Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  The timeline for Afghanistan was supposed to give local forces enough notice to adjust and take over the war against the Taliban before the United States pulled out, but there were clearly serious flaws in the plan. It was shaping up to be the worst year for the Afghan government since the start of the war: the new rules limiting US operations on the battlefield had a devastating impact on the capability and morale of government forces.

  The Taliban maintained a network of powerful commanders or “shadow governors” installed in every province. Poppy crops, which funded the insurgency, were at a record high, despite eradication efforts that had cost Washington over $8 billion. The United States had tried everything, from eradication to crop substitution to education, but nothing worked. The Taliban’s annual spring offensive, launched after snow melted in the Hindu Kush, was in full swing and driving a rise in violence. Afghan forces were fast losing ground as both sides realized that the United States was holding back its airpower and forces, leaving the Afghan government to fight on its own.

  The US military, prohibited from combat operations, allowed offensive strikes in a very limited set of circumstances: to protect US forces and to target known members of al Qaeda. Every strike had to be reported to the White House. In certain cases the United States could strike to save Afghan lives when they were in grave danger, but the onerous requirements for approval meant the US military often watched the Taliban bulldoze over Afghan checkpoints without being able to help. As an added restriction, some high-level counterterrorism strikes required sign-off in Washington, by which point the opportunity had often passed.

  Lavoy sympathized with the Pentagon’s case for retaining offensive authorities and holding off on the drawdown of troops on the basis that the timeline and the cap on troop numbers were arbitrary and undermined the mission. The Pentagon viewed the restrictions on US force levels as politically motivated, a strategy to enable the White House to say that “fewer than ten thousand” troops were left in Afghanistan. In line with his defense and intelligence background, Lavoy also saw the merit in the CIA’s case for maintaining its bases along the Afghan border with Pakistan, where the agency tracked militants in an area that for decades had been a training ground for al Qaeda and other such groups. Those bases provided an early warning of militant incursions into Afghanistan from Pakistan, sometimes intercepting high-profile attacks planned for Kabul.

  IT MADE NO SENSE, Lavoy thought, to cling to preset deadlines that appeared timed for the US electoral cycle without giving the president an opportunity to weigh the views of the various departments and agencies, all of which favored continuing the mission. He set to work on a new strategy for Afghanistan and tasked Fernando Lujan, the National Security Council’s Afghanistan director, with mapping out policy options. Lujan was a Green Beret on loan from the Pentagon who had worked at the council for nearly a year and had just started dating a prominent CNN news anchor.

  Lujan had served three tours in Afghanistan and was deeply invested in the country’s fate. He advocated stepping up US SOF operations to contain the Taliban insurgency. He thought that the strict restrictions on US operations in the country were causing the army and police to get slaughtered, and that an increase in US support would at least halt the Taliban’s advance. The second component of the strategy involved setting the goal of negotiating a political settlement to end the war.

  US efforts to negotiate with the insurgents had stopped and started since at least 2011. The Taliban had opened a political office in Doha to start talks in 2013, but it was forced to close down almost immediately due to a dispute with then president Hamid Karzai. Since then, the closed Doha office had continued to serve as the de facto embassy, and its Taliban members met with foreign governments, aid groups, and others in Doha from time to time. In 2014, the State Department, through Qatar, had successfully negotiated the release of Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, the only US prisoner of war, in return for five senior Taliban commanders at Guantánamo Bay. There were hopes that the prisoner swap might revive a peace process, but the parties remained deadlocked over sequencing. The Obama administration insisted that any process had to include Kabul. The Taliban insisted on talks with Washington first.

  To break the deadlock, Lavoy proposed leveraging the US relationship with Pakistan to bring the Taliban to the table for talks. Islamabad had played a double game from the start, acting as a US ally but also providing the Taliban leadership with shelter. Like many in the US government, Lavoy saw ample evidence that Pakistan was supporting the group with training, weapons, and medical care. If Pakistan was under pressure, it could force the Taliban’s leadership to engage in talks. He drafted a two-page concept note and scheduled a meeting with Susan Rice.

  The document outlined three different options for the way forward in Afghanistan that Lavoy hoped would initiate an interagency review of the plan to withdraw in light of the deteriorating security conditions.

  Option one outlined the Kabul-centric mission that President Obama had promised the public: dropping to a normal, embassy-only presence. It would reduce US leverage to push the Taliban to negotiate. To maintain security, the United States would fly in troops from Central Asia to conduct counterterrorism operations (which was one of the ways the United States was already quietly circumventing the cap on troop numbers), a costly and ineffective approach. Option two was a far more expansive US troop presence than the White House had promised the public. Option three was a “Kabul-centric-plus” plan: keeping a small number of US troops across Afghanistan’s regions beyond 2016 to prevent major territorial losses, and working on a negotiated settlement to end the war.

  The meeting with Rice did not go well. She went “ballistic” when presented with the proposal, according to Lavoy. She was opposed to a discussion about how the mission was going or any strategy that did not align with President Obama’s plan to draw down to zero troops and maintain a US embassy–only presence in Afghanistan by the end of his term.

  “I can’t do this; I can’t condone this process,” he recalled her telling them. “What don’t you understand about Kabul-centric?”

  The Department of Defense, however, continued to work on its own recommendation for President Obama, and it did not align with the plan to withdraw.

  SINCE TAKING OVER THE PREVIOUS SUMMER, General John F. Campbell, the top US commander in Afghanistan, had made holding off the drawdown to fifty-five hundred troops that year his main goal. The reduction would have entailed closing Kandahar Airfield, the launching point for operations in the south, where Helmand was on the brink of collapse. White House officials slow-walked the process in response, dragging out the discussion by drilling into the minutiae of the military’s recommendations, scrutinizing and arguing over practically what every individual in the force package would be doing.

  Gen. Campbell, undeterred, sat through the endless meetings with Washington with a digital clock over his head displaying the local time in Kabul in large numbers. The meetings often ran as late as two or three a.m. He was frustrated with the White House’s fixation with numbers, which hamstrung the mission. But since there was no way around it, he thought the United States should keep at least eighty-six hundred troops in Afghanistan to preserve the military’s regional commands, which operated across the country: Bagram Airfield in the north, Forward Operating Base Gamberi in the east, and Kandahar Airfield in the south. Decades earlier, Gen. Campbell had served in 5th Group, and he saw value in what relatively small numbers of highly trained SOF could achieve if the US maintained a presence across Afghanistan.

  In the media in Washington, retired American generals and diplomats were given bandwidth to warn against the withdrawal. The line of argument was that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan still posed a threat, and the United States should protect its investment. There was never a discussion in the media of the evidence showing that these groups existed in significant numbers, nor of the long-term plan for the war. Nor was there much effort to examine w
hy US forces had to be in Afghanistan when militant groups flourished in ungoverned spaces all around the world.

  Retired general David Petraeus and foreign-policy expert Michael O’Hanlon published one of many such op-eds in the Washington Post in July 2015, in which they warned against President Obama’s plan to draw down to an embassy-only presence in Afghanistan. They maintained that the withdrawal could have serious consequences for national security, and the right approach for the Obama administration was to keep military forces there beyond 2016. “We can schedule an end to our role in that nation’s conflict, but we cannot schedule an end to the war there or an end to the threat from al-Qaeda, the Islamic State or other extremist elements of the global jihad,” they wrote. “Moreover, the Afghan political leadership and public overwhelmingly want us to stay. But all is not lost. Far from it. Kabul is much safer than most cities in war zones—and for that matter, a number of cities in Latin America.”

  But things in Kabul were about to get much worse.

  THAT SAME MONTH, as the Pentagon wrestled with the White House over troop numbers, the State Department was initiating a plan to leverage Pakistan to get the Taliban to engage in talks while the United States still had a troop presence, and therefore influence, in Afghanistan. Washington had seesawed for years over the issue of how much weight to give Pakistan. There were questions about the level of influence Islamabad had over the Taliban, and how helpful it was likely to be in the process. Skeptics took the view that Pakistan was unlikely to sever ties with the Taliban because it nurtured relationships with a host of unsavory groups as a hedge against India. Others recognized the risks but still thought leaning on Pakistan to kick-start talks was worth a try.

  The US ambassador to Pakistan, Rick Olson, was skeptical that Islamabad would break ties with the Taliban, but he also believed that getting Pakistan’s leaders on board was a necessary component of the process. He was trying to get the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, to strong-arm the Taliban into a meeting with the Afghan government. That effort had borne the first fruits of success earlier in the year. An initial, secret meeting was held between Afghan and Taliban representatives in Urumqi, China, in May 2015. A month later, Afghan government officials met again with members of the Taliban in the resort town of Muree, Pakistan, this time with the United States and China attending in the capacity of observers.

  Despite these promising developments, questions remained about the authenticity of the meetings. The Taliban did not officially acknowledge that talks with the Afghan government had taken place, and the political office in Doha said the meetings in China and Pakistan were unauthorized. More generally, the Taliban had long rejected the suggestion that Pakistan had enough sway over their leadership to push them to engage in talks. But US officials and observers noted that the Taliban’s chief of staff, Latif Mansur, was among the participants in Pakistan, an indicator that the Taliban’s leadership had signed off. It seemed plausible that Pakistan might have enough influence to deliver other high-level Taliban in a future process.

  Ambassador Olson was on his way to meet Pakistan’s intelligence-agency chief, Lieutenant General Rizwan Akhtar. He had scheduled the meeting to plan for a second round of talks between Afghan and Taliban representatives following the meeting in Muree, Pakistan. He still hoped that the talks in Pakistan and China might lead to a more formal process, as it was critical to get political negotiations on track while US troops were still in the country.

  While Olson was on his way to the meeting, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), dropped a bombshell. It announced that the Taliban’s supposed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had died in 2013, over two years earlier. Lt. Gen. Akhtar had prepared a PowerPoint presentation for the meeting and was going through the slides when the news broke. He was shocked. Mullah Omar had a legendary reputation among the Taliban, who had given him the honorary title of Amir ul-Momineen: Leader of the Faithful. It would be hard to replace him. Lt. Gen. Akhtar and Olson pressed ahead with the meeting, even though both knew that the news would kill the peace process before it truly began.

  The Taliban was forced to confirm the Afghan intelligence agency’s announcement. The news sent shock waves through the insurgency. Mullah Mansour, the Taliban’s deputy leader, had conspired to keep the death secret, known only to a small handful of inner-circle members. Not even Mullah Omar’s closest relatives, including his eldest son, were informed. The Taliban claimed that the deception was necessary to avoid losing battlefield momentum as US and NATO troops were drawing down. But Mullah Omar’s family and many battlefield commanders felt betrayed, and soon a splinter faction broke away from the main Taliban group. (Its leader was named months later as Mullah Mohammad Rasool, a former Taliban governor who had fought alongside Mullah Omar during the anti-Soviet jihad.)

  US officials hoped the discord would weaken the movement on the battlefield. Instead, the reverse proved to be true. Mullah Mansour, moving swiftly to consolidate power, ordered a massive series of attacks in Kabul. About a week later, just past midnight, the whoosh of an immense blast wave swept across the capital, rattling windows for miles. The first truck bomb to detonate inside the city since the start of the war, it exploded in a poor area of Kabul known as Shah Shahid on August 7, 2015. The Taliban, believed to be responsible, didn’t take credit, likely because the bomb had detonated early and missed its target, harming only civilians.

  The blast left a crater several meters deep, killed fifteen people, and wounded hundreds with injuries from broken glass and shrapnel. It demonstrated that the insurgency was capable of bringing thousands of pounds of explosives undetected into the city; officials could only imagine the damage it would do outside a crowded government building or foreign embassy, the likely targets of the attack. In the afternoon, the Taliban struck again, carrying out a devastating suicide attack at a police academy that killed and wounded at least fifty cadets.

  That wasn’t all. In the evening, a group of Taliban fighters rammed a car bomb into the gates of Camp Integrity, the US Special Operations headquarters, the third major bombing in Kabul in less than twenty-four hours. The explosion leveled the gates, and a number of gunmen breached the compound. The soldiers inside ran to defend the base, and a firefight ensued before all the attackers were shot dead. At least eight Afghan contractors were killed.

  Hutch had only just arrived in-country when Kabul was hit by the triple attack. His former team sergeant based at the camp gave him a rundown of what had happened there. First Sergeant Andrew McKenna, a Green Beret with 7th Group, was killed in the firefight. McKenna had completed five tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq and was days away from going home.

  The bloodshed was an indication of how rapidly government control around the capital was slipping. The city was protected with security belts of checkpoints—through which insurgents had been able to drive several thousand pounds of explosives. It sent a powerful message about the insurgency’s capabilities and the threat posed to Kabul. The final tally that day: 355 casualties in the capital, including 42 deaths and 313 injured. It was the worst violence that Kabul had seen since the start of the war.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Insider Attack! Insider Attack!”

  CALEB was still excited about the tour as he settled into their new home at Camp Antonik in Helmand in August 2015. They had six months to make a difference, and there was a lot of work to be done. The small base had fallen into disrepair. The towers and walls were run-down, and everything was coated in a film of powdery dust that had blown in from the surrounding desert. The logic for restoring a permanent presence at Camp Antonik after the United States had supposedly withdrawn from Helmand a year earlier was unclear to them. The US drawdown was expected to continue, and there were even rumors that Kandahar Airfield, the launching point for all US operations in the south, would close.

  Caleb was also disconcerted to find that the local soldiers around them, their supposed partn
ers for the tour, were hostile. The Afghans wore tired green uniforms and long, straggly hair, mirroring their fatigue with the war and contempt for the latest batch of US forces. They wore their Kalashnikov rifles carelessly slung over their shoulders and drew their weapons on the Green Berets whenever the team drove through checkpoints to the Afghan-controlled side of the base, where the airfield was located. At every gate or barrier, they demanded codes in order to let them pass. The Green Berets were ordered to travel in armored trucks inside the Afghan army base, but there was a shortage of appropriate vehicles. There were just three armored trucks left at Camp Antonik, and all of them needed maintenance. The rest of their vehicles were unarmored, which meant team members and their attached personnel often had to travel in soft-skin vehicles despite the regulation.

  Caleb barely had a handover with the outgoing Fox, so he was especially grateful when the combat controller, Matthew Roland, an air force captain with the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron, offered to go through all the maps with him and point out where enemy forces were located. Combat controllers were often attached to Special Forces teams and were responsible for establishing air control and providing combat support to the ODA.

  Matthew had extended his tour to make sure the handover went well and was the only operator who stayed behind to help them settle in. A redhead, he had a goofy sense of humor and made the most of life on the camp. He had earned the team’s appreciation for introducing them to his signature cocktail: a mix that was equal parts Gatorade and Rip It, an energy drink. It was designed to keep one both awake and hydrated through night shifts. The team had to make frequent trips to the airfield to collect supplies and travel to meetings. Matthew showed them how to navigate the area. The base was located inside an Afghan commando base, which in turn lay inside the Afghan army’s 215th Corps headquarters, the unit responsible for Helmand.