(photos by Simon Klingert)
So how does a military intelligence gatherer know if an informant’s lying?
“A lot of times you don’t know if someone’s lying,” Chief warrant officer Edward Strauss, head of a Human Intelligence team based out of Jalabad, said in a phone interview. “Sometimes they outright tell me the wrong name. A lot of times we have other intelligence signals- (satellite or drone) imagery, that will give us ‘contrary’ information.”
“One thing we cannot do,” Strauss said, “we can’t do an operation based on what one person says. Nine times out of 10, (an informant’s motivation is based) on a tribal feud. You don’t go in on one person’s word.”
“The hardest part,” Dan, one of Strauss's enlisted soldiers, said, “is to corroborate and vet the information we get. When we hear a specific high-value target is moving in the region, we note it. When we get two or three sources saying it, then we move to find someone who has had direct contact with the target.”
But the difficulty in confirming such information is, “the Afghans have a fantastic technique of deflecting,” Dan said. “You’ll ask them how many guys they need at a command post, and he’ll talk to you about vehicle requests, more ammunition and goats. A tremendous amount is based on interpersonal skills, reading the subtleties and the signs. You have to pay attention. You have to come in with a clean slate. Pre-conceived notions in a combat zone are useless.”
“There are different levels of people we talk to.” Strauss explained that the insurgents pursue counter-intelligence operations, and it's hard to be sure exactly what a person's motivation is when you first meet them. “When we meet with them we try to give them the minimal level of information about us. We have to maintain operational security. There are people we trust, some have received a polygraph.”
"The big thing is you have to look at their history, if he was actively fighting," Stauss said. "They have to provide a tight (account of what they did and who they are); they have to build that trust slowly... You have to think, how would using this informant look to some one in the U.S. gov't. You have to be very careful."
"We've had several individuals lie to us. If I catch them in a lie, I won't work with them. It’s a lost cause. We put that information out there,” Strauss said.
What if you have a warlord, like Haji Jan Dad, who may be working with both insurgents and the coalition at the same time, I asked.
"He's a very influential man," Strauss said. "Commanders have to work with him. He's influential over a lot of village Maliks; he gets a lot of support from the Afghan government. But I wouldn't work with him. If you work with him, you don't act solely on his information. He's doing it for his own reasons. I'd be careful on any operations with him, whether Shura (community meeting) or road contracts."
I asked Strauss how they conduct interrogations. "Interrogations have gotten such a bad name since Abu Ghraib, we have to take high road at all times... There's a lot of oversight, reports before and after." He said all (interrogations) are managed differently now. "We don't have one person going into the room with the suspect. There's checks and balances. It's more rapport building like in an interview, and questioning and catching people in lies."
“The difficulty is being a principal-driven person when dealing with the enemy on a daily basis,” Dan said.
“Working both sides, it’s hard,” Strauss said. “You basically got to make him feel for the other side,” meaning trying to distill empathy from the low-level insurgent for their own people. “I don’t want to see young Afghans getting killed. I’m always trying to get them to see this, and to do something good.”
The Insurgent Business
“Being Taliban is a business,” Dan explained. “Ninety percent do it to feed their family. When a better opportunity comes, they will leave it for a steady paycheck. I talked to Talibs today, in a business sense,” he said.
Often times they’ll try to get even higher level insurgents to “reconcile”, a promise to lay down their arms, usually in exchange for a coalition-sponsored job or contract for their tribe.
“If they killed Americans we sometimes have to hide that from soldiers," Dan said. In Kunar province they brought in Taliban commanders for reconciliations, but they had to hide it from the battlefield commanders. “We disguised them under cover of the night,” Dan said.
“Every province has it’s own (Talib) shadow governor,” Dan said. In Afghanistan our main priority is to remove the dissenters- the ninety percent who have taken the Taliban name, from the “hard core” Taliban, some of whom are foreign fighters who travel over the border from Pakistan in pairs. They link with a local Taliban commander and move around. They’re classic jihadists… The American idea of borders doesn't effect their movements. It ebbs and flows.”
What is certain is that the local population is watching how Americans react to Taliban attacks. This summer an IED hit Nuristan’s Provincial Reconstruction Team during their last week in country. The vehicle rolled down a hill, injuring all five occupants. “It was a big upset to the PRT,” Dan said. But the American response was the difference maker.
“Nuristan is used to retaliation,” Dan said. “They thought we would blow stuff up. Now the people mention, you didn’t bomb us. That was a Russian tactic. It was a victory for us, when we were hurt, not to hurt more.”
“There’s two kinds of Nuristanis- those who see Americans from a distance, and the second kind that view Americans as guests," under the Pashtun tradition of Pashtunwali. “The salt of the earth who say if you weren’t our guests, ‘I’d shoot you myself.”
"You can't kill all the bad guys to help locals"
Torquem Gate is one of the main border crossings with Pakistan and notorious for arms smuggling. The intelligence teams use informants on both sides of the border, using a system of concealing informants, Strauss said. Information is passed through more than one person, so that informants aren't seen dealing directly with Americans. These actions probably save lives. Not only does it insulate the informant, 700 pounds of explosives were found hidden in the floorboards of a bus, based on this kind of information sharing.
This summer an informant saw a coffin surrounded by women, coming from Pakistan. It fit a profile he'd been told to look for. Police intercepted the coffin. It was full of suicide vests. They’d previously gotten reports of women smuggling weapons in coffins.
“A big part of it is meeting and talking with locals," Strauss said. "A big part is information operations, to get a sense how public feels about us.”
Often they hear about villagers helping the Taliban indirectly, like with food or shelter, probably under threat. Strauss explained instead of arresting the villagers, they try to garner allegiance from them by offering incentives to the local Malik, like medical assistance or digging a well, to side with the coalition.
The problem is the Taliban know the villagers personally and can return at night to make reprisals. To this reality, Strauss responded, "You can't kill all the bad guys to help the locals."
He spoke of one local Malik in southern Nangahar named Malik Niaz who publically rose against the Taliban. "This is not-media savy culture," Strauss said, "The tough part is working with the villagers who haven't seen foreigners since the Russians. But it's a word of mouth culture. The people knew about him."
Niaz on his own initiative went to the coalition and the local gov't. asking for funding to assemble a militia to defend the village. "Working with a militia," Stauss said, "that's a good possibility. Local people trust them. The Afghan Army is not as trusted, they’d rather have a local national guard."
"I don’t think it’s too out of the realm to pay and train them, so they don’t get into tribal feuds," Strauss said. "Locals are accepting it, it’s on the edge of happening. This Malik Niaz thing, they talked about it (all the way in) Nuristan."
Recent history shows a coalition-funded militia system worked extremely well to de-fang the Sunni insurgency starting in Anbar, Iraq.
But first, a critical mass of influential sheiks had to step forward. Here as in Iraq, the first few who step forward will be targeted and killed.
Malik Niaz was killed by a suicide bomb this summer as he was assembling the militia. But was he the start of a movement?
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Last night they shot down here with M-16s."
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