Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

The second time the city of Kunduz fell seemed to be a turning point. The US military once again dispatched teams of Green Berets to help the Afghan commandos rescue the province, while outwardly denying a role in the battle. At The Wall Street Journal Kabul bureau, we knew that US Special Forces had a critical role in the operation to recapture the city. But how had the battle played out? Would it show the scope of the US military’s operations in Afghanistan and reveal the truth behind the White House’s claim that the United States was no longer in combat? We felt confident that we could answer these questions if we could get into Kunduz, and we believed that the story was worth the risk. It became the story that motivated me to write this book.

  Habib, who had a great relationship with the ministry of defense, obtained papers granting us an embed with the Afghan army’s 10th Special Operations Kandak; they were delivered in a sealed envelope with an inky blue stamp. I looked at commercial flight options. The closest we could get to Kunduz was Badakhshan. We planned to stop overnight to see the governor in Takhar province, a contact of mine, and drive to Kunduz the following day.

  We set off with a photographer, Andrew Quilty. The drive to Kunduz on the second day was perhaps the riskiest part of the journey. The Taliban controlled the countryside, and our best bet was to drive in the middle of the day. We attached ourselves to an Afghan civilian convoy providing aid to the city and drove through villages where white Taliban flags flapped in the wind and the insurgents set up roadblocks at night. In the afternoon, we reached the Afghan army’s headquarters in Kunduz, where we knew that there were two teams of Green Berets based in the province.

  We were led straight into the commander’s office, interrupting a meeting with a bearded American Special Forces captain, who was chewing tobacco and spitting into a bottle. Everyone seemed startled to see us. A large map was spread over the coffee table, and the captain cut a muscular figure next to the Afghan soldier sitting beside him. They all stared at us.

  “How did you get here?” the captain asked when we were outside.

  “We drove from Badakhshan,” I told him, “through Khanabad.”

  He couldn’t believe we had made it.

  “Well, do you want to stay with us? I mean, I figure, culturally, it would be better for you to stay on our side,” he offered.

  We gratefully accepted rooms in the tiny Special Forces camp, which was located inside the larger Afghan commando base. It had clean showers and food. There was no question of a shower on the Afghan base, where the stench in the bathrooms was enough to make your stomach turn. It was too good to be true, and it wasn’t to last. As soon as US headquarters in Kabul found out we were there, the Green Berets were ordered to kick us out.

  “You’re putting our lives in danger,” I complained to Brigadier General Charlie Cleveland, the head of public affairs, on the phone.

  I dramatically listed the risks of staying in the Afghan commando barracks, including the possibility of an insider attack, but he wouldn’t hear of our remaining in the Special Forces camp. We returned to the commander of the Afghan army’s 10th Special Operations Kandak to ask for lodging. He tried to refuse to take us in, but our embed papers were good, and Habib made some calls to Kabul that cemented our position. The commander was stuck with us. We moved into the commando barracks and went with them on day and night patrols. Habib had a touch when it came to collecting stories about their hopes, regrets, and dreams. He heard how one commando had fallen in love with a village girl while posted out in a district. Others talked about corruption and, occasionally, guilt. In the evenings, we sat outside under the stars trying to get reception while Habib played American pop music like Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie.”

  Over the course of a week, we got to know some of the Afghan commandos, and a few US soldiers too, and managed to patch together the story of how they had recaptured Kunduz. Two teams of Green Berets had fought alongside the Afghan commandos in the city for days, backed by US airstrikes. Kunduz was under government control again, but everyone cautioned that it wouldn’t be for long. The Afghan government was corrupt, and the Afghan army’s leadership stole money that was meant for supplies like food and fuel. Afghan commandos were abandoned on frontline posts for weeks without resupply.

  The US and Afghan soldiers were preparing for a night raid to kill or capture a local Taliban commander when we left. A few days later, when we were back in Kabul, news broke that the raid had gone horribly wrong. The soldiers had gotten trapped in the village of Boz Kandahari and fought all night to get out alive. An AC-130 gunship attacked the village to help them escape, killing thirty-three civilians, including many children. In the morning, angry villagers paraded their tiny, bloodied, dusty bodies in the streets. Two American soldiers and three Afghan commandos were dead, and many others wounded.

  The Pentagon still refused to discuss the role that SOF were playing in keeping Kunduz under government control and provided no explanation for the village raid, which the soldiers had told us aimed to capture or kill a local Taliban commander. The whole thing was framed as a training mission. “The service members came under fire during a train, advise and assist mission with our Afghan partners to clear a Taliban position and disrupt the group’s operations in Kunduz district,” a statement said.

  I looked at the footage of the grieving families carrying their dead children and found it hard to square with the kindness we had seen from the US soldiers in Kunduz.

  The Wall Street Journal published the Kunduz story soon after, describing the role played by Special Forces in the recapture of the city and in the broader fight to save several other provinces also on the brink, such as Helmand, Uruzgan, Farah, and Baghlan. The newly elected president, Donald Trump, we predicted, would be faced with a tough choice: escalate the secret war, or allow Afghanistan to slip out of grasp.

  A few days later, I received a letter from the grieving mother-in-law of one of the US soldiers killed in that raid, Captain Andrew D. Byers. Her daughter had opened the paper and read our article, which was dated November 18, 2016. The two had been married for seven years. The mother-in-law wrote:

  Andy is a casualty of a policy without clear purpose, in a seemingly endless war. It is easy to want to make heroes out of people in this circumstance. The term hero is too strong. What is worth noting is that there are men and women who choose to serve, and in many ways, give up their freedom by serving.

  Andy was a soldier, doing his job with honor. He embodied respect, responsibility, and hard work. These qualities are becoming more difficult to identify in a world where being a victim is esteemed.

  Thank you for the commentary that highlights the need for those who govern to consider the impact of the war. What a sad way for our country to lose good people.

  —Laura Crites

  Back in Afghanistan, we felt the losses at home as well. Toryalai, one of our drivers, lost his twenty-one-year-old brother, who had worked with the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence agency, in Kunduz. The kid was ordered out on a mission and shot dead by a sniper. I visited their family home with the Journal bureau staff and went to the women’s side with our cleaning ladies, known as khalas or aunties, to meet the grieving mother and sister. Everywhere, women were wailing. The khalas immediately started crying as well. The war had taken a toll on everyone. The cries coming from the women weren’t about a single loss. They contained all their losses, the decades of war, and the losses to come—the helplessness of it all.

  I thought about the number of Afghan forces killed in the war that year—was it five thousand? Or eight thousand? I tried to imagine the grief that I was witnessing in our driver’s home, multiplied a thousand times, day after day, year after year. How could one country contain so much grief? I thought about how the US military officials and diplomats informally called the casualty rates among the Afghan army and police “unsustainable.” This one death seemed unsustainable to me.

  Today, casualty figures in Afghanistan are a closely
guarded secret to avoid hurting morale. But in the first four years of the new mission that was launched in 2015, some forty-five thousand Afghan army troops and police officers were reportedly killed. Most Americans have forgotten the war in Afghanistan. But to the soldiers I write about in this book, who have served multiple deployments there in service of the War on Terror, Afghanistan is like a second home.

  US SOF keep the country intact, providing just enough support through airstrikes and joint operations to prevent the Taliban from seizing major cities. Their sacrifices, such as they are, remain unsung. The war continues in the shadows, the violence worsening by the day. The White House calls the SOF troops “advisers” instead of soldiers and describes battles like the ones fought in Kunduz as “training missions.” A handful of American soldiers give their lives each year in the same places: Nangarhar, Kunduz, Helmand, Kabul. The low number of American body bags keeps the war out of public debate, while little thought is given to the Afghan forces and civilians bearing the brunt of the violence year after year.

  President Donald Trump inherited this mode of warfare and ramped it up to address the deteriorating conditions on the ground. Like his predecessor, he has struggled to extract himself from the Afghan war. The effort to negotiate a deal with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops was publicly rebuked by retired generals and diplomats, who warned of the risk that al Qaeda might resurge if the United States leaves Afghanistan. When an agreement was signed in February 2020, critics charged that it amounted to selling out the Afghan government and endangered the US investment in Afghanistan.

  US troops are currently scheduled to depart Afghanistan in early 2021, but the conditions attached to the withdrawal leave open the possibility of prolonging the war beyond that date. Provisions such as certifying that the Taliban have broken ties with al Qaeda, or that violence has decreased, seem subjective at best. In addition, little progress has been made so far in starting a genuine dialogue between Afghan groups to end the conflict, another condition for the US withdrawal.

  It’s not just Afghanistan. Historically, US SOF have been deployed all over the world, from Iraq and Syria to Libya and Yemen. A little-talked-about SOF mission still operates in the African countries of Niger and Mali against extremist groups linked to Islamic State, al Qaeda, and others. In all these battlefields, the complexity of local dynamics undercuts the simple good-versus-evil narrative. The conflicts are often fueled by scarcity of resources, tribal disputes, and long-standing ethnic rivalries left over from colonial eras. We in the media never question the counterterrorism argument, and so the wars continue in shadows with no end in sight.

  “A perpetual war—through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments—will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways,” President Obama said in a 2013 address promising to end the war in Afghanistan the following year.

  But that’s exactly what he started.

  US Special Forces led the invasion in 2001 to oust the Taliban and chase down the leader of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. Green Berets were the first to arrive in Afghanistan with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that year, riding over the mountains on horseback alongside Afghan warlords. Now, twenty years later, they are the ones still left on the front lines of the war.

  Footnote

  1 Statement by the president on the end of the combat mission in Afghanistan, December 28, 2014.

  PART ONE

  WITHDRAWAL

  CHAPTER 1

  Back to War

  HUTCH

  MAJOR MICHAEL HUTCHINSON was at 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Bragg, North Carolina, preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in the summer of 2015. He was thirty-five and, with fair hair and blue eyes, still fresh-faced. The other soldiers called him Hutch. This would be his fifth combat deployment, counting three tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. He’d spent the last year in California, completing a degree in unconventional warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, where he wrote academic papers converting his experiences in Afghanistan into theory and passed easily. He had felt renewed after his time on the sunny California coast with his family. Now, however, he felt apprehensive about the upcoming deployment.

  He had been promoted to commander of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Group. He was in charge of seven Special Forces teams. He thought of all the men that would depend on him on the battlefield and felt unsettled. Did he still have it in him to fight after having left the war behind? In California, he had focused on his family for the first time in years, bonding with his two daughters, who barely recognized him at first. He took them on trips to Hawaii and the Grand Canyon. They had a family membership at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and went shopping at farmers’ markets on the weekends.

  He was glad the girls would have lasting memories of him, in case anything happened. But did he really still have the ability to act decisively in the fog of war? He always prepared for the possibility that he might not return and had made all the usual preparations. He had updated his will and had written letters to his wife and daughters in the event of his death. As he sat at the table at Green Ramp, Pope Army Airfield, playing cards with the family, he tried to push his thoughts away and concentrate on their last moments together. But the disquiet persisted.

  He had promised his wife, Tina, that this deployment to Afghanistan would be different from the years of hardship he’d spent at remote outposts. US Special Forces were deploying as part of the new Resolute Support training mission, and they were expected to have very limited exposure now that the combat role was officially over. The soldiers were there to support the handover to Afghan forces before all remaining US troops withdrew the following year. Still, a familiar scene was playing out in the waiting area, where families and friends spent their last moments together until the loudspeaker called their flight. Infants cried, and mothers bounced them on a hip. Some wives and girlfriends looked tearful. It was a matter of odds; there was always someone that didn’t make it back.

  He was known in the battalion for leading a Special Forces team, a unit known as an Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA),1 during the Village Stability Operations (VSO) at the war’s peak in 2010–2012. He was the captain of ODA 3325, which operated out of Firebase Shkin in a remote part of Paktika province near the border with Pakistan. It was located at seventy-seven hundred feet over an infiltration route for the Taliban, accessible only by dirt track. Soldiers compared it to a Wild West fort. His team identified itself with a patch bearing a Viking braid and the Greek letter lambda, the symbol worn by the Spartans, which reflected both ferocity and endurance. And just about everyone had it tattooed on themselves somewhere.

  The team’s job was to recruit friendly militias to fight the Taliban in Paktika and to secure an economic corridor to offer an alternative to violence. Hutch had to immerse himself in local tribal dynamics. The US military’s chosen partner was a local warlord known as Commander Azizullah, who had been named chief of police. Their first major battlefield success came by mistake, after they got lost in the mountains in April 2010, only a few weeks after arriving.

  Hutch stopped the convoy, which was led by one of Azizullah’s men, and examined his GPS-enabled Blue Force Tracker map that was supposed to identify friendly and hostile forces. He mapped a route through the thick forest back to their camp. The trucks resumed moving single file, and drove directly into a clearing where men were setting up a camp. Some were in Adidas track pants; others wore the traditional Afghan tunic known as a salwar kameez. There was a group lighting a fire and another setting up a tripod for mortars. Taliban.

  Before he could give orders, his men opened fire in all directions, chasing down fleeing Taliban with their trucks. It was chaos. Hutch was almost shot by one of his own soldiers. The group’s favored weapon was a dual-mounted M240 machine gun, fed by two belts and affectionately called “the Twins.” He counted eleven dead Taliban when the battle was over, including some carrying foreign passports: Uzbeks and Tajiks, who
had likely reinforced the locals for the summer. The rest were Afghans.

  News of their success ran up the chain. Generals cited it as an example of how the VSO was supposed to work. The program aimed to secure rural areas by winning the support of villages in remote areas, where conventional forces did not go. Working with native forces was exactly what Special Forces were designed to do.2

  To Hutch, serving during the VSO was more than just a job. Over three years of back-to-back tours in Paktika, he began copying the gestures of elders in village shuras (meetings or consultations). When they prayed, he bowed down too. He wasn’t a Muslim, but he felt part of the community. When it was time to leave, like many other soldiers, his sense of self was skewed. He felt foreign at home and as though he was simply going through the motions of family life. It took him a long time to leave the mud-brick Afghan villages behind, but he’d done it.

  Awaiting departure at Fort Bragg in 2015, Hutch roused himself from his memories. After the long break in California, he didn’t know if he could do it all over again. But, he thought, conditions in Afghanistan were different now. He’d spend most of his time at a desk or in meetings in Kabul, far from the battlefield, ensuring that the teams ran smoothly and major infrastructure remained under government control. Combat operations were banned. The war was over.

  HUTCH’S WIFE, TINA, who sat across from him with her long, dark hair sweeping over her shoulders, looked down at the cards in her lap, and tried not to think too hard. They had started playing Texas Hold ’Em as a family during power outages in California, and it had become a ritual. Other families sat around them, wives and children waiting for soldiers to deploy. She was eager to get out of there.

  She hated lengthy goodbyes. It was like she and the other moms were playing a game of chicken to see whose child would cry first. The soldiers took off for remote corners of the world, and the women were left with a chorus of wailing toddlers, not knowing if or when their husbands and boyfriends would come back. Their daughters were six and eight now, old enough to understand how long an eight-month deployment really lasted.