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U.S. Army intelligence collectors in the region.
    According to a U.S. Army platoon commander who served with the 10th Mountain Division in Wardak in 2009, “The Hazaras were wonderful people and fantastic sources of intel about the Taliban. When we visited their villages up in the hills, everyone came out to meet us. We had to sit down for tea with the village chief and all the old men, followed by a meal. We were there for hours. And when we finally said our good-byes and got out of the village, my intelligence NCO had a notepad full of juicy tidbits about local Taliban activities.”
    These informal sit-down shuras (meetings) over tea with the Hazara village elders invariably produced a plethora of hard, and sometimes actionable, intelligence information about what the Taliban were up to. Two U.S. Army intelligence officers who served in Wardak in 2009 and 2010 conservatively estimated that they got about 75 percent of their best intelligence information about the Taliban from the Hazaras.
    But the relationship with the Hazaras took a painfully long time to develop, in part because the U.S. Army and the Afghan government had largely ignored the Hazaras and their needs since the U.S. invasion in 2001. The harmonious relationship that the U.S. military once had with the Hazara villagers immediately after the 2001 invasion was gone, replaced by wariness, and sometimes outright hostility, because the promises that had been made a decade earlier in return for their support against the Taliban had never been honored.
    So shortly after arriving in Wardak in January 2009, several of the brigade’s company and platoon commanders began asking local landowners ( khans ) and village chiefs ( maliks ) in their sectors for any information about the Taliban, in return for which they promised to build schools or dig water wells. The village elders politely rejected the requests, telling the American officers that their predecessors had made similar promises but had never delivered. And they were not about to get fooled again.
    There are literally hundreds of stories just like this, where in remote villages across Afghanistan young American field commanders were being denied access to basic ground-level intelligence about the Taliban because of the broken promises made by their predecessors. Because of our own obduracy, the American soldiers in Afghanistan had become, in the words of the current commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General David H. Petraeus, “an army of strangers in the midst of strangers.”
    So Colonel Haight’s brigade had to start from scratch to build a sense of trust amongst the local Hazara tribesmen. Seemingly small acts of kindness went a long way toward building up a sense of goodwill among the villagers. Taking a page from the Green Berets’ toolkit, U.S. Army commanders in Wardak found that offering free medical checkups was a very effective way to build goodwill and trust. Showing a degree of concern for the welfare of the village’s all-important livestock herds was another. One army lieutenant, who grew up in sheep-herding country in central California, proved to be an effective intelligence collector because he took the time to sit down with village elders to discuss the diseases that were afflicting the local goat and sheep herds. The officer arranged for a veterinarian to visit the village and inoculate the village’s sheep herds. Within a matter of weeks, the village elders were feeding the lieutenant’s platoon with tidbits of information about what the Taliban were up to around the village.
    The field commanders found that the most effective way to build trust and generate intelligence information at the same time was to spoil the village children, who invariably ran out to greet the troops because they had learned long ago that the soldiers brought gifts. The rule of thumb was that every child got a toy, usually a soccer ball, as well as whatever chocolate or