I first met Steve Shaulis about 27 years ago during Special Forces training. We’ve been friends ever since and have traveled many places together.
Back in 2001, six months before the 9/11 attacks, we were at his U.S. home in Vero Beach, Florida. We were preparing to swim out into the night in the Atlantic Ocean when Steve began to tell me more about Afghanistan. Steve had been to Afghanistan many times and had been exporting agricultural products from the war-ravaged land since 1997. Steve told me that the Taliban, who were not supposed to watch television, loved professional wrestling. Their favorite was “The Undertaker,” and when Taliban could not get television, they longed for wrestling updates from Steve. That night in Florida, as a full moon was rising over the dark Atlantic Ocean, Steve’s fax machine came to life with business from Afghanistan. While the message pushed out, Steve handed me a book saying something like, “You should read this. It was written by my friend Ahmed Rashid.” Mr. Rashid’s excellent book Taliban had just been published with a small print run. Steve sometimes cautioned me that much pain was brewing in Afghanistan, and he warned that night again. I remember that night like it was yesterday.
We stepped out of Steve’s home office, passed by his pool, and pulled on our scuba gear. With fins in hand we walked out his screen door to the beach and swam out into the dark sea, eerily illuminated by a giant full moon. Silently, we swam maybe a hundred meters from shore while the moon glistened over the waters in one of the most magnificent natural displays I had ever seen, or seen since then. I had no camera and only the memory.
We swam further into the sea and finally released the air from our buoyancy compensators and descended into the darkness, following the narrow beams of our lights to the holes where the lobsters pulled. The sounds of the fights were loud in the saltwater. We ate them.
Soon after that night, Steve took his family to Singapore, setting up an office there, where he has lived ever since. On about September 10th 2001, an email came from Steve. Ahmed Shah Mashud had been assassinated. The next day, when the second hijacked jet hit the World Trade Center, I called Steve in Singapore. He had been right.
The years flowed by. During 2006, I was taking a break from the Iraq War, and flew to Afghanistan with Steve, where he had several offices. After that trip, I wrote twelve dispatches saying in clear terms that we were losing the war in Afghanistan. Steve never tried to guide the story. He never told me we were losing. He just led me around and showed me Afghanistan. In April, we were in Lashkar Gah when the first two suicide bombers to detonate in that town exploded in front of the PRT. In fact, we drove from the PRT to the “Camp Bastion,” which did not really exist yet, but Steve’s laborers were building a runway for the British.
I wrote that we could find success in Iraq but were losing in Afghanistan. When I returned to America, people literally said I was crazy for saying we were losing Afghanistan. They said I had seen too much combat in Iraq. Ironically, they said the same thing in 2010 when I wrote that Generals Daniel Menard and Stanley McChrystal should be fired and that Generals Petraeus and/or Mattis should step in. Again, many people said I was crazy from too much combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then both generals were fired, and Generals Petraeus and Mattis stepped in. And none too soon. I ain’t crazy. I know a winner when I see one, and it’s my job to stay on point to designate them for you.
The Atlantic saw this before it unfolded.
Steve Shaulis is a winner. He started from scratch, and now does business in many countries and has three airplanes shuttling his able staff and materiel in and around Afghanistan. He has a footprint in 20 provinces, and let me tell you this puppy is not grown up yet and it has very big feet.
When I started fighting with Generals Menard and McChrystal, I promised never to embed with U.S. forces who were under McChrystal’s command. In fact, I was relieved because embedding is very dangerous and more difficult than going alone. I was in a perfect position to fight because I did not want to embed ever again. I hoped my combat days were over. So it was mixed blessings for me when President Obama fired General McChrystal. Meanwhile, Menard is facing a criminal charge and could go to prison. Some journalists who seldom embed have deceived the public by saying that embedding is the easy route—WRONG. Even the milkooks refuse to embed, and those who do come for short trips. So when the fight reached a high pitch with the generals, and General McChrystal’s crew ended my embed, I called Steve—get me out of here buddy! I will attack McChrystal from outside the wire. Brigadier General Daniel Menard was not worth the energy. I was going downtown to Steve’s big house in Kandahar but the neighbor got hit with a truck bomb the night before I got there, killing some people, and so with the house in tatters, I got on one of Steve’s airplanes and flew to Jalalabad.
McChrystal’s gang kept attacking. We now know how it all turned out.
Occasionally I would fly to Singapore to meet with Steve or others about Afghanistan, and I realized through time that my friend had morphed into something far greater than a mere “contractor.” Keeping in mind that Steve started doing Afghanistan business in 1997. He understands counterinsurgency at its most basic level and has been doing it in Afghanistan and elsewhere for years.
Steve is one of those intellectual freaks who brushes up against a language and accidentally learns it. He speaks Spanish, Russian, Pashto to a growing degree, and other languages. His staff is international. At times when he needs interpreters, they are first rate. Far better than what most of the military affords. Steve’s interpreters are actually something else—such as business managers—they’re Afghans who are completely fluent in English, and some have travelled. The only Americans I see with interpreters this good are generals, or ranking civilians.
And so all this is to say that I have been travelling around Afghanistan with Steve. We go places that soldiers and contractors simply do not go, or if they do it’s with lots and lots of guns. We go without armor. We met up this time in Kandahar, flew to Farah, Nirmoz, back to Kandahar, then to Urozgan, then Paktia, and I am now in Nangarhar and Steve has disappeared again. I heard he was in Dubai then Jakarta.
I’ve mentioned before that my job is to stay on point and to laser winners for you to place your chips. Have I served you well in Iraq, Afghanistan, Thailand and elsewhere?
The following small story is a typical “Steve day.”
One of Steve’s nice airplanes was broken and the other was flying somewhere else, so we took one of his freight airplanes from Kandahar to Urozgan. We landed in Tarin Kot. Travelling with Steve is like travelling with a general, or even with Secretary Gates. There is almost no waiting. Staff drives you to the airplane and by the time your seatbelt is fastened the engines are cranking. When you land, staff picks you up and you head straight to the field, visiting projects, key Afghan tribal and government leaders, and British and American officers. Crack, crack, crack.
We visited projects and along the way his Provincial Manager for Urozgan told us some interesting local vignettes, such as that about the suicide bomber who was shot before he could detonate his vest. His vest was deemed too dangerous to try to remove, and so they BIP’d him. (Blew him up in place.) Then there was the Afghan who had made trouble in the community, and so an Afghan commander had him tied to a tree and sodomized him with a shovel handle in front of 3,000 people, it was said. And, it was also said, people were making videos with their phones and transmitting the images and so the commander was fired. These are typical stories in Afghanistan and I have more reason to believe them than not. A few days after our trip in Tarin Kot, a CADG vehicle was hit by a small IED with no casualties. Though Steve’s staff has sometimes been kidnapped and or killed, it’s relatively uncommon and in any case, Steve goes to the same places and shares the risks.
The people are mostly very friendly and happy because Steve is helping the community. Steve has many revenue streams with “normal business,” but these projects are done with USAID money. The COINistas know something that a lot of others don’t seem to get. The project is your foot in the door to build personal relationships with the community. Once the community sees you as a friend, they protect you and you help them and you have tea.
We come from what might well be the most generous country the world has ever known. Sometimes we do it right. Sometimes not. Generosity with brains is a high virtue; generosity without brains is a goodhearted sin.
Many of the smart troops realize and will tell you that we are hobbled by our “forcepro.” (Force Protection.) We are so busy with making sure nobody gets hurt that more people get hurt because we can’t get our work done. A credible source in another province told me that we are using a helicopter to ferry soldiers 400 meters from one base to another because it’s too much hassle to mount constant ground missions. We literally are shipping ice in from Saudi Arabia. (I saw the bags.) General Petraeus will be the first to tell you these things. It’s maddening for him and everyone else who wishes to succeed.
Recently a mission was launched to Nimroz Province. American Marines hovered in on two Osprey aircraft, secured the airfield (or at least brought a lot of guns), and later a British general landed in another Osprey and the meetings began. The bottom line of the meetings was that we are not going to do much to help Nimroz Province. It’s out of sight and out of mind. The American way of doing things, along with British moral support, is to give money to people who are blowing you up and to ignore those who are neutral or helping you. The meeting was as impressive as it was meaningless. Swoop in on the loud Opsreys, set up machine gun positions, make a show of how nice it is to take off your body armor, talk a lot with nice words, and leave in the loud Ospreys. Waste of time. And if you dare try to calculate the hard and soft costs of that mission, it had to have cost well over a million dollars. The funny thing is, traveling with Steve is easily as educational as travelling with a general. Information flows from the firehose, yet his model is lean and mean. You get in the car and drive, yet it’s far more dangerous for me to be with U.S. forces in those giant vehicles with body armor than it is to drive with Steve or others.
We visited a greenhouse project that he had going in 2006. Back then, Steve had farmers from Africa working here to help Afghan farmers, and he brought Afghans to Thailand to visit the Royal Project Foundation and to see his Thailand projects. In fact, it was just about at this very spot that I realized in 2006 that we were losing. That night, the base was in serious contact. We could hear the fighting. Yet we were staying out in the desert with Afghans with no problems. One of Steve’s people said to me that they had warned the U.S. battalion commander that year about an IED, but she had ignored the warning and a soldier was killed. Very few American or British officers will listen to contractors, despite that many of the contractors know the ground and the people far better than most military will ever know. They tend to view the contractors as dirty, conniving profiteers, and some are exactly that. But there are others who wish to make a profit while succeeding here, and they spend far more time here—quality time at that—than most soldiers. Most troops never actually leave a base, and only a small fraction have any meaningful interaction with Afghans. This is not the fault of the troops. The warrior class who understands this struggle wants to live in the villages, and some do.
We headed to one of Steve’s offices for briefings/talks/questions, and then an Afghan senator invited us to tea. Steve has known Senator Abdul Khaliq for some years and in fact it was Steve who got him on the ballot to be elected. Senator Abdul Khaliq would be a tribal influence with or without the nudge, but not a senator.
So we headed to Senator Khaliq’s home and sat down to tea and business. During the conversation, Senator Khaliq mentioned that he was about to head to Kabul for meetings and to take his kids to some school. Steve then said that one of his airplanes was coming in a few hours and could take him if he wants to go today. The Senator said thank you and agreed, so Steve hit the speed dial and confirmed the flight.
We then headed to lunch and after that met with a representative of USAID along with an American officer. The USAID man said what two other USAID people said in two other provinces. Steve is best implementing partner they have. He goes where no man goes. The American officer was from Special Forces. He’d done multiple tours, and though he was a young captain, was about the sharpest officer I’ve seen. His knowledge of Afghanistan was intimate. He was asking Steve to consider doing a certain very dangerous project. It would not be appropriate to discuss the project. I’ll let the Army do that, but Steve was interested. After a long, healthy talk, I was impressed with that Special Forces captain and when we shook hands and said goodbye, Steve said, “That guy is switched on. Impressive.” That’s big words from Steve. The Special Forces officer was dangerous. He studies his enemy in detail. Sitting there listening to this Special Forces man, I thought, “I wish he were my neighbor.” There would be no crime in our neighborhood. That’s part of what Afghan people want. He gets it. If the Taliban stomp down crime (and they do), people will accept them. When they see the government as delivering nothing but orders while shipping money to Dubai, they will resist!
In order for this project to go forward, you will either need a LOT of guns, or simply cooperation from the tribes. With tribal cooperation you don’t need guns because they have guns coming out their ears. If they like you, they will fight for you.
We headed to the airfield and Steve’s airplane landed, and Chief Ajaml Khan Zazai stepped out of the airplane along with Sara Persson who is reporting for the BBC. (Many journalists, including the big fish, silently use Steve’s infrastructure as a launch pad.)
And there it was, on Steve’s airplane flying from Tarin Kot to Gardez: Steve started working with Senator Khaliq to formulate an idea of how to make this Special Forces idea work. During this time, Chief Zazai discussed with Senator Khaliq other tribal matters.
I could tell another hundred “Steve stories,” but the bottom line is that this guy—who I admit is my close friend—is a winner. He can help win this war.
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Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/michaelyon-online/~3/MNfJ1DImxzw/to-follow-these-steps.htm
Posted
Oct 04 2010, 08:19 PM
by
Michael Yon - Online Magazine