Like Ray, Bill McRaven understood our priorities and began to reposition forces to Afghanistan. Over the next twelve months, beginning that fall, his footprint multiplied, with bases spread over most of Afghanistan. As important, Bill and his primary command team moved to Bagram, just as I had done in reverse five years earlier. TF 714’s pace of operations grew proportionally, as did its impact on the enemy.
In addition to using strike teams to unbalance insurgents in and around Marjah, we conducted information operations to communicate what was coming. We dropped leaflets and in more nuanced ways that used other media to sow discord within the enemy, channel tribal sentiment in our favor, and build popular support for the wisdom and safety of pledging allegiance to the Afghan government. The Taliban responded with a trump card: In their night letters, they promised the coming American offensive would reinstall Abdul Rahman Jan and his predatory police. The honor of Helmandis required they resist this man, who had robbed them and raped their boys.
There was much discussion about the risks involved in so clearly “telegraphing” our forthcoming punch. No doubt the enemy was able to prepare his defense. But we had to communicate that this operation would be different. ISAF had conducted limited-duration actions into the area before. In March and again in May 2009, Coalition forces had entered Marjah in force, only to withdraw. These incursions, although tactically successful in temporarily disrupting the insurgents and drug traffickers, actually made us look weak rather than strong. The population saw that our arrival did not herald a permanent presence—we lacked the strength to stay—and showed that the Taliban would be free to resume its control. This time, I wanted to let the population, and the Taliban, accept the idea that we would stay.
Major General Nick Carter planned and would lead the operation. Nick’s concept was to rapidly project overwhelming power, while limiting the actual employment of fires, in order to reduce damage to the area and civilian casualties. That was a tricky business. Air strikes and massed artillery fires, followed by a methodical sweep by armored vehicles, would most protect troops as they advanced. But such actions would leave devastation in their wake. Instead, Nick’s Afghan, British, U.S., and other Coalition forces would maneuver rapidly, much of the force by helicopter, into positions to “unhinge” any deliberate Taliban defense. They would then begin the process of clearing and securing the district. The use of fires would be tightly controlled.
A key aspect of the plan was to rapidly institute as many Afghan government services as possible in order to build legitimacy with the populace. Rod, Nick, and their teams spent months working with Helmand provincial governor Mohammad Gulab Mangal and Afghan government ministers to create a cadre of technocrats to deploy to the area. A superficial description we’d mistakenly coined “government in a box” distracted from the serious effort to bring Afghan governance into what had been enemy territory.
Establishing credible local governance in rural Afghanistan involved a number of challenges. This was especially the case in Marjah. In truth, there were rarely real power vacuums in Afghanistan—in every area, someone or some group was in charge. Therefore installing a new local administration necessarily took power, influence, and access to wealth away from either traditional or nontraditional leaders.
Identifying these power brokers often took months. Other districts in Helmand were somewhat homogenous—Nawah-ye Barakzai was the valley of the Pashtun tribe Barakzai—but more than sixty tribes were represented in Marjah, making it one of the province’s most diverse districts. As Marjah became a central processing site for opium, many of the elites depended on money from the drug trade, funds they feared would dry up if the government eradicated the crop. Many therefore opposed the change, some aggressively.
Finding competent, honest civil servants to work in troubled areas was difficult. The educated talent whom we needed to govern on the local level often had more lucrative and far safer opportunities in Kabul or other large cities. Meanwhile, in places like Helmand, locally available candidates too often lacked the education, were involved in corruption, or were caught up in tribal rivalries to function effectively.