Task force tries to one-up Taliban with info - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Task force tries to one-up Taliban with info

HUTAL, Afghanistan — The denizens of this dusty market town had never seen anything like the sight that greeted them at midday Oct. 12.

The previous day, a handful of insurgents in a nearby village had made the mistake of shooting at a pair of U.S. OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters. Stryker-borne infantry rushed to the scene and, together with the helicopters, engaged the Taliban, killing one, wounding another, who got away, and detaining three more.

Now, rolling slowly down the main street of the bazaar, came five Stryker vehicles with the weapons captured in that fight tied to their fronts on full display for the locals.

As a crowd gathered to watch the spectacle, loudspeakers mounted on a Stryker rammed the message home: “We took these weapons from the dead Taliban that decided to fight Task Force Legion, and we took them from the cowardly Taliban that surrendered to us and are currently sitting in our jail.”

The in-your-face challenge to the insurgents was unprecedented. For years the Taliban had held sway here in the Maywand district on the western edge of Kandahar province. Small, ineffectual coalition forces and their Afghan counterparts came and went, but the Taliban remained, growing stronger year by year. No one could even remember the last time the coalition had killed an insurgent in Maywand. But now, here were the Americans calling out the Taliban, taunting them, questioning their manhood.

The effect on the crowd was electric, according to U.S. troops who were there. Some smiled and gave the Americans the “thumbs up” sign. Others glowered, pointing at the captured weapons and whispering to friends as if to say, “That’s Mohammed’s gun they’ve got there.” Their sense of anger and frustration was palpable, and that was exactly how Lt. Col. Jeff French wanted it.

The commander of Task Force Legion, built around 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, French had only arrived in Maywand a month before, but already he had determined that the key to undermining the Taliban’s hold over the population was to fight the insurgents in an arena they had dominated for years — that of information.

Coalition officials have long despaired over the Afghan insurgents’ skill at turning what appear to be tactical defeats into strategic victories by virtue of their ability to push their version of events out to the local and international publics first, and by inflicting coalition casualties that often dominate U.S. and other western news coverage of engagements.

To counter the insurgents’ tactics, French devised an information operations campaign based upon the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine, which, he said, “emphasizes isolating the insurgent from the population.”

A former instructor of military history at West Point, French also drew from his studies of insurgencies, and from a study of Afghan culture and military history done by him and other leaders in Task Force Legion before deploying.

The first step in carrying out French’s plan was to take a page from his enemy’s book and make every combat mission first and foremost an information operation.

Although his task force conducts a lot of lethal missions alongside Afghan security forces, they are all focused on “chipping away very slowly at the populace’s belief that the Taliban are all-powerful,” said French during an interview in his spartan quarters at Forward Operating Base Ramrod, about nine kilometers west of Hutal.

It is that aura of invincibility that enables the Taliban to cow the population into submission. “The enemy has had a long time to really saturate the local populace and create a sense of fear,” French said. “The local nationals have given in to that sense of fear.”

Only about 20 percent of the local population support the Taliban, said Abdul Fatah, 57, the deputy principal of the local school who was born in Maywand and has lived here for the past 20 years. But for coalition forces to succeed here, they must break the Taliban’s ability to intimidate and coerce the remaining 80 percent.

“The enemy have dominated Maywand District for so long and they’ve become so comfortable with being the biggest, baddest dog on the block that I try to set up our lethal operations to undermine their confidence in their leadership, to undermine their confidence in each other, and to take away ... this sense of invulnerability that they had when we came into this area,” French said. “So every opportunity I get, we’re either developing a product, sending a message or setting up a patrol that reinforces this theme of: There is somebody bigger and badder on the Maywand block than you, and it’s Task Force Legion.”

Even when the Taliban appear to have gotten the better of an engagement, French refuses to yield the information battlefield to them.

After a suicide bomber killed two civil affairs soldiers attached to Task Force Legion together with their interpreter a few hundred meters from the bazaar Oct. 2, the Taliban set up a little shrine to the bomber, consisting of some painted rocks and colored glass and a little jar of salt.

“According to local custom if you eat the salt out of it, it will bring you good luck or strength from the jihadist warrior who gave up his life,” French said. “So I had the interpreters write up a message to the Taliban, and I left it on the shrine. It said, ‘You can send all the suicide bombers you want; TF Legion is going to stay here in Maywand; we’re going to continue to secure the population against you, and when you go on vacation and turn your backs on the people and go back to Pakistan for the winter … we’ll be here when you get back.’ ”

Central to French’s approach is his belief that “actions speak louder than words,” a mind-set that has particular utility in a region like Maywand, in which no more than 5 percent of the population is literate and where there is no television, no local radio station and, since the Taliban blew up the relay towers, no cell phone coverage.

But when Task Force Legion wants to reinforce its message verbally, the key to success is to figure out which locals will pass that message on to the wider public with the greatest speed, accuracy and credibility. “The race is to be the first one to get information out before it gets changed, and then it’s to get it out to the right people,” said Capt. Casey Thoreen, commander of 2-1 Infantry’s B Company. “It has to come from the local side.”

“That human terrain, and who the influencers are, is the biggest challenge we have right now,” French said. “Who are the people that can push information, can push influence and can effect change in Maywand?”

For Thoreen’s company, nicknamed the Blackwatch, that means pushing the information through the district chief, the police chief, the maliks (elected tribal leaders), the mullahs, and the town and village elders.

Getting the task force’s message out fast sometimes requires the Americans to bypass their allies in favor of some unsavory characters. The Afghan national security forces “don’t necessarily have a whole lot of credibility here because there’s a lack of legitimacy with them,” Thoreen said. On the other hand, French said, “those people [ideally placed to spread the word] may be just normal businessmen, those people may be mullahs, they may be religious leaders ... those people may be tied up in narco-trafficking and may or may not be ‘Taliban,’ quote-unquote.”

Task Force Legion assumed responsibility for Maywand in mid-September, and by early Nov. 10, French said his information operations campaign was bearing fruit.

“We’ve gotten a lot of traction,” he said. “The second- and third-order effects of that within the enemy ranks, within the enemy formations and leadership is they get really pissed off, they change ... the way they operate, they start making mistakes and doing things that they wouldn’t normally do.”

As an example, he cited two presumed insurgents who were killed Nov. 4 by .50-caliber fire from a Stryker as they were digging a 1-meter by 1-meter hole in a road at 2 a.m. near a village called Luy Kariz, where Task Force Legion had encountered 10 improvised explosive devices in two incidents in previous days and, as a result, had conducted a major sweep of the area the day before the two men were killed.

“Laying IEDs within 24 hours of our major operation was a major screw-up,” French said. “They should not have done something like that, and we had ambushes laid out on the off-chance that they tried to do something like that, and we killed two of them. So they do not like when they take a black eye and the people see that.

“They’ve got to respond and regain face, regain their Afghan male pride in the eyes of the community and people. So I try to get that splinter under their fingernail and twist it and just make them more and more irritated … It’s pretty easy to get under the Taliban’s skin through some aggressive and focused [information operations].”

But the Taliban are not letting their control of the flow of information — and disinformation — in Maywand slip without a fight.

Capt. Sayed Asif has just taken command of an Afghan National Army company located three kilometers from Ramrod at Combat Outpost Pegasus. Sitting cross-legged on a mattress on the floor of his hilltop command post, which doubles as his quarters, Asif relayed what he had heard on his first walk through the Hutal bazaar. “The people said the Americans are arresting kids and old people,” he said. “They are making enemies for themselves.”

The insurgents also spread their propaganda through their allies in the mosques, which U.S. troops are forbidden to enter. “The mullahs tell the people that the Afghan government is not a Muslim government,” said Abdul Fatah, the deputy principal. “The mullahs say, ‘don’t help the government,’ and that the people should do jihad against the government.”

Even an apparent clear-cut success, such as the killing of the two men digging the IED hole in Luy Kariz, can seem a much murkier affair once the Taliban disinformation campaign swings into action. A few days after that attack, French and his troops returned to Luy Kariz and conducted a second sweep of the village. In each compound they entered, the U.S. soldiers patiently explained to the men of the house how and why the two men had been killed.

But to the Americans’ frustration, the locals all repeated a version of the same story: that they had heard that the men who had been killed were “innocent people watering their fields,” in the words of Nazzar Mohammad, a local mullah.

At the conclusion of the clearing mission, French met in the middle of a field with Said Salim, the diminutive, white-haired malik of the Saydan tribe in Luy Kariz, who was deposited at the meeting place by one of French’s Strykers.

The battalion commander tried to reason with the tribal elder, reiterating some of his favorite talking points. “The Taliban are using your sons right now,” French said. “The Taliban are cowards. They don’t have the courage to go out there and lay the IEDs themselves.”

Salim denied that his sons were laying IEDs, but added, “We are in the middle.” (He might also have been thinking of the two maliks the Taliban had dragged from their homes and beaten to death in Luy Kariz last winter.)

“The Taliban are weak,” French countered. “They don’t care about you.”

“I know they don’t care about us,” the elder said, a sad, defeated expression creasing his worn face. The Taliban don’t even talk to the villagers, he added. Instead, they impose a 9 p.m. curfew on the village — only farmers working in their fields are exempt — and communicate with the locals by posting letters at night in the mosque. “We are seeing that letter in the morning,” Salim said through an interpreter.

In response, French gave the elder a couple of Task Force Legion calling cards and asked him to put them up on the wall of the mosque, as well.

The cards show pictures of a Stryker and an OH-58D firing on the left, with photographs of U.S. troops hosting a shura and handing out gifts to children on the right, accompanied by the words, “We’re not going anywhere — it’s your choice,” in English and Pashto.

The elder took the cards, but handled them as if they might explode in his hands. Then, spurning the offer of a ride home in a Stryker, he turned and shuffled back across the sandy, rutted fields towards his village, limping away from the Americans as fast as his frail legs could carry him.