Aftermath

The next day Contreras met with Saki again. “The Marines are giving me a lot of problems because of the delay,” he said. Contreras asked for an assurance that they could leave in two days. Saki was still waiting for supplies. A quick reaction force of forty men from Kandahar would also go along with Saki’s sixty or so men from ANCOP, and he would equip them. “They will look like ANCOP, but will they act like ANCOP?” Contreras asked, worried that they might spoil the good name of Saki’s ANCOP. “As long as you and I are in charge it will be okay,” Saki said with a smile. He told Contreras he heard the Marines were trying to get close to the people but the local police were making problems and people were complaining that the police were thieves. “We will tie Taliban to trees and shoot them,” Saki said. Contreras looked down and shook his head, laughing. “Enemy morale is low,” said Saki. “The enemy is nothing.” Saki didn’t trust the local Nawa ANP. “They inform the Taliban,” he said. He also didn’t trust the police in Lashkar Gah and warned Contreras not to travel with them. “If they could, the ANP would hand me over to the Taliban,” Saki said. The ANCOP liked to say about the ANP that “you can change the blanket on a donkey, but it’s still a donkey.”

Two days later they finally get the order to go. McGuire was in command of the first Humvee, and I joined him as a passenger. The gunner up top shot pen flares at cars that got too close. The pop sounded like a gunshot and served as a warning. We drove by a group of small kids fighting, punching one another in the face. The men cheered. McGuire opened the windows and shouted, urging them on. McGuire asked if I was sure I wanted to be in the first vehicle. It would be the first one to get blown up by IEDs.

The team linked up with the ANCOP and waited for them to get ready. Contreras met with Saki and assured him that he would also take part in all the meetings with the Marines. Saki suggested that the Americans’ armored vehicles take the lead once they crossed the river because his vehicles were more vulnerable to IEDs, and recommended that the Americans stay in the lead in dangerous areas. Contreras agreed. He told Saki he still didn’t know who would meet them on the other side.

As we drove south the ANCOP stopped in front of every culvert to search both sides of it. Progress was slow. Some of the police pickup trucks got stuck in the deep soft sand. The Americans grew frustrated with the way the ANCOP plodded through the desert. Our vehicle searched for a place to cross the hundred-meter Argandab River, avoiding the unexploded mortars on the sand. McGuire emerged to walk across it, making sure the vehicles could cross. The water reached his mid-thigh. Water seeped inside the Humvee, reaching up to my calves. The rest of the vehicles followed. One of the rangers got stuck in the water and had to be towed out. “ANCOP is better than the ANP in running checkpoints,” McGuire said, “but little things like vehicle movement, and it all breaks down.” “Instead of following each other they race around,” Sergeant Sadler said, laughing at the ANCOPs crossing the river like they were at Nascar. Two of the police got into an argument about the driving, and one pointed his rifle menacingly at the other. This had happened before, Verdorn later told me. Once, on their base, two of the ANCOPs got pissed at each other and drew their pistols. “There was blood in their eyes,” Verdorn said. The Americans were caught between them.

Two Marine Humvees met Ironhorse across the river. Thacker chatted with them about what kinds of IEDs they had encountered. We were in a thick vegetated area of farmland and trees. Cows grazed near flooded fields. We crossed narrow canals and arrived at the schoolhouse. Sandbags lined the top of it. Hundreds of Marines wandered around shirtless, wearing green shorts and kicking up dust as they walked. It looked like Lord of the Flies. They slept on the ground outside or in classrooms that smelled of sweaty feet.

A Marine captain thanked Contreras for his arrival. “Our weak spot” was the shortage of ANSF, he said, so the additional cops were helpful. Nawa had been quiet for the past five days, since July 2. “The Taliban left for Marja to lie low,” the captain said, “but this is their breadbasket, so they’re not likely to give it up.” Ironhorse occupied two dirty arched rooms in the schoolhouse. The men hastily swept the broken glass, dust, and dirt and set up cots, unloading boxes of water bottles and food, making it home.

The Marine commander, Lieutenant Colonel McCollough, told Contreras that they had discovered “rogue” police who were abusing people in Aynak, to the north. In two communities people had complained about the police. When the Marines first encountered the local police in Aynak, the police were so startled that they fired warning shots and nearly got into a firefight. “They weren’t disciplined and appeared to be on drugs,” he said, addressing Saki. “They had no mentors and had no connection to a higher headquarters. It worries me that that’s how those communities view the Afghan police, so I wanted the ANCOP to replace those police and show those communities what ANSF is about.”

McCollough turned to Contreras and said, “I’m glad you’re here. You couldn’t have come at a better time.” Nawa’s chief of police, Nafaz Khan, sat in on the meeting. He had a long beard and a long, nervous face. The Marines described him as a local mafia boss. “The Taliban come to people’s houses at night and demand collaboration,” Khan said. “If people don’t get away from the Taliban, the elections will fail.” Although he had 250 men officially working under him, he said the real number for this large rural area of 180,000 people was only 138. “We had a lot of tough days here and we cannot handle those days anymore,” he said. “There were times when we had no food and nobody came to ask us how we were doing.” Sergeant Sadler suspected that Khan was keeping his men’s salary for himself, forcing the police to steal for a living. Khan denied that the police in Aynak were under his authority and claimed he had never heard of them.

Saki didn’t trust the Nawa commander and waited until he left to speak freely. McCollough told Saki that he should supplant the “rogue police” in Aynak. “Those are not police officers,” he said. “They’re criminals.” He estimated there were about sixty of them. The Marines had to fight to get up to Aynak, and although it was only a few kilometers away, they planned our trip up there like a careful military operation.

The next day we waited. The men of Ironhorse played cards. The ANCOP sat in the shade of a tree.

The Marines promised that once in Aynak they would meet with locals in a shura, or council. But Thacker dismissed it. “These shuras are just a bitch session,” he said. “They’ll complain about cops shaking them down. The major will make promises, and the ANP will come back and go back to the same ways.” After their additional training, when the ANP returned to one district where Ironhorse had taken over, they went back to setting up illegal checkpoints and demanding money from cars passing by. When Ironhorse and the ANCOP came in, towns that were formerly abandoned would slowly get re-populated with their residents, and when Ironhorse and the ANCOP prepared to leave and make way for the ANP again, people would flee and move back to Lashkar Gah. “We don’t see what it’s like after we leave,” Thacker told me. One team of police who came back from training actually got into a firefight with the Afghan army and killed four men. In one district the ANP came back from their training with new body armor, boots, goggles, and rifles; later, when Ironhorse returned on a mission to support the British, whose base was in danger of being overrun, they found the same ANP wearing sandals but not their body armor or goggles. The problem with coming in for a short cycle as the local ANP were sent on training, Thacker told me, was that just when they got to know the area and the people, they had to leave.

The men prepared for a departure the following morning. The Marines gave them enough fuel for another day or so. McGuire worried about what they would do after that. “The homework wasn’t done in advance,” he said. At 5 a.m. Sergeant First Class Sadler showed the men the route. The military command for Helmand contradicted the Marines and Nafaz Khan, informing Contreras that the Aynak police were legitimate and that they belonged to the Nawa headquarters and Khan. We rumbled slowly along a green canal. Marine minesweepers walked ahead of us. At 9 a.m., nearly four hours after leaving, we had gone only four or five kilometers. It was a numbing pace and one that allowed the fleet-footed Taliban to flee well in advance. The Americans’ enemy was elusive, normally engaging them from a few hundred meters away unburdened by the heavy body armor and gear the Americans had.

As we progressed, I watched children tending cows and sheep in dark green fields. It was almost idyllic. The men I was traveling with linked up with the Marines at 10:30 a.m. Dozens of their vehicles were parked off the dirt road on plowed fields, crushing corn plants. “This farmer is not gonna be happy,” Corporal Chapman said. The Marines had paid damages to farmers in the past few days. They accidentally set one field on fire and ran around trying to put it out.

The shura meeting was canceled because we were so late. Instead, Marines lay about in the shade. Specialist Baker sat atop a Humvee. “We came, we parked, we relocated, then we parked,” he said triumphantly.

Marine Captain Schoenmaker told Contreras that when they first arrived in Aynak and asked locals about the Taliban, they heard complaints about the police instead. He estimated that there were about 150 of them. They were stoned, he said, wearing beads and looking shady. “It was uncomfortable when we met them, they were all