In theory, success to McChrystal would result in a handover to the Afghan security forces. But there weren’t enough of them, they were hopelessly incompetent or corrupt, and the few good ones were too often killed. The Provincial Reserve police were not paid until they completed their training and took a urine test for drugs. Then they got their back pay. But out of the eighty men scheduled to take the test in July 2009, only fifty-three showed up, some refused to take it, and twenty tested positive. Meanwhile, of twenty-five new police recruits in Helmand, twenty tested positive for marijuana, opium, or both. An Air Force major conducting drug tests on police throughout the country told me that in some districts 60 percent of the police force tested positive. The south was the worst. Some police had tried to give him water instead of urine. Sergeant Kilaki thought the Provincial Reserve needed more training in tactics, techniques, and procedures as well as scenarios. “It sounded like they just dragged the eight-week curriculum to fourteen weeks,” Captain Westby said.
The Taliban Is Everywhere
In July 2009 a police checkpoint on Highway 601 had observed the Taliban destroying the road and constructing a four-foot barrier on it. Team Prowler and the Provincial Reserve went back on the road and clashed with twelve to fifteen Taliban, killing at least one. The team had no engineer assets, so they couldn’t take down the barrier. The Taliban cleverly diverted traffic through the village to shake people down and control who passed. Colonel Shirzad sent the Provincial Reserve, with Lieutenant Farid in command, without their American mentors to Highway 601.
Lieutenant Farid’s Ford Ranger drove over an IED or was hit by an RPG and was blown to pieces. Farid was killed along with two other cops. Five PR men were killed and five wounded in action in seven days. “601 is the most insecure road in Afghanistan,” said Sergeant First Class Clark. “There’s nothing but Taliban out there. That road is the lifeline to Lashkar Gah. We’re being asked to deal with it with fifty-five men, and we lost five last night and five in the last fight.” Team Prowler was supposed to have eighty police with them, but the British had taken some for themselves. There weren’t enough police to go around.
I had met Lieutenant Farid when I first arrived in Lashkar Gah. I had hoped to interview him at length. He was jovial and chubby and had a short beard, and he looked older than his twenty-eight years. Farid was Colonel Shirzad’s cousin from Helmand. Before he set off on his mission, his kids came to see him at the base. He was good-humored and an advocate for his men, apparently. At first he had a hard time delegating responsibility. NCOs were weak in the Afghan security forces, so he was a dominant figure and his loss was even bigger. The Americans took Farid’s loss heavily. “He was going to be a good commander,” said Westby. “It’s frustrating.” Staff Sergeant Enriquez had worked with Farid for seven months. “He’s one of the only noncorrupt officers there were,” he said. “I was pissed. He worked his ass off for his men. It felt like losing one of our own.”
“We’re asking a lot from these men,” Westby said worriedly about the police. Westby was also frustrated by the British army, who controlled security in the Helmand province and who he had to report to, as well as his American masters in Kandahar. “The British attitude is ‘Go now, get your men out there and go.’ These are cops, not soldiers, but we’re treating them like soldiers.” Clark sympathized with them too. “We come out here for a year and we’re done. These ANP come out here until they get killed.”
Despite the loss, the police were told to go on a mission the next night by the British to relieve four checkpoints of highway police. The highway police were supposed to have been disbanded because they were committing highway robbery, but they still existed. The police would set up three checkpoints while the highway patrolmen were sent to training. “These ANP are mentored by the British,” I was told, “even the British say they’re shit.” One American added, “But all the cops mentored by the British are shit.”
The British warned Team Prowler that Highway 601 was blown in three places and that there were IEDs all over, on and off the road. I wondered why eight thousand British soldiers in Helmand had such difficulty controlling one fifty-kilometer stretch of road. “601 is impassable,” a British officer had admitted to Clark. Many officers I spoke to complained about how imperious the British were to them and the Afghans.
The British were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Jasper de Quincy Adams, who worked closely with Colonel Shirzad. The mission was to clear Popalzai, a Taliban-dominated village along the highway. Prowler and the police would take one side, while the British and the Afghan army would take the other side and deny the Taliban an escape route. “There’s nobody good left in Balochan and Popalzai,” Dyer told me. “They sent all the women and children away. There’s nobody good left. They’re really bad.” The police also said there was nobody good left in those towns. The Americans told me how odd it was that they never received a brief on the rules of engagement, which varied depending on what province they were in. It was as if there were no rules for Helmand. One American called it “an open-fire zone.”
Clark was unhappy that Team Prowler was going in their more vulnerable Humvees and not in the Cougars, larger vehicles suspended higher above the ground. But the Humvees were necessary if they went off-road in villages. “We’re not a fuckin’ route clearance package,” said Dyer. “Who are we gonna send out to blow ’em?” “We can say we’re not going,” Westby said with frustration. But even if he didn’t go, his police would, and it was Prowler’s job as the mentor team to go with them. “I’m pissed at [Lieutenant Colonel] Jasper too,” he said. “I see people getting hurt or killed if we do route clearance with the police,” Dyer said. “The police should be given assets. If you’re not going to give us the assets, don’t fucking ask us to do it.”
A stout, bearded sergeant called Ahmadullah was placed in command until a replacement for Farid could be found. Ahmadullah, a former schoolteacher, had joined the police after he was threatened by the Taliban, the Americans told me. He and his senior men gathered around Westby and Dyer along with many of the police, who were on the verge of a mutiny after hearing that they had to go back to Highway 601. The mood was tense; the policemen had only hours earlier been collecting Farid’s body parts off the road. “Today they lost their commander who they really respected,” Westby texted to Jasper on the Blue Force Tracker (BFT), a computer in his vehicle that allowed him to communicate with other forces in the area.
The Afghans insisted they lacked ammunition, and the men of Prowler were confounded by the number of machine-gun and RPG rounds that were unaccounted for. The Afghans told them that twenty-seven RPG heads had been destroyed in Lieutenant Farid’s vehicle as well thousands of rounds of machine-gun ammo. The Americans were skeptical that Farid had been carrying such a huge number of rounds; he was coming back to get more supplies, so his truck should have been empty. “They’re claiming a suspicious amount of ammo is missing,” Enriquez said. The police didn’t want to go because it was a British operation, and they felt like the Americans didn’t care about Farid’s death. “To restore their confidence, they have to go wipe out some Taliban location,” Sergeant Kilaki said.
The Americans weren’t happy about going on the mission either. “This is a bullshit British mission,” said Dyer. “It’s obvious the Brits don’t give a fuck about the men,” Enriquez said. Westby persuaded the British to postpone the operation until the following day. “Sir, it’s almost a mutiny right now,” Westby told Jasper, who agreed to postpone. “He doesn’t want a mutiny,” said Westby. “They’ve lost nine guys in seven days, and they need to do weapons maintenance.”
Because British clinics were full with their wounded, and the British media were focusing on the numerous British casualties, including a dead lieutenant colonel, the British decided to cancel their clearing operation in Popalzai. The Afghan army didn’t feel like going on the mission anyway.
Instead, Westby focused on replacing the highway patrol checkpoints. He spread a blanket on the floor and split open a watermelon, sitting with four senior policemen to discuss the next day’s mission. They thanked him for postponing until the morning and they discussed where they might set up their new checkpoint. The Afghans couldn’t read the map even to tell that the blue undulating line was a river. One of the checkpoints on 601 had recently been attacked, with eleven Afghan policemen killed. Sergeant Abdulahad—an Afghan police officer from the Provincial Reserve—expected heavy Taliban attacks when we arrived. He worried that they wouldn’t have enough supplies. Westby, meanwhile, tried to figure out how to get them money so they could buy food and fuel. Westby explained to the policemen that they had to depart at 7 a.m. so the highway policemen could be relieved in time to make it to their flight for training.
“When we get to the area where the diversion through the villages is, that’s where we will definitely have contact with the Taliban,” Abdulahad said. “It’s all dirt roads there, and the Taliban put many IEDs on the roads, and it will be hard to see them.” He was unenthusiastic about the mission and came up with numerous reasons not
