One Hundred Victories by Linda Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

building to plan the first of what became a dozen operations throughout western Kandahar. The Americans would provide the helicopters, air support, and medevac, and conventional forces would form an outer perimeter as Riga and Raziq’s men entered the villages. Riga and about a dozen of his men saddled up the next day to accompany Raziq and four hundred of his border police into one village after another. Helped by tips from local residents, on the first day they found over one hundred improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They captured about thirty Taliban in the first day. Riga found them to be younger and more poorly armed than the fighters he had seen in earlier years. “They had one or two magazines and little ammo, and no heavy machine guns,” he said. The IED was now the weapon of choice.
    In one day, Raziq had cleared a notorious insurgent stronghold and identified a spot for the conventional forces to set up a patrol base. He walked the conventional officers to the spot and then he and Riga moved on. Riga and his operations officer, Mike Sullivan, found that Raziq was a savvy tactician. His men were adept at spotting the lethal buried mines. They also had contacts in the districts, and the intelligence gathered allowed them to operate quickly. Both American officers said they saw no evidence of any human rights abuses in their operations with Raziq; nor did Sullivan hear of any when he debriefed the other operators who had been in the field with him. Riga pushed back against the allegations of Raziq as a bloodthirsty Afghan. “He is an incredibly brave, phenomenal combat leader,” Riga said. “I found him to be shockingly empathetic toward the enemy.” He recalled Raziq telling a captured fighter, “You are my brother. You need to come back to our side. I will give you the opportunity to come over so the NDS [Afghan intelligence] does not have to take you away.”
    The fight in the Arghandab was not over. The next month, in October, the conventional battalion commander ordered the bombing of two nearby villages, Tarok Kolache and Khosrow Sofla, after seeing insurgents in what he said were deserted towns. The two villages had become factories for making homemade explosive powder, which was manufactured from fertilizer ingredients and then spread out to dry inside abandoned qalats. The villages were razed to the ground. Most of the civilians had left the villages beforehand. Some may have been under pressure to leave from the Taliban, which wanted to use the villages for their own purposes; others may have left in anticipation of a US offensive. In any case, it remained unclear whether any villagers had been killed; those who returned were furious to find their homes and pomegranate orchards gone. When Terry arrived, he inherited the public relations disaster. He ordered the local mosque to be quickly rebuilt along with a massive tree-planting campaign to replace destroyed orchards. {40}
    Riga’s readiness to ride out alongside the Afghans earned him the respect of many of them. As his tour drew to a close, Afghans mounted a campaign for him to stay. Elders and officials from every district in Kandahar wrote letters or attached their thumbprints to the letters of others, and Ahmed Wali Karzai sent the appeal to President Karzai. They wanted Riga and his men to stay. “We had some incredible momentum going at that point,” Sullivan commented. “It gets personal.” Petraeus explained to the Afghans that the next battalion would be just as good, but Riga reported that this rebuff felt like a “kick in the gut to the leadership of the south.” He added, “Such trust can’t be built overnight.” Before Riga left, Kandahar’s mujahideen council, veterans of the anti-Soviet war, feted him with a banquet, and a popular Kabul singer performed a farewell concert in his honor.
    By the time Riga left in April 2011, Arghandab was largely pacified, but Zhari, Panjwayi, and Maiwand were not. They straddled Highway