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tribal cleansing.” {17}
    Reeder also set his staff to work on a slightly different concept from AP3, which they dubbed the Community Defense Initiative. Mahaney, who had come back for a sixth tour as Reeder’s operations officer, enthusiastically embraced this pivot to putting local Afghans in charge of securing their villages. As if the scales had fallen from their eyes, he and his 7th Special Forces Group veterans saw that they had applied this self-help approach for years in Latin America, first in El Salvador and then in Peru and Colombia. Their emphasis had to shift to assisting rather than leading Afghans, and in a very deliberate and carefully structured way. Civil defense was not a replacement for the national army or a local police force, but an adjunct to them. Reeder’s staff began to do the rigorous evaluation of Afghanistan’s tribal mosaic that had been lacking. It was the beginning of a campaign approach guided by an overarching concept and plan.
    Reeder thought the best model was a volunteer defense force with villagers taking shifts. He believed this approach would prevent any one faction from dominating other members of the community. He also wanted the defenders to bring their own guns, and he wanted to limit the US contribution to training and development projects. In his view, these limits would mitigate the risks. If the men were paid, and the pay ran out, a disgruntled armed local would be more likely to turn to nefarious activity than someone who was a volunteer to begin with. He wanted the solution to be something the Afghans could sustain. The interior minister, however, insisted that they be paid, and so they were.
    On May 11, 2009, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked for McKiernan’s resignation. McKiernan was a thoughtful general, but not decisive enough, or so the Obama White House concluded as it completed its yearlong review of Afghan policy. Stan McChrystal, the hard-charging special ops counterterrorism chieftain, was picked as the next commander and promoted to four-star general. He hadgained fame in the inner circle of national security leaders from his days in Iraq, where he had turned his unit into a ferociously effective, relentless machine to hunt down Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents.
    Shortly after McChrystal arrived in June, Reeder and Jones went to talk to him about local defense. Reeder asked him what he wanted to do about AP3. McChrystal was noncommittal. “I don’t want to kill it, but let’s reassess in six months,” he said. They described the fledgling Community Defense Initiative and the development projects. “We have to get Karzai to ask for it, to ask the US to do it,” Reeder said. “It has to be an Afghan program or it won’t work. It will just be seen as another Western program.” {18}
    The next day, McChrystal raised the idea with Karzai over breakfast at the presidential palace. When he returned he sent the message through his staff: “Tell Reeder thumbs up.” Reeder proceeded to launch the Community Defense Initiative in July, but he noted that there was no overt sign of support from Karzai.
    Reeder directed his special operators in the field to be on the lookout for spontaneous anti-Taliban activity. They would find it in Gizab in 2010, a village overrun by the Taliban a few years earlier. It was pure serendipity that the team was in the area, however. Reeder planted the seeds by sending a team to Day Kundi Province, 25 miles from Gizab, after its governor came to see him. The governor complained that his province did not reap any benefits in aid or attention because it was not a hotbed of insurgency. “I want a PRT,” he said, referring to the provincial reconstruction teams that brought development projects and government training to provinces. A building had been built, but no development workers had ever arrived. Day Kundi was not a priority because it was peaceful. Its population was ethnic Hazara, Shia Muslims who had been brutally