When the day began for Lt. Col. David Flynn on Oct. 6, Taliban insurgents were using three southern Afghanistan hamlets as bomb factories. By the time the next day ended, Tarok Kolache, Khosrow Sofla and Lower Babur had been eradicated from the valley where they once stood.
Flynn had ordered tens of thousands of pounds of bombs to rain down on the villages. Tarok Kolache was completely flattened, and there wasn’t much left of the other two.
Flynn says that he had little choice but to take the extreme step. The Taliban had rigged bombs all through the compounds in the villages, and placed tons of explosives in the vegetated fields nearby.
Efforts at clearing the villages of homemade bombs during the previous three months had failed. The fighters had evicted the villagers from their land, telling them, “you can’t get to the fields this year,” in preparation for the U.S. troop surge. Few residents still retained hope that they’d ever get to move back home.
“We never went in with the mindset that we’re going to flatten the villages,” Flynn tells Danger Room. “I have friends in this community now. The last thing I’m trying to do is wreck my friends’ lives.”
But he did flatten the villages — a decision that’s spurred heated debate since an analyst close to Gen. David Petraeus, Paula Broadwell, blogged earlier this month about the destruction of Tarok Kolache with 49,200 lbs. of rockets and bombs.
Flynn discloses that it wasn’t just Tarok Kolache that got hit: Khosrow Sofla and Lower Babur, located nearby in the Arghandab River Valley, were pounded nearly as badly. Several buildings in Khosrow Sofla are still standing, Flynn says, but Lower Babur is “closer to Tarok Kolache, though not completely eliminated.”
Now, the villages are being rebuilt, a process that’s just begun and which probably won’t be finished by the time Flynn’s battalion completes its tour in the spring. It remains to be seen whether Afghans will remember Flynn for taking the villages back from the Taliban — or completing the process of their destruction.
It wasn’t Flynn’s first time in southern Afghanistan. A Massachusetts native, he served a previous tour at the nearby Kandahar Airfield in 2004 and 2005, when there wasn’t much of either a fight or an American presence. He read Lester Grau’s acclaimed history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, in part to learn what not to do.
Driving through the Arghandab back then and seeing its thick vegetation — perfect for hiding bombs — he recalls thinking, “Holy crap, what must the Russians have gone through…. I was thinking thinking back then, I’m glad we weren’t in that kind of fight. And now, seven years later, here I was.”
That factored into his mind heavily in 2010, when he learned his battalion and their Afghan partners, known collectively as Combined Joint Task Force 1-320, would be one of the first surge troops to clear out parts of Kandahar. But it was one thing to visualize the insurgents’ improvised explosive device (IED) tactics — and another to experience them.
“I didn’t anticipate the density of IEDs that we saw,” he says. From July to October, the 1-320th fought its way through an area about 2 kilometers long and 6 kilometers wide — and found 200 improvised explosive devices. Later, his men would discover caches of another 200 Taliban bombs. “There was an IED about every 60 meters [200 feet] that you’re out there walking,” he says, “in the gardens, on the roads, in the walls, in the villages, in the buildings.”
And it felt like it. Flynn’s plan was to push south and east to the Arghandab River, through villages the Taliban had controlled for three years. The insurgents had planted an ungodly number of bombs in the interim.
The 1-320th’s first real test came July 30, at a canal crossing it needed to control if it was to gain access to those villages. The fight, which the unit christened the Battle of Bakersfield, took four days. “We had three killed the first day and eight wounded,” Flynn says, “and we lost another 12 wounded during the next couple days of fighting.”
What he didn’t see also stuck with him: people. “The friendlies dispersed. They went to the four winds,” Flynn says. The Taliban had pushed the populace out, away from the pomegranate trees that provided their livelihood. Some went to Kabul, others to Kandahar, figuring that the area’s history of never falling to a foreign power meant the Taliban was here to stay. Others — including Tarok Kolache’s malek, or de facto leader — went to a village near Flynn’s base called Jelawar.
Those displaced locals became a source of information for Flynn that summer. He wouldn’t have known how densely placed the homemade bombs were without them.
Before a planned raid into Lower Babur with Special Forces and Afghan commandos, “people literally came up to us and said we can’t go back there. We were with the police on a partnered operation, and they literally told the police, ‘Don’t go down into the gardens, there are Taliban IEDs [there].’ Go where it’s wet, not where it’s dry, if you have to go.”
Using drones and what he calls “multiple sensors,” Flynn confirmed that the Taliban had turned the compounds in the vacated villages into bomb factories. “Pattern of life” analysis showed militants coming in and out, but no civilian activity. In some cases, he could see homemade explosives drying on the rooftops. When he did, he’d call in an air strike or a blast from an attack helicopter, leveling the building.
But as the months ground on, that didn’t stop the proliferation of the bombs. All in all, the 1-320th suffered seven killed and 83 wounded, with nearly 70 percent of those casualties coming from homemade bombs and mines.
To clarify something from Broadwell’s post, Flynn sent his men into the villages to attempt to clear them out — but there were just too many bombs. A July raid on Khosrow Sofla was repulsed by the density of the explosive charges. A Special Forces sergeant told Flynn it was the “most sophisticated IED network he had ever seen.”
A different clearing operation had to be turned back after his men discovered there were more bombs than they had material with which to safely detonate them.
That led Flynn to seek out alternatives. “It was comforting to know” that the civilians had fled, because “we [could] employ the full suite of our weapons systems” — everything from grenades to .50-cal machine guns to attack helicopters and close air support — “without worrying about killing civilians.”
The alternatives before him were stark: He could take out the buildings. Or he could keep moving in on foot, with more of his men getting maimed or killed. And if he cleared the villages without taking out the buildings, he couldn’t know that Afghans would be safe moving back into them, since the Taliban had rigged them to detonate.
So by late September, Flynn called together Tarok Kolache’s malek and the other area residents to let them know that he was planning, essentially, large-scale demolitions. “We didn’t show them a plan and say, ‘We’re going to destroy everything in the village, is everyone OK with that?’” he says.
“But they were made aware there would be significant collateral damage in the village. People didn’t say, ‘Yeah, blow up the village,’ but they kind of understood — they’d been at war for 30 years. This was the biggest fight that had gone on in the district.”
A reporter from the Daily Mail, who Flynn says wasn’t at the meeting, reported that Flynn threatened them: Either turn in the homemade bombs, or he’d blow up their houses.
Flynn says that never happened: Instead, he told them that if residents couldn’t tell him where exactly the bombs were, he would have no way of disposing of them without blowing up the buildings. Khosrow Sofla’s malek registered the only concern, Flynn says: He wanted the soldiers to use a bulldozer to get rid of the bombs, so the pomegranate trees wouldn’t be harmed.1
On October 6, once Flynn was satisfied he had sufficient intelligence about which buildings had explosives in them and the area was cleared of civilians, the air campaign began. Tarok Kolache got 49,200 pounds of bombs dropped on it — basically, 25 1-ton-pound bombs to take out “over 45″ buildings.
Flynn says he’s not sure how much Khasrow Sofla and Lower Babur got, but says it was comparable.
He reported his plan up to brigade headquarters, and from there it went to the regional commander, Flynn believes the sprawling office running the day-to-day war from Kabul, known as the ISAF Joint Command, knew of it as well.
During the bombing, Flynn kept an eye out for civilians and saw none. “We had overhead drones watching the strikes, multiple sensors watching the strikes,” he says. “We probably even got film somewhere, because we were anticipating the Taliban coming out and saying something.”
On previous operations, “a long line of elders” would complain if a civilian died. “In October, when we destroyed the Taliban sanctuary, I didn’t get anyone at my door complaining,” he says.
But that may not be enough. Some locals have expressed dissatisfaction with the operation: Even an Afghan cop told an NPR reporter in Tarok Kolache on Monday that he was “very disappointed and very angry” that the village is no more.
Flynn says his strategy will be vindicated when the battalion stays in the valley — he’s set up 17 small bases for the 38 villages he patrols — and rebuilds what it destroyed. “I told them, ‘We can rebuild your homes. I can’t give you your leg back, I can’t give you your life back,’” –the consequence of Afghans returned to booby-trapped houses — “but I promise, I will rebuild the homes.”
The building is just getting underway, including the foundation of Tarok Kolache’s new mosque. But problems remain in the Arghandab. While the Taliban appear to have largely left the district for nearby areas after the October clearing operations (Flynn estimates there are still a dozen active militants in the area) the battalion is still “pulling out [homemade bombs] by the dozens.”
And just last week, the Taliban assassinated Khosrow Sofla’s malek. Some Afghans tell Flynn they’re too scared to move back into buildings that the battalion left standing. There’s USAID program to re-plant 4,000 pomegranate trees, but that’s “still not a great deal for the people, because that tree’s gonna take five years to produce any fruit.”
If he had to do it all over again, Flynn says he would still have destroyed the buildings, because he sees little alternative. But he wouldn’t have released the before-and-after pictures to Broadwell, because they seemed to imply that Flynn thought flattening the village was sufficient. On the other hand, he says, the pictures show “the truth. That should tell you I’m not trying to hide anything or be deceitful.”
Flynn is home at Fort Campbell on R&R before finishing up his tour. He says he can already take “a degree of satisfaction” in rereading Grau and comparing his actions to the Russians.
“We’re not there to terrorize the population,” he says. “The people talk about the Russians bombing their villages and say the Russians never did anything for us. They say, ‘That’s the difference between you and the Russians.”
Note 1. The original version of this story confused the malek of Khosrow Sofla with the malek of Tarok Kolache at the late September meeting.
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