One Hundred Victories Read Online Free PDF Page A

Airfield, a perch from which he and his son oversawthe family’s burgeoning trucking and contracting business, fueled by the influx of troops and dollars. Reeder’s friendships with these men extended beyond his tours in Afghanistan. They paid him visits at Fort Bragg and stayed in touch by phone. Shirzai sought his advice as Karzai dangled offers of cabinet positions to dissuade him from running for president in 2004. In the end, the clever Karzai managed to keep the wheeler-dealer Shirzai out of the race and then left him in his post at Nangahar.
    From his first tours in 2002 and 2003, Reeder and his men had been heavily engaged in targeting Taliban. Although the senior Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders had left for Pakistan, a lot of local Taliban remained. By his own admission, Reeder had not spent a lot of time thinking about how to stand up a good Afghan government or security force. Like Mahaney’s battalion later on, Reeder’s one battalion of special forces teams was spread out across the three provinces, with virtually no conventional forces in the south—and one reserve brigade was divided between Kandahar Airfield and Bagram. The training of the Afghan army had barely begun. In these circumstances, the special operators relied very heavily on the Afghan militia force they had recruited and hired. “They were a very effective force because they were local,” Reeder said. “They knew the people and the terrain.” After Reeder decided to cross-load Afghan and special forces personnel in each other’s vehicles, the ambushes stopped. “The locals did not want to kill a local guy,” he noted.
    When Reeder returned as the commander of the CJSOTF-A in 2006, his troops still focused on targeting Taliban insurgents, but they also assumed more training and advisory missions. They were partnered with thirteen Afghan army battalions, called kandaks . Reeder’s boss back at US Central Command in Tampa, Brigadier General Frank Kearney, wanted him to build an Afghan special forces unit, but Reeder persuaded him that the Afghans’ skill level was still too immature. Instead he proposed they start a light-infantry commando unit. The first one hundred were selected and sent to Haas’s 5th Group forces in Jordan for training. These Afghans became the training cadre for the commandos, and in 2007, the first two commando kandaks were formed and fielded. Reeder viewed the commandos as one of the US special operations forces’ most successful contributions to the Afghan project. The commandos received an extra $50 a month in pay and double food rations, but he believed the secret to their 99 percent retention rate was a predictable deployment cycle and regular leave. After returning from leave, the commandos would live and train with the special operators at Camp Morehead outside Kabul before heading back into combat alongside a US special operations team.
    By then, a training command had been created for the Afghan army and police, although the police, always an afterthought, still lagged behind badly. The overall US commander, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, ordered Reeder to demobilize the 11,000 members of the Afghan Militia Force. “Tell them to go into the army,” Eikenberry said. “And get them out of [battle dress uniforms].” Reeder was crushed, but this edict had been percolating for a while. As Afghanistan’s formal army stood up, both the tolerance and rationale for unofficial and competing armed formations not under the control of the Afghan government waned. The reach of the Afghan government was still limited, but the fear of wayward militias was a legitimate concern and a legacy of the tumultuous 1990s. There was no simple solution, however. This issue exemplified the ongoing tension between those who wanted expedient solutions and those who aspired to more idealistic results. The operators tended toward the practical. Reeder knew from conversations with the AMF members that they had no desire to serve