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Uncle Sam Needs You
Two years before Ashley White ran off the helicopter in Kandahar, Afghanistan, U.S. Special Operations Commander Eric Olson had an idea.
Working from a second-floor office in the headquarters of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, Admiral Olson had spent years studying the ever-changing battlefield in what had become the longest war in American history. Twenty-first-century technology, advanced weaponry, and instant communications radically altered the modern battleground, offering fighters more real-time information than ever before. But specific pockets of what Olson called âmicro-knowledgeââmeaningful, detailed intelligence about a regionâs people, culture, language, and social moresâremained out of reach to American forces. He wanted to change that.
Olson was a groundbreaker in his own right. The first Navy SEAL to be appointed a three-star, then a four-star admiral, he was also the first Navy officer to lead the Special Operations Command. It was a position widely considered to be among the most importantâand least-knownâjobs in Americaâs fight against terrorism.
SOCOMâs creation in 1987 ended a bruising Washington brawl that pitted special ops supporters in Congress and the special operations community against senior military and civilian Pentagon leaders. The military leadership viewed the command as a needless drain of resources from Americaâs armed forces, of which special ops formed just a very small part, less than 5 percent of Americaâs military men and women. As a distinct culture that favors small units over large forces and independent problem solving over the formal, traditional military hierarchy, they were viewed with deep suspicion by much of the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. Americaâs first special operations teams were created in World War II for missions that rely on the kind of nimble, secret, surgical actions for which large-scale, conventional forces are ill-suited. Their portfolio was always intended to be utterly different from that of traditional ground forces. In his 1962 speech to West Pointâs graduates, President John F. Kennedy reflected on the new geopolitical landscape that gave rise to special operations forces:
This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its originsâwar by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of combat; by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It requiresâin those situations where we must encounter itâa whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore, a new and wholly different kind of military training.
Over the years, special ops forces were subject to boom-and-bust cycles as conflicts escalated and ended. They played a heroic and prominent role in World War II, when special operations teams parachuted into German strongholds, scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc in Normandy to destroy enemy gun positions, and dropped behind enemy lines to liberate American prisoners of war from a Japanese prisoner of war camp. In Korea special ops units ran raids and ambushes, but soon afterward saw their budgets and their numbers shrink. They once again bulked up to join the fight in Vietnam, running small-unit reconnaissance missions far behind enemy lines and working with and training local South Vietnamese fighters, but by the late 1970s, the force had again been whittled down to near extinction. In the era of Cold War confrontations, their style of fighting was seen as a mismatch against the Soviets, who were rapidly building up conventional forces.
Everything changed in the 1990s with the successful use of special operations forces in Operation Desert Storm and the rise of modern terrorism by non-state actors like Hezbollah and, toward the end of the twentieth century, al-Qaeda. After the attacks of 9/11, the subterfuge, speed, and surprise that were the hallmark of special operations moved its forces front and center in the war against terror. By 2010 SOCOM could draw upon people, technology, dollars, and equipment that its founders wouldnât have dared imagine twenty years earlier. During that period, in the latter half of the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, Eric Olsonâs Special Operations Command demanded a great deal more of its fighting men and women than ever before.
Olson was the quintessential special ops man. Slight in build and large in presence, he is the model âquiet professionalâ that Special Operations Forces style themselves after. Those under his command described him as âa cerebral officer,â unusual for his tendency to listen more than he speaks. He had seen plenty of combat in his long career; a highly decorated Navy SEAL, he received a Silver Star for leading a team through Mogadishuâs streets to rescue injured soldiers overcome by Somali fighters in the battle popularly known as âBlack Hawk Down.â
From the start of the war, Olson believed that America was never going to kill its way to victory in Afghanistan. âWe have to learn to think our way through this fight,â he would say. To do that, âwe have to understand it better.â For some time, Olson had been thinking about âthe whole yin and yang of modern warfare capabilities.â As he saw it, âconcepts that may at first appear to be opposed to each other may in fact be parts of the same whole,â and he had come to believe that the United States was out of balance, too tilted toward the hard side of war and not devoted enough to what he viewed as its softer side: the knowledge-based war.
Part of the problem, Olson felt, was that the militaryâs incentivesâits systems, programs, personnel policies, promotion pathsâall rewarded hard skills over deep knowledge. He believed that even the most knowledgeable members of the militaryâs elite special operations teams in Afghanistanâexperts who had studied the geography, history, and language of the region and had become comfortable in the environmentâeven they were missing a huge chunk of intel about the enemy they were fighting and the people they were there to protect. Some of the most crucial information, Olson believed, was hiding within a population to which special ops forces, nearly a decade into the war, had virtually no access: the women.
For centuries Afghan culture has enshrined women as vessels of family honor. In some regions, particularly in the more conservative and rural Pashtun belt, from which most of the Taliban fighters come, women are kept separate from any man unrelated by marriage or blood. Pashtunwali, an unwritten tribal code governing all aspects of community life, delineates the laws and behaviors of the Pashtun people. At the heart of the system is the principle of namus, which defines the relationship between men and women, and establishes the primacy of chastity and sexual integrity of women within a family. Namus commands men to respectâand more fundamentally, to preserveâwhat it holds to be the honor of Afghan women. An essential part of preserving that honor means keeping women separate from men from the time they near adolescence until their marriage. When a woman does venture out from her familyâs walled compound, she must be accompanied by a male family member or a group of other women led by a male chaperone. When in public women wear the chadri, or burqa, which covers their face completely.
While much has changed for the millions of Afghans now living in many of Afghanistanâs increasingly crowded cities, where girls go to school and women work outside the home, in the most remote reaches of rural provinces where the Americans have been fighting their toughest battles, womenâs lives often look very different.
The ancient practice of purdah, or the seclusion of women from public view, makes women in these regions nearly invisible to the foreign men fighting in their country. And it means that foreign troops cause a serious affront to Afghan families when a male soldier even catches sight of a womanâs face. Searching a woman is an even graver offense. By engaging with Afghan women the male soldiers are disrespecting them as well as the men in their family charged with protecting them. The act violates a code of honor that lies at the very foundation of their society.
This form of cultural trespass was also in direct opposition to counterinsurgency, a newly revived military doctrine based on a commitment to protect the local population while stopping insurgents and helping build a government that could provide basic services to its people. Fresh from its prominent role in the Iraq troop surge of 2007, counterinsurgency was at the center of the 2009 addition of thirty thousand U.S. forces into Afghanistan. In counterinsurgency theory the âpopulation is the prize.â Winning hearts and minds and protecting civilians now played a key role in Americaâs military strategy, but both would be undermined if American men searched Afghan women.
And there was another important cultural reality in play. In a communal society such as Afghanistan, in which family is central, the role of women is critical. Afghan women saw, overheard, and understood much of what was happening in the households they ran, and they exchanged information with one another every day. In rural Afghanistan, information travels faster via the network of extended families than it does via instant messaging in most other parts of the world, and the women often have an idea of what their sons, husbands, brothers, and in-laws are up to.
What Admiral Olson was coming to understand was that from a strategic point of view, not having access to Afghan women meant that U.S. soldiers were entirely blind to half the countryâs population, and all the information and social influence it held. Even more: whatever may have been hidden in the womenâs quartersâeverything from enemy combatants to weapons and nuggets of critical intelligenceâwould remain unfound. This reality signaled a dangerous security gap, for no soldier had ever truly cleared a house when even a single room went unchecked. The only question that remained was: could the military actually do anything about it?
In Iraq, a similar question had been asked and answered years earlier with the creation of the âLionessâ program within the Marine Corps. In 2003 and 2004, as the budding insurgency grew bolder in the city of Ramadi, commanders gathered an ad hoc group of twenty female soldiers and female Marinesâmost of them drivers or mechanics certified on the .50-caliber machine gunâto join male Marines and Army soldiers on raids, security patrols, and at the increasing number of security checkpoints designed to stop suicide bombers. Much of the Lionessesâ work consisted of searching Iraqi women for hidden weapons and explosives vests, and confirming they were indeed women, not men who had disguised themselves beneath the veil.
A similar story played out later in Afghanistan, and once again it was the Marines out in front. It was early 2009, and a unit was planning an operation in Farah Province to capture the men responsible for planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that had killed several fellow Marines.
One of the planners was Lieutenant Matt Pottinger, a Marine who traveled an unlikely path to Afghanistan. Before arriving there, Pottinger spent five years covering China for the Wall Street Journalâs Beijing bureau, where his aggressive reporting got him detained for a piece about political corruption. He watched from Beijing with growing concern as his Journal colleague Daniel Pearl was abducted and killed by al-Qaeda and the war in Iraq descended into chaos. Then, in 2004, the Journal sent him to cover the Asian tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people. The only first responders who impressed him on a personal and professional level were the U.S. Marines and sailors who landed there en route from Iraq. While local and international charities fumbled in disorganized chaos, the servicemen and women methodically tackled problems and found ways around the countless obstacles to get actual relief to the people in need. Witnessing them in action profoundly affected Pottinger, and he thought if he were ever going to serve his country, he should do it now, with this caliber of people, at this time of severe national crisis. So in 2005, at the age of thirty-two, he entered Marinesâ Officer Candidates School. A year and a half later he deployed to Iraq.
By the time Matt Pottinger reached Farah Province, the battlefield acumen of a trained Marine and Iraq veteran now complemented a reporterâs instincts for navigating the cultural fault lines that shape the country. He soon realized that, given Afghanistanâs social customs and traditions, it would be nearly impossible for the military to raid homes filled with women without alienating everyone in the village. After months of study he reached a surprising conclusion: in order to achieve success, the missions needed women.
It was a counterintuitive idea, one Pottinger himself initially mistrusted, so with the help of a satellite phone he tracked down a few U.S.-based Afghanistan experts, including Sarah Chayes, an American journalist who had lived on her own in Kandahar for several years. Chayes confirmed what Pottinger had hypothesized: having U.S. female soldiers on hand would not ratchet up tensions with Afghan men, but instead was likely to defuse them and make the whole operation run more smoothly. And if the experts were right, far from violating social codes, it would, on the contrary, help build trust. With his commanderâs approval, Pottinger assembled a group of seven female Marines and one female interpreter, and over a period of several days led impromptu lessons on Afghan culture, proper search techniques, and how to conduct tactical questioning.
The experiment worked. With the help of local village women who had been questioned by members of the female engagement teamâsoon to be known by the acronym FET, coined by Pottinger and logistics officer Lieutenant Johannah Shafferâthe Marines located the insurgents responsible for killing their brothers-in-arms. As significant: village elders expressed approval that neither Afghan nor American men had interacted with their women. Having the female Marines on-site had proven to be a boon both culturally and tactically.
This point was driven home during a failed mission a few months later in southern Helmand Province that became notorious when male insurgents literally, and brazenly, walked past a team of Marines who had cordoned off their compound. They simply donned burqas and filed right by the Marines, who had called for the women to leave the compound so they would be protected from the fighting that would inevitably follow. Only later did the Marines realize what had happened.
Word of Pottingerâs work spread. And soon former Marine 1st Lt. Claire Russo, who was determined to formalize for the Army the kind of female engagement teams Pottinger was developing for the Marines, reached out to him for advice. Russo arrived in Afghanistan in 2009, the same year as Pottinger, as part of a civilian team created to help the Army better understand the cultural terrain. The C-130 transport plane had no sooner dropped her ...