The first time the United States tried to kill Osama bin Laden was in the summer of 1998, in Khost, Afghanistan. A dusty, mountainous region in the southeast of the country, Khost was a hospitable place for radicals; the Taliban controlled the area, and Pakistan, which frequently supported Islamists, was just across the border. Bin Laden had recently built a training camp there, and invited terrorists from around the Muslim world—Pakistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia—to learn how to conduct jihad. The camp, which he called the Lion’s Den, was situated in a place of some personal significance. During the anti-Soviet jihad, in the nineteen-eighties, bin Laden had participated in a legendary battle there between the mujahideen and the Soviets. The experience, he felt, had transformed him from the politically inclined heir to a construction fortune into a warrior.
In May, 1998, bin Laden summoned journalists to a press conference near his base, at which he discussed “bringing the war home to America” and expressed the hope that “by God’s grace, the men . . . are going to have a successful result in killing Americans and getting rid of them.” On August 7th, suicide bombers trained at his camps attacked the U.S. Embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, killing two hundred and twenty-four people, including twelve Americans.
Two weeks later, the Clinton Administration struck back, attacking a factory in Sudan that was thought to be an Al Qaeda chemical-weapons plant. The same day, it fired seventy-five Tomahawk missiles from warships in the Arabian Sea at the base in Khost. According to the C.I.A., bin Laden was scheduled to be at the base that day, presiding over a summit meeting. Some twenty terrorists were killed, but bin Laden escaped; he had reportedly left hours earlier, alerted by a former chief of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the I.S.I.
George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A., put a five-million-dollar bounty on bin Laden’s head, and, three years later, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, in pursuit of bin Laden and his deputies. Whether or not the ensuing war has been intended principally, as President Obama says, to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” Al Qaeda, it has certainly been intended to prevent places like Khost from harboring terrorists.
In ten years, some things have changed in the region. As the American military has adopted the counter-insurgency principles advocated by General David Petraeus, the soon to be replaced commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, it has come to believe that it is essential to enlist Afghans as our allies. Accordingly, the Army’s main fighting unit in the area—War Squadron, four hundred men spread out over four bases—works side by side with Afghan soldiers and strives to engage local leaders. But, after more than fourteen hundred American lives lost and countless billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan, the southeast remains in many ways unchanged from the place that housed the Lion’s Den: an area of tribal intrigue, anti-American sentiment, and quickly shifting loyalties.
A few months ago, a group of visitors from War Squadron held a meeting with Pacha Khan Zadran, a leader of the influential Zadran tribe, to ask for his help in fighting the Taliban. Zadran, who is in his late sixties, is an extraordinary-looking man, with a face like something devised by a Claymation animator. At the meeting, he wore a black turban topped with a flamboyant cloth fan and trailing a yard-long train. He has a horizontal stripe of eyebrows dyed jet black, a great proboscis, a handlebar mustache, and bassetlike jowls. His ears are massive, resembling dried apricots loosely attached to the sides of his head.
A young American soldier assessed the warlord’s appearance with raised eyebrows. As he shook his hand, he grinned and said, “Wassup, pimpin’?” Zadran looked quizzical and didn’t seem to understand. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Lutsky, cuffed the soldier’s shoulder and pushed forward to introduce himself and his entourage. Zadran waved his guests to sit down on sofas, which ringed a meeting room in his local headquarters, in a mountain pass between the strategic cities of Khost and Gardez. Outside, a large billboard displayed Zadran’s picture.
The meeting was conducted through an interpreter, a muscular young Afghan whom the Americans called Arnold, after Arnold Schwarzenegger. Lutsky, a small, wiry man of forty with a boyish face and a New Jersey accent, leaned toward Pacha Khan and told him that he had been looking forward to their meeting. Lutsky arrived in Khost province in January, 2010, taking command of a volatile wedge of territory along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier that included Zadran’s traditional turf. He was meeting Zadran to try to persuade him to assemble a paramilitary security force.
The force would be part of the Afghan Local Police Initiative, a U.S. and NATO program that supplies weapons and rudimentary training to as many as twenty thousand Afghan villagers, in the hope that young men employed by the government won’t be tempted to work for the Taliban. The program is a key element in the counter-insurgency doctrine, and, for the Obama Administration, these local units are crucial. The United States has announced that it will begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July and will complete the process by 2014; President Hamid Karzai said recently that the Afghans will assume control of seven of the country’s thirty-four provinces this summer. But the Afghan National Army and the police are widely seen as ineffective and corrupt. If there is to be an orderly “transition” to Afghan control of the battlefield, the U.S. needs better allies in the area.
The problem is that Khost borders the Pakistani province of North Waziristan, a lawless place that serves as a sanctuary for jihadis. After the fall of bin Laden’s base at Tora Bora, his fighters retreated to hiding places inside Pakistan. To all intents and purposes, North Waziristan remains their headquarters. It is also the home base for Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan jihadi leader whose group of Pashtun fighters is a linchpin in the alliance among Afghanistan’s Islamists, Al Qaeda, and, despite its denials, Pakistan’s intelligence service. It was Haqqani who, after Tora Bora, hosted bin Laden in his Pakistani refuge.
Although the U.S. has thousands of troops in the area, the Haqqanis operate across the border with impunity, taking advantage of their tribal connections and knowledge of the local smuggling routes to carry out audacious strikes. In recent years, with the aid of the I.S.I., the Haqqanis have become increasingly active, fostering spectacular suicide commando attacks in Kabul, Khost, and elsewhere. The most recent of these, a suicide car bomb that exploded in a Khost marketplace in February, killed eleven Afghans.
Lutsky was interested in Zadran partly because his tribe had long been rivals of the Haqqanis. During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the Haqqanis allied themselves with Al Qaeda, while Zadran’s men fought alongside the Americans. “We need a leader of the Zadran tribe to unite the subtribes and defeat the insurgency,” he told Zadran. “And when I think of the person who can do this I think of you.”
Zadran smiled and made an offer: “If you pressure Karzai to name me as the head of these three provinces”—the contiguous, tribally linked provinces of Khost, Paktika, and Paktiya—“I promise you no more problems in them.” Zadran, in a long career in Afghan politics, has not made a virtue of constancy. He fought against the Soviets in the eighties, before joining the U.S.-backed campaign against the Taliban, in 2001. After the ouster of the Taliban, he was named governor of Paktiya province, but locals protested his appointment. Karzai removed him from the post, and, soon afterward, Zadran shelled the cities of Gardez and Khost. For a time, Zadran resorted to banditry, with his fighters extorting money from motorists on the road that passes his headquarters. Nonetheless, he was allowed to participate in the 2005 parliamentary elections, and he won a seat. In the most recent elections, he was voted out, a result that he claimed was due to fraud.
Lutsky alluded tactfully to Zadran’s electoral problems. “Even if it were to turn out that, for whatever reason, you were no longer a member of parliament, we know that you would still be the leader of the important Zadran tribe,” he said. “And we look to you in that role.”
Zadran said that he was ready to help Lutsky, but complained that the Americans had not always acted upon the information he had given them, allowing enemy suspects to escape. (The opposite was also true. In 2002, more than sixty Afghan tribal elders were killed by U.S. warplanes after being misidentified as members of Al Qaeda. The U.S. military apologized for the incident, calling it a tragic case of “mistaken identity,” but there were reports that Zadran had relayed false information in order to eliminate rivals.) Lutsky countered politely that he had been acting decisively since he arrived in Khost. “I know the government’s weak,” he said. “I want to work more through the tribes, because they are strong.”
Zadran offered to organize a tribal militia, an arbakai. Or, he said, he could pick twenty men to work with the Americans as a special liaison force. Such a group would need arms, vehicles, and communications equipment, as well as American financing. Which would he prefer? Lutsky hedged, saying that if Zadran could organize a local police force, under his own leadership, it would be “very helpful.” In the meantime, if Zadran’s men could lead the Americans to Taliban weapons caches, he was authorized to pay out reward money.
Ignoring this, Zadran said, “When my men have intelligence, you will pick them up in Black Hawks, and they will lead you to where the enemies are, and you will drop bombs on them.”
“We should work on both initiatives,” Lutsky said, and then changed the subject. He had heard that Zadran was building a house in the city of Khost, and he asked when it would be finished. Zadran said, “When you guys give me enough money to finish it,” and they both laughed.
The two men exchanged cell-phone numbers, and Lutsky and his men climbed into their armored vehicles and drove off. He was pleased. The meeting had allowed him to check off a couple of important boxes on the score sheet of counter-insurgency doctrine: a “key leader engagement” that offered an opportunity to secure greater control of a “key terrain area.” As an American counter-insurgency adviser explained it, “What we’re doing here is a very big hand wave. The idea is to work as best we can to create little bubbles of civilization and see where it gets us, see if we can’t connect them up.” The adviser stressed that, in and around Khost, “partnering with Afghans is a key element of what we’re doing.”
In 2009, there were only about five hundred “partnered” operations; last year, there were more than ten thousand. Still, tense relationships are common among the coalition partners. Last year, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, reportedly characterized Hamid Karzai as erratic and clinically bipolar. Worse, in April, an Afghan military pilot killed eight American soldiers and a civilian contractor at Kabul airport; it was the eighth such attack this year. Situations like these underscore the quandary that confronts the United States and its partners in Afghanistan. The Taliban are canny and ruthless, and they share cultural and religious links with the civilians living on the battlefield. How can the U.S. find reliable local proxies to train and arm and share intelligence with? Who, ultimately, can take over Afghanistan’s security?
Lutsky’s area of operations—his “A.O.,” in military parlance—feels like a place at the edge of the known world. His base, Forward Operating Base Clark, sits on a flatland about twelve miles from Khost. On the far side of the city is Camp Salerno, NATO’s regional military headquarters, and F.O.B. Chapman, an adjacent C.I.A. base. Set behind dreary defensive fortifications punctuated by high-tech communications masts, the bases seem like mirages on the Afghan plain. In daytime, the skies flash with metallic light as helicopters come and go, and F-15 jets roar past. At night, the only noise is the barking of dogs.
The small city of Khost is situated in a mountain valley crisscrossed by dry riverbeds and bullock-tilled fields. The mountains rising eastward to the Pakistan border glisten with minerals. To the west, a road leads up a deep canyon and over the mountains to Gardez, passing through a smattering of hamlets carved out of mud and stone. Except for the occasional shepherd, few people are visible. The road is periodically clogged by convoys of gaudily painted “jingle trucks,” cargo wagons festooned with dangling metal ornaments that clank tinnily as they move. The rest of the traffic is nearly all military.
The center of Khost is a welter of traders’ streets, arrayed around the governor’s mansion and the police headquarters. The town is crowded with people, motorbikes, and brightly decorated shops, but it retains a conservative provincial air. Unlike Kabul, where there has been a construction boom in recent years, only the outskirts show evidence of new wealth: a handful of colorfully painted villas with ornate wrought-iron balconies.
Khost has a long tradition of resistance to political and social change. In 1924, the local Pashtuns rose up against King Amanullah, a modernizer who sought to emancipate Afghan women. During the Soviet war, the mujahideen besieged the Russians and, for a time, surrounded their airfield on the edge of town—today’s Camp Salerno. In the spring of 1991, after the Russians had withdrawn, Jalaluddin Haqqani seized the city; it was among the first to fall to the mujahideen.
In part because of the Haqqanis’ persistent influence, Khost province remains one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan. A recent study showed that, of the four hundred and ninety-seven U.S. casualties suffered in Afghanistan last year, four hundred and eight occurred in the provinces that border Pakistan. Mike Boettcher, a veteran network news correspondent, who is also a terrorism expert at the University of Oklahoma, told me, “In the context of what’s going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Khost is the centerpiece. It’s right up against North Waziristan, which is the one place the Pakistani Army won’t go.”
On December 30, 2009, a Jordanian suicide bomber posing as a defector blew himself up at F.O.B. Chapman, killing seven American C.I.A. agents, in one of the most lethal attacks ever carried out against the agency. Nonetheless, the C.I.A. station continues to provide much of the raw intelligence for the U.S. Army’s field operations in the area. When American military officers allude to their C.I.A. colleagues, they refer to them as “O.G.A.,” meaning “other government agencies,” and it is clear that their work in the area is of primary importance. While the U.S. Army often points to its efforts to engage with civilians and train the Afghan Army, the C.I.A. and the Special Forces have been carrying out violent covert operations, like the spectacular killing of Osama bin Laden. Boettcher said that North Waziristan, just next to Khost, is where “the secret war is going on at its fiercest—over eighty per cent of the drone attacks are there.” C.I.A. drones with laser-guided missiles regularly target Al Qaeda, Taliban, and Haqqani suspects. In September, 2008, a strike against the Haqqanis killed at least twenty-three people, reportedly including one of Jalaluddin Haqqani’s wives and ten other relatives. The C.I.A. also operates an Afghan paramilitary force of three thousand fighters out of secret bases along the border with Pakistan, several of which are in Khost. All of this has created an atmosphere of suspicion that makes collaboration, of the sort that Lutsky is supposed to encourage, very difficult to achieve.
Stephen Lutsky was born in Clinton, New Jersey, where his father worked as a municipal engineer and his mother as a secretary. Clinton, in the central part of the state, has remained rural, because, Lutsky says, “it doesn’t have an off-ramp.” He enlisted in 1987, straight out of high school, and then “went green to gold,” meaning that he went to college in order to receive an officer’s commission. He attended Valley Forge and Lock Haven, both in Pennsylvania, and earned a biochemistry degree in 1992. Lutsky was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas, and then served in Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo. He and his wife, Denise, whom he married in 1995, have a ten-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter at home, in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Since 2003, Lutsky has had three deployments in Iraq; Khost was his first in Afghanistan. In all of them, he has developed a reputation for seeking out combat. In Iraq, he said, a rocket-propelled grenade hit his Humvee, and he was peppered with shrapnel, some of which is still inside his body. He’d had a dental X-ray recently and what looked like a cavity in one of his molars was revealed to be a metal fragment in his jaw. In Afghanistan, he has the distinction of being one of the few American officers to survive a suicide bombing—two of them, in fact. The right side of his face is scarred with red welts, from his cheek to his eyebrow.
The first bombing was on March 8, 2010, three weeks after Lutsky took charge of F.O.B. Clark. That morning, he told me, he was reviewing operations and intelligence at his Tactical Operations Command, or T.O.C., a large room in a prefab warehouse on the base. Lutsky shared command of the area with his Afghan National Army counterpart, General Mohammed Asrar Adqas, but their respective groups of soldiers didn’t mingle much. At Clark, the Americans live alongside about a thousand Afghan soldiers, in separate but adjoining compounds; the Afghans are trained by a special team of U.S. military instructors. At the T.O.C., the two groups of officers meet each morning for a briefing and planning session. The meetings are conducted through interpreters like Arnold, because few of the Afghans speak English and almost none of the Americans speak either of Afghanistan’s two main languages, Pashto and Dari. While the Americans peer at laptop computers connected to their field units, the Afghans communicate orders through bulky field radios that they lug with them.
Lutsky and Asrar were at a morning briefing when the news came that a group of suicide bombers had entered Khost and were being pursued by the police. One bomber had detonated himself; the A.N.A. had killed another; and the police had two more trapped inside a building. “General Asrar said he needed to be there to see what was going on,” Lutsky told me. “I said, ‘I’m going, too—I’m your partner.’ ”
When they arrived, one of the bombers had climbed to the roof, and the situation had become a standoff. “To end the thing, me and four or five of my guys had to kill the guy on the roof with grenades,” Lutsky said. They fired into the building three times, using a grenade launcher, and when they entered they found the remaining bomber wounded but still alive, sitting propped up against a wall. “He had a detonation cord on him, and I saw his hands move,” Lutsky said. He shot the bomber in the head, and one of his N.C.O.s shot him in the chest. “That’s when he exploded.”
Lutsky was about fifteen feet away. “My right arm was numb, but I thought I was fine, that I had just been hit by debris,” he said. Later, doctors at the base found six ball bearings in his neck, his right arm, and his right leg; others had been deflected by his sunglasses and flak vest. The doctors dug out four of the ball bearings but left one in his arm and another in his leg, because they were too deeply embedded. Lutsky rolled up his sleeve and pointed to a spot on his forearm. “You can feel it,” he said. I pinched the flesh and felt a hard round shape. Lutsky smiled. “I can get it to come to the surface with a magnet.”
The suicide bombers had been sent from Pakistan by the Haqqanis, apparently to attack the Afghan government’s administrative complex in Khost. Lutsky was wounded only because he had put himself in the action. But, a few months later, on October 10th, he was the object of what seemed to be a more targeted attack: a suicide bomber blew up a vehicle as his convoy drove past.
Lutsky thinks that General Asrar may have known about the bombing. In the preceding weeks, relations between the two men had grown tense. “Initially, we thought Asrar was a really good commander. We’d been working together for nine months.” Then, at election time, in September, “something happened,” he said. “There was a rumor that Asrar was going to be replaced. He wouldn’t interact with us anymore, and wouldn’t leave his office.”
A few days before the bombing, Asrar confiscated a truck loaded with acid. “We thought it was going to be used for making H.M.E.”—homemade explosives—Lutsky said. “We found out later it was for cutting opium. He had plans to sell it. He also had some detainees he was planning to release—he was planning on getting paid to release them.”
Without revealing his suspicions, Lutsky seized the truck, and, working with Asrar’s deputy, with whom he had built an alliance, he devised a way to keep the detainees in custody. “In the morning update at the T.O.C., Asrar said, ‘We have got to release these detainees—we can’t hold them this long.’ ” His deputy suggested that they be handed over to the provincial police chief. Lutsky, on cue, offered to transport them to the office. “I said, ‘I can take them there, because I’ve got to take the acid there, too. We can do that in the afternoon at fourteen hundred.’ ”
Asrar was obligated to come along, Lutsky told me: “We are partners, and we’re supposed to do everything together.” But that afternoon Asrar was nowhere to be found. A little after two, Lutsky’s convoy left the base and turned onto the road the soldiers called Virginia, leading to Camp Salerno. After a few kilometres, a car pulled over to let the convoy by, “like every car does,” Lutsky said. “Our A.N.A. escort passed, the acid truck passed, my vehicle passed. And then that’s when it blew up.” The bomber triggered a six-hundred-pound bomb, creating a thunderous explosion. “Fortunately, he pulled the button either too late or too early. So we had damaged vehicles, but it didn’t hurt any of us.”
Lutsky jumped out of his vehicle and heard a woman screaming, “My son is dead.” Three boys were injured, one of them ten years old, one fourteen, and one a six-month-old infant. Lutsky says he ran to the ten-year-old. “We grabbed him, and that’s when the blood started spraying. Femoral artery. Chunk of the vehicle took a huge piece right out of his thigh.” While Lutsky was tending to the boy, he said, he looked up and saw Asrar standing over him. No one else from the base had yet arrived. “It was just very strange that General Asrar was the first guy on the scene. He was there quick.” Shaking his head, Lutsky said, “I suspect that he knew something was going to happen.”
Asrar denies any wrongdoing. “If the Americans prove that I had any relationship with the opposition forces, then I am ready to be court-martialled,” he said. “I served in Khost for four years and nobody ever filed a single complaint against me.” A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense later said there was no evidence that Asrar had collaborated with the enemy. But Lutsky maintains that Afghan soldiers and local officials privately accused Asrar of corruption. “There will always be some level of corruption in this country, but we refuse to accept corruption that affects the morale, training, and effectiveness of the A.N.A. soldier, and any corruption that will affect the coalition,” Lutsky said. “If he wants to have illegal checkpoints and extort money, O.K. If he wants to sell off some gas, O.K. If he wants to give his soldiers second-rate food and sell what he’s getting for them from us, well, we can work with that. But if he wants to tell the enemy when we are going to conduct an operation, then we just won’t tell him.”
Asrar vanished the day before I arrived at Lutsky’s base, and the rumor among the Afghan soldiers was that he had left for Kabul. Lutsky told me that Asrar’s deputy had written to the defense minister and asked for the General to be removed. There had been no official response, so Lutsky didn’t know what Asrar’s absence meant, but, he said, “I sure hope it means he’s gone.”
Lutsky drove into Khost to see the police chief, General Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai, with whom he was friendly, to ask about his missing partner. We travelled, as Lutsky did whenever he left the base, in a convoy of three MRAPs—mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles. Oncoming cars pulled off the road as we approached, and when they didn’t our gunners cursed and aimed their machine guns at them. As we drove into Khost, the Pashtun men on the streets either ignored our convoy or noted it with neutral or hostile expressions.
Hakim was a thin, bearded man wearing a dark-blue uniform covered with medals. He received Lutsky graciously in his office, a large room with heavy drapes and an old-fashioned wood bureau set with surveillance monitors. After the two men exchanged formal pleasantries, Lutsky said that he had a problem and would be grateful for the Hakim’s advice. A day or two earlier, his troops had come upon a group of men, wearing civilian clothes and armed with AK-47s, who were detaining other men, presumably to extort money. The robbers had turned out to be A.N.A. soldiers, one of them an active-duty major. Lutsky explained that he had turned them over to the A.N.A., but he wondered what he should do to follow up. Hakim said, “Unfortunately, such abuses are occurring throughout the security forces. This won’t change overnight, but it is up to the commanders to make sure their forces are clean.”
Lutsky asked if he ought to raise the matter with Asrar when he returned to Khost. Hakim gave an irritated look and said, “I’ve known General Asrar ever since I was a child. We went to school together. But here in Khost it has hurt my heart to see that he doesn’t have the whole province in mind, only his own interests.”
It wasn’t just Asrar that Lutsky was concerned about. He had recently urged that two police officers whom he suspected of working with the Taliban be fired; he later learned that they were back at their jobs. Studying Hakim’s face, he said, “I was surprised to see they had letters from you authorizing them to have their arms returned to them.”
Hakim nodded and said, “I was pressured by the Ministry of the Interior to do this. Believe me, if there was no pressure I would disarm these people. They will not help build this country.”
One morning, Lutsky mustered a team of his men for an operation in Shembowat, a village a few miles from Clark. Intelligence had come in that insurgents had stayed in the village overnight and cached explosives in a latrine there. Lutsky asked an A.N.A. unit to accompany him, but the unit, led by a moonfaced young captain, arrived forty minutes late. Lutsky’s men spoke contemptuously of the Afghan soldiers, calling them lazy and unreliable.
Outside the village, we made our way through stubbly fields to a group of walled farmhouses. The Afghan soldiers fanned out to provide security; some of them were local men, who wore black face masks to protect their identity. A few farmers eyed us blankly; a man working the ground with a wooden hoe carried on as if we weren’t there. A man and a woman were making fuel patties out of dung and straw, slapping them onto a dirt wall to dry in the sun.
With Arnold translating, Lutsky told the A.N.A. captain to explain to the villagers that he and his men needed to search their houses. The officer looked distinctly uncomfortable, and he hung back, scowling, as Lutsky led his team in the searches. For the next four hours, they went from compound to compound, and the Afghan soldiers trailed along. Women appeared in doorways to shout at the Americans. To show respect for the villagers, Lutsky told the Afghans to conduct the house searches while the Americans went through the compounds’ walled yards, picking their way amid tethered cows and rudimentary outdoor kitchens.
In one compound, Lutsky found a suspicious recess in the base of a haystack, and he wondered aloud if that was where the explosives were. There was nothing there, but Lutsky was still suspicious, and he asked one of his men, a lanky red-haired sergeant named Rhyss Heeter, to climb down into the family’s sewage pit to investigate. Heeter sighed and began descending, inching his way down the rounded sides of the pit until he vanished. As Lutsky waited, the A.N.A. captain chatted amiably with the owner of the house, a bearded man in his thirties who smiled throughout the search. Heeter eventually climbed back out, his pants and boots smeared with excrement; he had found nothing.
A few minutes later, on a pathway outside the compound, one of Lutsky’s men found a small adobe structure and opened its wooden door. He gave a shout. The explosives were inside, attached by wires to a cell phone. Lutsky barked at everyone to step back as the bomb-disposal team was summoned. After a few minutes, a small, wheeled robot was sent in to disengage the phone from the explosives. As everyone took cover, the explosives were blown up in a sudden blast of noise and dust. We left the village as we had come, followed by the blank stares of the locals.
Back at the base, I asked Lutsky, “Who is your real enemy here?”
“You mean what is keeping us from being successful?” he responded. “I’d say it’s somewhere between apathy and misunderstanding. To us, the solution seems very simple: all the villages and the people and the subtribes have to do is join together and agree, ‘We’re just going to say no to the Taliban.’ If they did that, the Taliban wouldn’t be able to survive. But, unfortunately, because this war has gone on so long, people are tired. They just want to be able to have an honest job, have food on the table, let their kids go to school, and be able to go to sleep at night without their house blowing up. . . . They’re in survival mode. My guess is that if the Taliban come to their door and ask, ‘Will you let me sleep here tonight?,’ they’re probably going to say, ‘O.K.,’ and not say anything to us about it, because, if they do, they’re afraid the Taliban will kill them.” When I asked about the moonfaced Afghan Army captain, he shrugged unhappily but said nothing.
Twenty-five of Lutsky’s soldiers lived at an isolated base called Combat Outpost Spera, situated high in the mountains, just a few hundred yards from the border with North Waziristan. Spera was subject to constant Taliban mortar fire, and though the men were rotated out every three months, Lutsky was often concerned for their safety. One of the men at F.O.B. Clark described Spera as “a bullet sponge,” maintained purely as a marker of the American presence on the front line.
The American counter-insurgency adviser told me that Spera would likely be shut down, because it didn’t conform to the new U.S. counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan. For a start, he pointed out, Spera wasn’t anywhere near a “district development center,” the Army’s label for a populated hub. “We’re looking at our presence in places where there aren’t many people and asking, ‘What are we doing there?’ Spera is one of those. It’s on an insurgent ratline, yes, but the truth is that the insurgents can go around it.”
Lutsky took me on a three-day visit to Spera, which was accessible only by helicopter. The camp, surrounded by pine-covered granite ridges, was a mess of jury-rigged wooden bunkers and sandbag-lined dugouts for mortars. There were machine-gun towers and observation platforms, a hut that served as a gym, and a deck where the men lounged and smoked cigarettes. Camouflage netting hung overhead. The soldiers’ life revolved around the T.O.C., where they gathered to watch TV and check their e-mail. It operated out of one room of a rustic structure that resembled a hunting cabin, with plank floors and a rough brick fireplace. Three times a day, American-style meals were served by a big man called Cookie. In the evenings, some of the men played Risk or cards. Others fed ammo boxes into the fire to keep warm.
The soldiers pointed toward the ridgeline northeast of Spera, saying that just over the border there was a Pakistani military outpost. Every evening, the young officer in charge of Spera, First Lieutenant Paul Corcoran, spoke for a few minutes with his Pakistani counterpart over a field radio. There was a stilted quality to their exchanges; the Americans suspected the Pakistanis of being complicit with the insurgents who regularly attacked them.
Near the entrance to the base was a room occupied by ten Afghans, including the commander of the A.N.A. contingent. Other Afghan soldiers lived below the base, in an old qalat, or family compound, next to the airstrip and the crumpled remains of a white Russian helicopter. The Afghans were rarely seen outside their qalat, and the ten who shared Spera with the Americans were apparently there only because regulations required it. They had their own cook fire outdoors, and seldom mixed with the other soldiers.
On the outside wall of the gym shack, someone had scrawled a scoreboard: “ANA 1, Hendrix 2, Cats 9.” Staff Sergeant Shawn Buzzell explained that it had to do with “some problems” between the Afghans and an American soldier named Hendrix. When the Afghans arrived on the base, they brought a pet cat with them. “The cat took a shit on Hendrix’s sleeping bag, sir, and, ever since, he’s tried to kill it a lot,” Buzzell said. “But the Afghans are pissed off at him, because they say cats are sacred.” He joked, “I guess you could say Hendrix doesn’t have a great deal of respect for the Afghan people, sir.”
One morning, Lieutenant Corcoran, a blond twenty-four-year-old from North Attleborough, Massachusetts, set up a patrol into the surrounding hills. Before first light, fifteen Americans and as many Afghans left the base on foot and climbed to the summit of a large hill to the west. To provide air cover, a surveillance drone was sent overhead. The area looked down on a dry riverbed that extended toward Miran Shah, a Haqqani stronghold in North Waziristan. Insurgents periodically made their way into Khost by circumventing the Pakistani military base across the border.
Not long into the patrol, Corcoran ordered a group of A.N.A. soldiers ahead to a hilltop called Texas, which had a good view of an insurgent access route. For an hour, the American soldiers huddled in silence against the side of a rocky escarpment. Corcoran, speaking over a radio through his interpreter, asked for a report, but there was none. Finally, the interpreter admitted that the A.N.A. soldiers had decided not to go. An argument ensued, and at last some Afghan scouts set out toward the hill. Within minutes, word came back that they had spotted five “Taliban”—men in civilian clothing carrying weapons—on an adjacent hill. The Americans checked their weapons and gear excitedly, whispering to avoid giving away their location. Corcoran issued new orders of position, and the drone circled closer. After another half hour, we heard the crack of gunshots from across the hill. Over the radio, an interpreter told Corcoran that the advance party had fired on the “Taliban”; sadly, they had all escaped. Corcoran waited for the drone to spot the intruders, but it found no one. At mid-morning, he called off the mission. By then, some A.N.A. soldiers, tired of the mission, had already left for the base.
That evening, Corcoran stopped by the cook fire, where Spera’s A.N.A. corps commander, a pleasant-faced young man named Mohammed Hamid Agar, sat warming his hands. Hamid had not gone on the morning patrol, but had sent one of his junior officers. Corcoran, despite his frustration, had accepted it as the Afghan way of doing things. But why, he asked, had Hamid’s men, against his orders, fired at the “Taliban”? Hamid replied calmly that he had talked with his junior officer about it; the soldiers had fired at the men “because they saw them leaving, rather than heading toward the Americans, where they could be ambushed.” Corcoran pointed out that the drone could have spotted them and, if the A.N.A. men had waited, the Americans could have set an ambush. Hamid was silent, and eventually Corcoran gave up.
After Corcoran left, I asked Hamid if the story about Hendrix and the cat was true. He nodded, frowning. He said that, after Hendrix’s first attempt to kill the cat, some of the Afghan men had wanted to murder Hendrix, but he had prevented them. He had served in the Afghan Army for five years, he said, and in that time had discovered that Americans fit into two main categories: “There are those who respect our culture, and those who don’t.”
The Americans refer to the sixty-three miles of road that wind over the mountains between Khost and Gardez, linking the frontier lands along the Pakistani border with the road from Kabul to Kandahar, as the K-G Highway. Its highest point, the nine-thousand-foot K-G Pass, is vitally strategic, and it has become legendary as one of the bloodiest stretches of road in Afghanistan. In 1987, when the Soviet campaign against the mujahideen was in its eighth year, Mikhail Gorbachev ordered his generals to seize the pass. After a protracted standoff, in which hundreds of soldiers died, the Soviets took it. Within a month, they lost it again, to Haqqani’s fighters. Three months later, they began withdrawing from Afghanistan.
For the past four years, the United States and its partners have been trying to rebuild the road. In May, 2007, two American construction firms, the Louis Berger Group and Black & Veatch, began a hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar repair project. But last summer, as laborers were subjected to near-daily attacks, the work at the pass had to be abandoned. The attacks were widely believed to have come from a Zadran tribesman named Gul Bad Shah, and, in October, L.B.G.’s subcontractors devised an ingenious, if cynical, solution to the problem: they hired Shah to provide security along the vulnerable section of the road. The attacks at the pass abruptly stopped.
Recently, though, work had faltered again, because of contract disputes with Shah. Lutsky, as the ranking U.S. military officer in the area, had an interest in seeing the road completed, and he made an appointment to meet Shah—another “key leader engagement”—but Shah did not show up. During my visit, Lutsky happened to encounter Shah outside Zadran’s headquarters. Shah presented excuses for the missed appointment, but Lutsky made light of it, and asked him to come that evening to F.O.B. Wilderness, a base a few miles up the road.
Shah arrived at the outer gate just after nightfall. A big-faced, slow-eyed man with a salt-and-pepper beard, Shah wore a shalwar kameez and a pakul, the felt porkpie hat favored by the former anti-Soviet mujahideen. Lutsky and a young woman named Melissa Skorka—a social scientist who was studying the Haqqanis for the Department of Defense—met him in the camp’s “Shura room,” where Afghans were invited in for discussions with the Americans and their interpreters. It was a large, carpeted room with a few cushions on the floor, and it smelled strongly of feet. Though the room was meant to be a neutral space, Shah was at a distinct disadvantage. He was barefoot, having removed his sandals at the door. His cell phone and other belongings had been taken by soldiers outside. (This was a routine procedure at all bases, but I overheard a discreet discussion about Gul Bad Shah’s “things,” and was given the impression that during the meeting there would be a minute inspection of his phone. Lutsky suspected Shah of conspiring with senior Haqqani lieutenants, and he wanted to keep closer tabs on him.) An American soldier stood in front of him with a flesh-colored plastic device that looked like a Polaroid camera—a biometric scanner, which the Americans used to take the vital statistics of visitors, to be saved in a digital-identity bank.
As the talk with Shah proceeded, the soldier stepped forward with the scanner and held it over the Afghan’s eyes, and then each of his fingers, obliging him to stand still, while Lutsky and Skorka asked him questions. After a minute or two at each position, the soldier would remove the apparatus and step back and register its results. Lutsky and Skorka, despite their repeated apologies about the inconvenience of the procedure, seemed quietly pleased with the situation. It allowed them to assess Shah while he was distracted.
“I’ve wanted to meet you ever since you won the contract,” Lutsky told Shah. “The Louis Berger Group has kept me informed of the security situation, and of its changes, along the road.” He mentioned that L.B.G. had raised some “discrepancies” in the number of security guards Shah had promised to provide. Shah glared. “They’re lying to you,” he said. The problem, he insisted, was that L.B.G. had given some Mangal—members of a rival tribe—a security contract along a portion of the road. Shah said that he had signed a contract for eight hundred men and had a hundred and fifty of them ready to go to work. “The Mangal have to be removed so that I can put my own men there,” he said. “I told L.B.G. this, but they haven’t done it yet.”
Shah talked carelessly, as if trying to fill the silence, as the soldier fit his fingers into the machine. He said that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—a former Afghan mujahideen leader who had allied himself with the Taliban—was trying to “disrupt” the road work, as were the Haqqanis.
Lutsky nodded, and said, “Yes, we’re tracking everything. What we need to do is have a meeting—you, me, and the Louis Berger Group—to get this security contract resolved.”
Shah replied, “Once it’s paved, there will be no more problems, no more I.E.D.s.” He added, “If the Louis Berger Group can’t do the work, I can. I can bring diggers and excavators and five hundred men, and they will do the work! L.B.G. has spent years on this road, and they haven’t paved it!”
Lutsky said, “That’s why we’re excited you’re on it. With the Zadran tribe, we’ll get it done.”
Shah said, “The next time you come to the K-G Pass, I want to throw a party for you.” He described his house, in a village next to a washed-out bridge, and said, “We’ll have tea and corn bread.” When the soldier finished the last finger, Lutsky stepped forward and thanked Shah. Looking a little uncertain, Shah put on his sandals and left the room.
Not long after my visit, General Asrar was transferred to Kabul; he left Khost, he said, because he wanted to be with his family. Lutsky finished his tour and returned to Kentucky. Before he departed, he oversaw the closing down of Spera. In a carefully orchestrated operation, the American soldiers were evacuated by helicopter, along with their Afghan partners. Before leaving, the Americans burned everything they could not take with them, so that nothing would be left for the insurgents, who would again have full control of the area.
Mike Boettcher, the terrorism expert, was skeptical about the pullback. He said, “Khost is the one place where we’re going head to head with the new Al Qaeda”—the insurgents in North Waziristan. The greatest threat, he told me, came from Jalaluddin Haqqani’s son and heir apparent, Siraj. In 2009, the U.S. offered a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to Siraj Haqqani’s capture or execution, like the one offered for bin Laden in 1998. “Siraj is the poster boy for the new generation of Al Qaeda,” Boettcher said. “The old generation—that’s Jalaluddin—was basically about the regional war, but Siraj is a believer in the global jihad, which was bin Laden’s contribution.”
Despite the threat from Pakistan, the American soldiers’ presence at Spera was principally symbolic. The outpost’s small number of men couldn’t do much to stop insurgents from moving across the border. Their attempts at forming allegiances had been frustrated; they had only token coöperation from their Pakistani counterparts on the other side of the mountain, and precious little from the Afghan soldiers they lived alongside.
In any case, it is not ground troops or A.N.A. soldiers who are proving most effective in fighting insurgents. As the killing of bin Laden showed, some of the most successful work in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and against Al Qaeda is being done covertly, by the C.I.A., the Special Forces, and the Navy SEALs. Pacha Khan and others often told Lutsky that, to win the war, he should forget about everything else and go hit the enemy in Pakistan. Lutsky always answered, “That’s way above my pay grade.” He said this in a joking way, but he was right: there is a larger concern in Afghanistan that only political leaders can solve.
U.S. counter-insurgency doctrine places great emphasis on what used to be called “winning hearts and minds.” But, after nearly ten years, it is unrealistic to expect that the Army can still win people over in Afghanistan. The coalition has huge numbers of troops there, armed and housed at vast expense. Many have acquitted themselves honorably, and in some areas they have succeeded in pushing back the Taliban. But the task of building a nation out of warring interests has for the most part proved overwhelming. It seems, regrettably, that whatever we can accomplish in Afghanistan will be achieved by force, not by making friends. Lutsky told me, “The cultural complexity of the environment is just so huge that it’s hard for us to understand it. For Americans, it’s black or white—it’s either good guys or bad guys. For Afghans, it’s not. There are good Taliban and bad Taliban, and some of them are willing to do deals with each other. It’s just beyond us.” ♦
