The city had been the site of many of Afghanistan’s most historical pivots. Alexander the Great reputedly laid out the city in the fourth century BCE, and it bore his mark—it’s said Kandahar is a corruption of “Iskander,” the locals’ name for him. It was also where the modern Afghan state was born, thirty years before the United States. In 1747, a nine-day-long council of elders elected Ahmad Shah Durrani their leader, and he went on to congeal Afghanistan into the Duranni empire. His Durrani tribe produced each of Afghanistan’s rulers for the next two hundred and forty years, until the coup in 1978. The city hosted a massive Soviet garrison during the mujahideen war of the 1980s, and was later the seat of the Taliban government. The Afghan government’s ability to secure the nation’s second-largest city—Pashtun, Afghanistan’s most important center, and President Karzai’s family home—was an important measure of its capacity to assert sovereignty.
Long before Operation Moshtarak launched forces into Marjah, Rod had identified the importance of securing Kandahar to convince its residents and the wider population of Afghanistan that the city was neither a Taliban-controlled enclave nor perpetually threatened with strangulation by insurgent forces. In the spring of 2010, although Kandahar bustled with daily activity, security had deteriorated in the previous four years. The city was not under siege, but mortars and attacks had harassed the August 2009 elections. And the insurgents waged a meticulous assassination campaign against key leaders that sent a clear message to the population that if they didn’t call the shots, neither did the government.
While, unlike Marjah, Kandahar did not need to be recaptured from the Taliban, its sheer scale defined the challenge. The city’s population had swelled in recent years to over five hundred thousand, and the area grew dramatically when we considered the need to secure the environs around the city. Much like the belts that Al Qaeda had sought to dominate and use as staging grounds to funnel violence into Baghdad from 2005 to 2007, the districts that encircled Kandahar were the traditional keys to controlling the city. Since 2006 and 2007, the Panjwai, Zhari, Daman, Shah Wali Kot, and Arghandab districts had been grinding battlegrounds. ISAF forces, led by a Canadian task force, had been struggling for several years to gain firm control over these critical approaches to Kandahar. But after a series of stiff fights, the districts remained unstable and contested in the face of growing insurgent strength. The fate of Kandahar City rested largely on our ability to secure these avenues, particularly the Arghandab River valley.
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At the end of February 2010 I received an e-mail from a staff sergeant serving in the valley. He led a squad in an infantry battalion task force in the Zhari district, west of Kandahar. I’d made several trips to the districts around Kandahar, particularly Arghandab, where one of our Stryker units, an organization built around wheeled armored vehicles, had suffered significant casualties. But any note like his struck a chord inside me.
I don’t believe you fully understand the situation we face in this district, and I think you should come down and see it up close, Staff Sergeant Israel Arroyo wrote. Senior commanders don’t get many notes directly from squad leaders, particularly notes like that. I told Charlie Flynn to arrange for us to go down the following day.
We flew by C-130 cargo aircraft to Kandahar airfield and transloaded to UH-60 helicopters for the flight to their battalion’s main base before driving the final miles in Strykers to a sandbagged outpost on a small rise that overlooked an expanse of farm fields. There I met Arroyo’s platoon. After a short brief we went on a combat patrol. Departing from the outpost, we moved on foot for several hours, sweeping the area until we reached a small Afghan village, then returned. As we moved, I listened to the young leader’s thoughts and got to know members of his squad, in particular one of his team leaders, Mike Ingram—a corporal responsible for four soldiers. It was difficult ground to soldier in, and always had been. Southern Afghanistan had been the site of the only known mutiny of Arab troops during their global conquest thirteen hundred years earlier. Now both the physical and human terrain seemed to resist the platoon’s best efforts. The Afghans were distant in their demeanor, but that wasn’t uncommon. It was the cultivated fields that were striking. I felt as though I were walking through the grooves of corduroy: Instead of using wooden trellises to support fruit vines, the local farmers used packed mud. In long lines, they built walls six feet tall, four to five feet apart at the tapered tops, and narrower at the ground where the supporting base was wider. For soldiers, it was like operating in a maze, each corridor of sun-caked mud perfectly designed to channel them into waiting IEDs or well-placed ambush positions. It was still too early in the year for the vines to have fully bloomed, but by late spring the corridors would become like tunnels under a canopy of foliage, any movement inside largely hidden from the air.