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persecuted by the Taliban. Reeder sympathized with the governor, but he had no authority over PRTs. He offered instead to send a twelve-man special forces team, ten naval construction workers (called Seabees), and a “radio in a box” manned by psyop soldiers. They would hire local Afghans as deejays to produce programs and play music. The grateful governor burst into tears.
    The team settled into the PRT building and began getting toknow the neighborhood. Several months later, the residents of Gizab decided they had had enough of the Taliban. When the uprising in Gizab occurred, the team moved in to help. Reeder also made sure the Shia religious leaders knew what they were doing to help the Hazaran Shia, who were the majority population in this area. Iran was heavily courting Afghan Shia to build its own avenues of influence. Reeder went to see the senior Shia cleric in Kabul, Ayatollah Shaikh Mohammed Mohseni, who was surprised by the overture. Reeder insisted on taking his boots off at the mosque door, and the cleric later invited him to come on Sundays to pray after his own Christian tradition. Like most other Afghans, the ayatollah thought that all special operators did were night raids, so Reeder kept him apprised of their projects such as renovations of mosques and provision of medical care. He sent him a CNN report on the team providing first aid for a Shia child who had been medivacked to Kandahar for surgery, and the cleric rebroadcast the information on his own television show.
    Reeder’s burgeoning Afghan Rolodex led other commanders to his door. They used his Pashtun network to help tone down Karzai’s periodic anti-American tirades. At McChrystal’s request, Reeder asked the powerful Karzai ally Jan Mohammad Khan to meet with outraged elders following a devastating special ops raid in Uruzgan in February 2010 that mistakenly killed twenty-seven civilians. When Private Bowe Bergdahl went missing in Paktika Province, Ed Reeder called the former governor of Uruzgan, a former Taliban deputy minister who had joined the government. The latter’s contacts said that the soldier had been taken across the border to Miran Shah in Pakistan. A week later, in response to Reeder’s appeals for information, Qayum Karzai, the president’s brother, visited Reeder in Kabul and gave him a note from the kidnappers demanding $19 million and the release of twenty-five prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in exchange for Bergdahl’s release. He also gave him a video, the first proof that Bergdahl was still alive. Karzai had obtained both via a Pashtun who had traveled to Miran Shah. Reeder later received a second message, which lowered the ransom demand to $5 million anddropped the demand to release detainees, but to his surprise, none of his superiors followed up on it. {19}
    Did Reeder’s close relationships wind up empowering Afghan leaders and powerbrokers? Probably, at least in some cases. Reeder’s perspective was that he had to deal with the Afghans who wielded significant influence. His ties no doubt helped the United States understand the machinations going on at any given moment within Afghanistan, but a lot of Afghan skullduggery was overlooked in the name of friendship, leaving open the question of whether more tough love would have reined in some of the corruption. As the massive flow of US funds ratcheted up the corruption to new heights, the coalition formed a task force aimed at peeling apart the web of money and influence in order to stop malfeasance and worse. Contract procedures were tightened, but very few insiders went to jail.
    By the time Reeder left in March 2010, special operations teams had formed local defense groups in seven sites around the country. Some of the sites did not work out—in Achin in Nangahar Province, for example, an anti-Taliban uprising devolved into tribal and land conflicts. In Arghandab, just north of Kandahar City, however, Karimullah Naqib eagerly sought a special