The most poignant moments of the stay involved visits President Karzai made to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to visit wounded soldiers and to Arlington National Cemetery to recognize the fallen. At Walter Reed, Karzai was visibly moved by the courage of badly wounded American soldiers. When several amputees said they’d been wounded in Arghandab, he seemed sobered by the ferocity of the fighting they described. In Arlington Cemetery we walked among the markers of the recently fallen and when I came upon headstones of soldiers I knew, I described the men to Karzai.
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On May 26, I met with the latest group of “Afghan hands” to arrive for duty in Afghanistan. The program, conceived by Scott Miller in my office in the Pentagon over a year earlier, had graduated its second round of officers and dispatched them to theater. Although I was frustrated with what appeared to be half-hearted service support for the program—they sent a number of nonvolunteers and noncompetitive officers—it still represented a step forward, and I spoke during an orientation course we conducted before sending this contingent forward to specific duty positions around the country.
After almost a year in command, I was more convinced than ever that a cadre of language-trained professionals, steeped in the culture and assigned for multiple tours to establish genuine relationships, would be the single most powerful asset we could field. This most recent group—which included my former TF 714 aide-de-camp, then-Major Donny Purdy, now fluent in Dari—could begin to provide a more educated, nuanced capability to complement our already overwhelming conventional military power.
* * *
As I navigated the first month of my second year in Afghanistan, I recognized that we were a different team than the one I’d joined the previous June. Rod’s IJC had matured into a headquarters capable of executing a nuanced counterinsurgency campaign across a collection of very different regional commands. Leavened by the arrival of additional combat-experienced U.S. forces, these commands were approaching the 2010 fighting season with resolve. It would be brutally violent, we knew. Already, in stark rejection of Mullah Omar’s layha from the previous year, it appeared insurgents had turned toward targeting civilians in order to defeat our attempt to protect them. Since January, the enemy had wounded and killed more Afghan civilians than it had during the first six months of 2009, using more IEDs, suicide bombs, and a ramped-up assassination campaign. While the insurgents killed and wounded more civilians, ISAF and Afghan security forces were responsible for fewer civilian casualties than we had been during the first half of 2009. But we were still killing far too many Afghans, particularly at checkpoints, and needed to better shield them.
I wasn’t satisfied with where we were; that’s not my nature. But I was fiercely proud of the effort so many people had put forward to get us this far. We thought if we didn’t blink, we would come out in a better position than we had been in the previous year.
On Monday, June 21, we gathered again at Kandahar’s convention center. Afghan and ISAF military and civilian leaders convened in a large room outfitted with tables facing a briefing screen. As we mingled before the session began, familiar faces engaged in animated conversation: Karl Eikenberry, Mark Sedwill, Abdul Rahim Wardak, Dave Rodriguez, Sher Mohammad Karimi, and Richard Holbrooke—who’d flown in from the United States for the session—and a host of key planners and staff.
Eight days earlier, Karzai had held a second shura in the same location. Smaller than the April shura, it brought together only a few hundred elders. As before, Karzai brought Mark and me. There, as I’d anticipated, after some discussion the elders had voiced their support for the operation. We now collected to rehearse the specifics of Hamkari. Under Rod’s patient guidance, we drilled into almost every aspect of the complex plan. More interesting than the operation, to my eye, was the interaction between Afghans, Americans, Brits, and Australians. Relationships, now scuffed and dented by regular use, had the power of familiarity among comrades that was so vital, yet took so long to develop. If Hamkari succeeded, it would owe less to any brilliance of concept than to the sinew of trust.