THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright © 2012 by Rajiv Chandrasekaran All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are by the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Little America : the war within the war for Afghanistan / Rajiv Chandrasekaran.—1st ed. p. cm. “A Borzoi Book”—T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-0-307-95842-6 1. Afghan War, 2001—Political aspects—United States. 2. United States—Politics and government—2009– 3. Obama, Barack—Military leadership. 4. United States—Military policy. 5. Internal security—Afghanistan. 6. Afghanistan—Strategic aspects. I. Title. 371.412. 48 2012 DS C 958.104′71—dc23 2012010354 Map by Gene Thorp Jacket photograph by Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images Jacket design by Darren Haggar v3.1 For Julie and Max “You, Miss Maxwell, didn’t your government in Washington hand you a neatly typed report on Kabul? Mean temperature. Dress warmly. Expect dysentery.” “Yes,” Miss Maxwell laughed. “And it was all the truth, wasn’t it?” “Yes.” “But did it prepare you for today?” Caravans JAMES A. MICHENER 1963 CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Map of Southern Afghanistan Prologue PART ONE—GRAND DREAMS 1 An Enchanting Time 2 Stop the Slide 3 Marineistan 4 The Wrong Man 5 The Road to Ruins 6 The Surge PART TWO—SHATTERED PLANS 7 Bleeding Ulcer 8 Search and Destroy 9 Deadwood 10 Burn Rate 11 Allies at War 12 Odd Man Out 13 A Bridge Too Far PART THREE—TRIAGE 14 The Boss of the Border 15 A Fresh Can of Whoop-ass 16 There Was No Escaping Him 17 My Heart Is Broken 18 What We Have Is Folly Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Illustrations Other Books by This Author A Note About the Author Prologue Set atop a dusty plain between two ridgelines, the orchards of Now Zad once yielded pomegranates as large as softballs, luring visitors from across southern Afghanistan during the harvest season. After they gorged on the juicy magenta fruit, most headed home. Others grew so intoxicated by the prospect of farming the fertile soil that they transplanted their lives. Waves of settlers in the 1960s and 1970s transformed Now Zad, which means “newborn” in Persian, into the fourth largest city in Helmand province. By the fall of 2006, the city looked like old death. The pomegranate fields had been booby-trapped with makeshift mines. Homes and shops had been blown to rubble. Bullet holes pocked the few walls left standing. The Taliban had invaded Now Zad with hundreds of fighters earlier that year. After desperate pleas from Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the British commanders who were responsible for Helmand under a NATO security agreement dispatched a platoon of Ghurkas to evict the insurgents. But the fearsome Nepalese warriors were outmanned by the Taliban. A tense standoff ensued as the insurgents roamed the city and the Ghurkas hunkered down inside the police station. Every few days, the Taliban would try to storm the compound, sometimes getting close enough to hurl grenades, but the Ghurkas, and subsequent contingents of British troops, managed to keep the enemy at bay with torrents of bullets and rockets. As the fighting escalated, most residents fled. The Brits were bent on simple survival. Soldiers crouched in their guard towers, gazing at the city through rifle scopes. They named a once lush pomegranate grove just a few hundred yards away Sherwood Forest. A strip of walled compounds teeming with fighters from across the border—their shouts in Urdu revealed their provenance—became known as Pakistani Alley. If the soldiers could have left their Alamo, there would have been no Afghan policemen or soldiers to accompany them on patrol, at least none who were interested in anything more than self-enrichment. The portly police chief, who holed up in the same compound as the Brits, spent his days finding the last few residents to extort and the last few boys to molest. U.S. Marine Brigadier General Larry Nicholson was appalled when he visited Now Zad on a February 2009 reconnaissance trip. The first thing he saw when he landed was a wall at the police station that was scrawled with graffiti: WELCOME TO . American Marines had relieved the British the year before, and they had HELL expanded the patrol zone by a few blocks, but they were still surrounded on three sides by insurgents hiding in trenches and abandoned houses. A debris- strewn no-man’s-land lay in between, trod only by wild dogs. Injuries from IEDs —improvised explosive devices—were so common, and so dire, that the Marine company in Now Zad was the only one in the country to be assigned two trauma doctors and two armored vehicles with mobile operating theaters. To Nicholson, a compact former infantryman whose ruddy complexion made his weathered face appear perpetually sunburned, the opposing forces staring at each other reminded him of what it must have been like at Verdun during the epic trench battle between the French and Germans in World War I. He met a Marine at Now Zad who told him, “Sir, we patrol until we hit an IED, and then we call in a medevac and go back” to the base. “And then we do it again the next day.” The first U.S. Marines had arrived in Now Zad in May 2008 on a mission to train Afghan security forces. The ninety-five-man reinforced platoon was led by Lieutenant Arthur Karell, a twenty-seven-year-old with degrees from Harvard and the University of Virginia who had postponed practicing law for the adventure of combat. When he landed at the NATO base in Kandahar, about a hundred miles to the southeast, he was given a satellite map of Now Zad marked with a small blue star that indicated where he was to build a police station to house newly trained Afghan policemen. But when he got to Now Zad, he discovered the blue star was four miles beyond the British perimeter. In between were Taliban bunkers and minefields. He crumpled up the map. In his seven months in the city, the only civilians he saw were a few brave farmers from a nearby village who came looking for firewood. When he led his Marines on patrol, they were met with gunfire less than three hundred meters from the base. His platoon killed dozens of insurgents, but at a cost: One of his men was sent home in a casket, and 20 percent had to be evacuated because of injuries. At first, despite the danger, his Marines didn’t complain. There were plenty of bad guys to kill. But even the most trigger-happy eventually started to wonder why they were in a town that had been abandoned. “There’s nobody here,” they said to Karell. “Why are we here?” When Nicholson became the top Marine commander in Afghanistan in April 2009, he resolved to save Now Zad. IEDs had blown off the legs of more than two dozen Americans in and around the city. Fighting a war of attrition with fixed positions was not something Marines did, at least not in his book. “If we’re not showing progress, if we’re not showing movement towards stability, what the fuck are we doing?” he asked. The situation was emblematic to him of