in an Afghan army unit far from their homes. Few would volunteer. Instead, many militia members transitioned to a paid security force, which was confined to guarding the perimeter of the special operations forces’ firebases. {12}
Two weeks before the end of his tour in 2007, Reeder watched Mahaney’s troops crush the Taliban in Operation Adalat. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” Reeder said. The battalion had been hugely successful in blunting the Taliban’s drive to retake the south.
As he packed up to go home, the champion of the counterguerrilla fight had an epiphany. How many times had special forces done this? To what end? Reeder asked himself. They simply were not gettinganywhere with the constant raiding approach. They could conduct raids for the next one hundred years and not finish off the Taliban. “It seems like every time I come back here, the security situation is worse,” he thought. “Maybe we need to do something different.”
Before leaving the country, Reeder had several long talks with the CIA station chief in Kabul, who was also a friend of his. They discussed how the Taliban, a force of maybe 20,000, was managing to affect a country of 33 million. The Taliban had no trouble recruiting fighters, albeit largely inexperienced ones. The destabilizing cycle could go on forever. It was going to take a different approach to change this pattern. How had the Taliban taken control of Afghanistan in the first place? And now, how had they managed to make a comeback in 2005–2006, despite averaging only 10 percent support in public opinion polls conducted within Afghanistan? Admittedly, those polls primarily measured the views of urban Afghans and those in easy-to-reach, and therefore non-insurgent-dominated, areas. But what were the Taliban doing right—and could the special ops forces learn from it? {13}
Reeder spent the next year working as the executive officer for Admiral Eric Olson, the four-star admiral in charge of US Special Operations Command in Tampa, and continued to think about his experience in Afghanistan. He concluded that he could have done things differently. First, he realized, special forces needed to have a better understanding of the tribal dynamics of the country. The Taliban had used their knowledge of those dynamics to win over smaller tribes and subtribes by supporting their grievances against the bigger or more powerful tribes. Second, there was a need for a greater emphasis on defense, and especially on helping Afghans protect their own homes. To date, the special operations forces had focused on using Afghans as offensive tools to attack suspected Taliban enclaves, whether because they wanted to fight or because they were eager for the paycheck. Civilian self-defense was not a new idea for special operations forces; US special forces had conducted the largest such effort to date in Vietnam among the highland tribes, in what was called the Civilian Irregular Defense Group. The Marines had a similar village defense focus in their Combined Action Program.
Reeder was introduced to a political scientist named Seth Jones who had spent the past five years researching a book on Afghanistan. Jones had examined how the Taliban had taken power after the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989, and he had found that they had recruited one tribe and village after another through a series of deals, eventually taking over the entire countryside before closing in on Kabul in 1996. Looking further back in history, he found that the five decades of the Musahiban dynasty’s rule had been largely stable, in part because the monarchs struck agreements with rural Afghans to maintain security in their own areas. The Pashtuns, in particular, were far more inclined to police themselves than they were to allow others to run their affairs. Thomas Barfield, an American anthropologist who had studied the country for more than forty years, characterized its social history as relying on a