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forces team to come to his valley to push out the Taliban. This would become one of the most successful and enduring sites. That bond had been forged in 2007, when Naqib had credited Mahaney’s men with saving his life after he had come under attack as the newly anointed head of the Alikozai subtribe. Local defense was still nascent, but it was now more than an idea.
    The year 2010 marked a pivot for special operations forces as they turned away from pure combat operations to embrace local defense as a viable way to bring security to a largely rural society. Before this new direction could get off the ground, however, there would be more turmoil at the top.

CHAPTER THREE
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    THE TALIBAN’S HOME

    Kandahar 2010–2011
    “WHO WILL GO WITH ME?”
    The framers of the local defense initiative recognized that Kandahar was the single most important province, so it received the greatest number of special operations teams. It was also the hardest place in which to find willing volunteers, because it was the cradle of the Taliban—its spiritual home, where it had regrouped while the coalition was sleeping. Taliban leader Mullah Omar had ruled from Kandahar, and before the Taliban came to power he had taught at a madrassa west of the city. Once ousted, he took up residence in Quetta, Pakistan, just a few hours’ drive away.
    Kandahar Province’s landowning khans had largely fled to the city of Kandahar, and tenant farmers, left to fend for themselves, were easily cowed. In 2010, Taliban influence in the province overshadowed the government almost everywhere outside of Kandahar City. The insurgency asserted itself as a ubiquitous presence through the use of threatening night letters, summary justice dispensed by shadow courts, and thugs on motorcycles carrying AK-47s or PKM machine guns. Even if most Kandaharis rejected this extremist version of Islamic rule, survival instincts dictated compliance. The Taliban was, for young men, a source of seasonal employment, especially after the cash crops of opium and hashish were harvested.
    The natural landscape of Kandahar was far less intimidating than the rugged mountains that characterized most of the insurgent belt in the south and east. The province is mostly flat, with small humps of mountains springing up here and there on dun-colored plains. The irrigated land between the Arghandab and Helmand rivers serves as the breadbasket of the south and the opium capital of the world. South of the Arghandab, the blood-red Registan Desert runs in undulating ripples to Pakistan, crisscrossed by smuggling trails and nomadic Kuchi herders who camp in black cloth tents. The province’s manmade landscape provides many guerrilla-friendly structures, such as arched grape-​drying sheds dotted with tiny windows, which are perfect portholes for guns. Grape arbors made of chest-high walls of mud are impassable to Humvees and favor fighters on foot. Homemade bombs festoon their walls or the sides of the underground irrigation channels, called karezes , which from above look like holes bored by giant moles in a snaky line across the plains. Columns of insurgents can run underground and pop up miles away. Arched kilns, surrounded by high piles of freshly baked bricks, await customers and offer one more spot to hide.
    In the summer of 2009, all of Kandahar Province was under siege, but there were few forces available to pull it back from the brink. In hindsight it seemed incredible that the United States had neglected the south, leaving it to small numbers of British and Canadian troops while Americans obsessed on the eastern border where bin Laden had last been seen. Realizing belatedly that the war was about to be lost, the Americans hastily threw the 5-2 Stryker Brigade into the fight. It was led by a man named Harry Tunnel who thought counterinsurgency was bunk. His troops proceeded to get chewed up in Arghandab District and then got even in Maiwand District,