, interview by author, October 2, 2010. Before the arrival of the 2–2, the Americans and their main coalition partners in that area, the Canadians, had paid Maiwand little attention in comparison to places closer to Kandahar city, where fighting was heavier. International troops, mostly Canadians and U.S. Special Forces, had occasionally conducted raids there. Lieutenant Colonel Hurlbut, the battalion commander in Maiwand in 2008 and 2009, described these to me as “either intelligence-driven operations or just because they knew they needed to come out here. They would do very focused, very short-duration operations, but then would go back to wherever they were originally at. So you had this effect of the people not really having faith in the government, not having faith in the coalition, because we weren’t there long enough to make any kind of true change.” The 2–2, by comparison, wanted to move in and stay. Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009.

The soldiers of the 2–2 landed:
Major Cale Brown, interview by author, March 22, 2009.

As the first American unit deployed there:
Although the 2–2 was on fifteen-month orders, the battalion got to Maiwand in mid-August and planned to be out of the district by June. Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009. By the time I got to Maiwand in March 2009, about 700 people lived on Ramrod and a company element of 100 to 130 people lived on each of the smaller bases, Hutal and Terminator. Brown, interview by author, March 22, 2009. The 2–2 was a one-thousand-soldier task force, but because of leave schedules and missions back to Kandahar, it is
unlikely that all of those soldiers were in Maiwand at any one time. Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009.