Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  US Special Forces and Afghan commandos were dispatched once again to save the city. The Afghan commandos had seen the Kunduz movie before, but the American teams were all new. The 10th Group, which was historically oriented toward Europe, was in charge of the Afghanistan mission. The battalion commander had augmented the US Special Forces presence in Kunduz from the start, with two ODAs permanently based there and led by Zachary McLain and Mike Saleck.

  The 10th Group teams studied Hutch’s CONOP as a model should the city fall again, and they adopted a similar plan of attack. They had been warning their chain of command for weeks that Kunduz was ripe for another assault after sustained Taliban attacks throughout the spring. No one seemed to have taken much notice. Their requests for additional resources had gone unheeded. They still had just three armored vehicles and the same broken printer that disgorged magenta blobs.

  The night after Kunduz fell, US Special Forces and Afghan commandos penetrated the city and established a foothold at the governor’s office. There were rumors that provincial officials had emptied the safe at the bank and fled. The teams came under heavy fire for days, and it took them over a week to regain control of the situation. They were upset to learn later that money distributed to local officials to compensate residents for damaged shops and houses had been mostly stolen. It was easy to see why locals turned to the Taliban. Unless the US-backed government addressed the root causes of the conflict, the insurgency would continue to grow.

  The Pentagon played down the significance of the collapse and denied a US role in the operation to recapture Kunduz, once again calling it a training mission. In Kabul, Brig. Gen. Charlie Cleveland described it as an Afghan operation.

  “Our Afghan partners are responding to the increased Taliban activity within the area, and US forces have multiple assets and enablers in the area to provide support,” he said in a statement emailed to reporters.

  The language belied the extent to which the US military had been involved. The “enablers” were the US Special Forces, augmented by an array of attached infantrymen, combat controllers, explosive ordnance teams, intelligence analysts, and so forth. “Assets” meant air support from an AC-130 gunship, drones, helicopters, and jet fighters.

  In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis also played down the loss of Kunduz. “This is largely something we’ve seen before,” he told reporters. “We see the Taliban go into these city centers, do a Western-movie style shoot-’em-up, do some raiding, do some looting, raise a flag, and just as quickly as they do that, they are beaten.”

  A few days after Kunduz collapsed, and while the battle was ongoing, the Taliban launched a coordinated assault on Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand, firing rockets into the governor’s walled compound. Areas of the provinces Baghlan, Farah, and Uruzgan also came under attack, giving the impression of complete chaos just as foreign donors met at an aid conference in Brussels to pledge support to the Kabul government for the next four years.

  Averting their eyes from the situation on the battlefield, the United States and its allies pledged more than $15 billion in aid. The goal remained to help the government achieve self-reliance in what was dubbed the upcoming “transformation decade.” It was wishful thinking. President Ghani was midway through his first term in office and had already lost the confidence of donors in Kabul after failing to appoint an inclusive cabinet or make any real effort to tackle high-level corruption.

  While Afghanistan edged toward collapse, America’s longest war was a topic that no one wanted to broach ahead of the US election. In the course of three presidential debates, it wasn’t a topic for discussion. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump spoke about the Syrian war, immigration, taxes, Russian influence, Clinton’s emails, but never Afghanistan. The topic didn’t even come up at the final debate, which took place on the same day an insider attack killed a US soldier and another American at a military base in Kabul.

  ELECTION NIGHT, November 8, 2016. The US embassy in Kabul was holding an election-results-viewing party, to which it had invited the expat community, including journalists. Afghanistan was eight and a half hours ahead of the East Coast of the United States, which meant the results would be announced the next morning. It seemed the entire embassy was expecting Clinton to win, and that US policy in Afghanistan would be business as usual. The final results jolted the room: Donald Trump had been chosen as the forty-fifth president of the United States.

  The mood among the diplomats seemed to be one of shock. Ambassador Michael McKinley took to the podium and delivered a short speech thanking the audience for attending. An American official sitting near the front, who worked in commerce, wiped away a tear. In the back of the room, the US Marines in uniform seemed to be celebrating. What the impact would be on Afghanistan wasn’t immediately clear.

  Like his predecessor, President Trump was torn between his instinct to pull out and dire warnings from the national security establishment about the consequences of a full withdrawal. The low number of US casualties made staying tolerable, and there were other, more pressing domestic concerns: health care, the economy, and more. Unlike the war in Vietnam, this one didn’t trigger protests in the streets. Most of America was unaffected by the war. Talk was revived about capitalizing on Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth, which had proven impossible to extract due to the security situation and the weak rule of law. What would President Trump do?

  The deciding factor turned out to be the ousting of National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had withheld information about a call with a Russian ambassador. Army lieutenant general H. R. McMaster was chosen as his replacement. Gen. McMaster lacked a previous connection to President Trump, but he had strong Republican backing and clear views on the war in Afghanistan.

  Gen. McMaster, who had served from 2010 to 2012 during the surge in Afghanistan as the commander of an anticorruption task force, was credited with having taken difficult and meaningful steps to tackle the high-level graft and criminal networks that were responsible for draining the reconstruction money. Since then, he had argued that the Afghan war could be won and that a counterinsurgency strategy could work—if the military was unleashed and allowed to come out in full force for as long as it took to do the job.

  He was lauded in military circles for his application of a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq that led to a reduction in violence at a time when the United States seemed to be on the verge of losing the war. He believed that the same dedication could turn around the war in Afghanistan. Unlike President Trump, he wasn’t skeptical about the reasons for the US presence in the country. He blamed the failure to win the war partly on what he considered the Obama administration’s defeatist approach, which limited troops and resources and put the war on a timeline.

  In fact, he thought the US failure went back even farther, to the Bush administration, which had become distracted with Iraq and underinvested in the war in Afghanistan. The lack of US commitment had forced Afghanistan’s president at the time, Hamid Karzai, to cut deals with corrupt elites and former warlords, hollowing out institutions that were critical for the state’s survival.

  Gen. McMaster was often recognized for his book Dereliction of Duty, which delivered a blistering critique of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War for their failure to stand up to the president and his administrators. Some found it ironic that he should emerge as the chief advocate of prolonging the war in Afghanistan, a conflict that many compared to Vietnam and that had dragged on even longer. But in his view, the stakes in Afghanistan were still high, and the US presence was the only hedge against the country once again becoming a safe haven for terrorist groups.

  He thought, probably accurately, that the Afghan government would quickly collapse without significant US backing, leading to the same chaos that had allowed the Taliban to rise in the 1990s after the Soviet withdrawal. His main concern was the presence of transnational terrorist groups. The evidence o
f this often-cited reason for staying in Afghanistan, as always, was not made public, but he thought the links between the Taliban and al Qaeda were reemerging.

  At the National Security Council, Gen. McMaster was charged with putting together a plan for Afghanistan, which included deciding how to approach the unpredictable President Trump, known for a long history of skepticism and ingrained opposition to the Afghan war. McMaster acknowledged that the president wanted to get out of Afghanistan and all other Bush-era conflicts to focus on other priorities. But to him, sorting out Afghanistan was important for national security, and he planned to bulldoze through the administration.

  Gen. McMaster later identified a moral imperative behind his strategy: “I thought there was an ethical dimension to this too, by the way, because soldiers were fighting and dying and there was not really a clear articulation of the strategy that would allow them to understand how the risks that they take, and the sacrifices that they might be called on to make, were contributing to an outcome worthy of those risks and sacrifices.”

  Gen. McMaster and President Trump did agree on one thing: that micromanaging the war was wrong. President Trump swiftly delegated authorities on troops and targeting to the Pentagon and cut back the number of high-level meetings on Afghanistan. He didn’t want to hear about it, and the relevant departments and agencies, including the Pentagon and the State Department, believed that keeping the war out of his sight was the most prudent course of action. Everyone feared that the president might one morning see something on Fox News that he didn’t like and dispatch the “Tweet of Damocles” that would end the war in a single post.

  Gen. Nicholson, supported by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dunford, and other senior military officials, stayed on as the top commander of US troops in Afghanistan. He, too, advocated an expanded mission, calling for more resources to turn the tide of the war in favor of the United States. President Trump was barely a month into his presidency when the general called on the new administration to fix capability gaps in airpower and troop numbers and warned that Islamic State remained a threat, especially now that fighters under pressure in Syria and Iraq might flock to shelter in Afghanistan.

  At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he cautioned that the war was at a “stalemate” and that the emergence of Islamic State had created a new enemy. Implicit in his testimony was his criticism of the Obama administration’s fixation with numbers and micromanaging authorities. Gen. Nicholson argued that the mission in Afghanistan was a success overall, measured by the absence of major terrorist attacks on US soil. Without providing further details, he also claimed that the US-backed coalition in Afghanistan had stopped Islamic State from carrying out a high-profile attack. He testified that a series of operations called Green Sword that had been launched against the affiliate known as Islamic State Khorasan Province had killed about a third of the group’s fighters, including its leader.

  Claims about Islamic State Khorasan Province were difficult to verify. The group’s spokesman had been killed in a US drone strike over a year earlier, and a successor had not been appointed. Any communication came from the main Islamic State media branch, and its connections to the group in Afghanistan were unclear. Often, it claimed responsibility for attacks hours after the incident had taken place and with little evidence that it was really involved, suggesting that it might be taking credit for violence perpetrated by the Taliban and other groups.

  As usual, the audience was sympathetic to the military’s call for more troops, authorities, and resources. Senator John McCain, the committee chairman, gave Gen. Nicholson a platform from which to make his appeal.

  “Numbers are just one parameter,” McCain said when asking about troops. “But it is an important parameter. How many more do you need to get this stalemate reversed?”

  Gen. Nicholson replied that the counterterrorism mission was in good shape, but more troops were required to support the Afghan government. “In my train, advise, assist mission, however, we have a shortfall of a few thousand,” he said.

  AMONG THE GREEN BERETS heading back to Afghanistan under the new Trump administration was Jordan, the Bravo that had fought in Marjah. He had switched teams to be able to return to the battlefield less than a year after coming home with Mick’s body. Casey did the same. Going back afforded an easy escape from the guilt that stalked them after the mission. Dismayed, Jordan’s wife watched him make the choice to leave instead of getting reacquainted with his family and getting to know his newborn child.

  Jordan and Casey were assigned to different teams, both based at Jalalabad Airfield, Nangarhar, where the focus of their mission was targeting the Islamic State Khorasan Province. It was slow at first. But in the spring of 2017, the soldiers were told that the secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, wanted Islamic State defeated by July, and they were to get busy seeing it through. A long-planned, large-scale operation targeting the terrorist organization finally took off. The first stage of the strategy was to clear Kot district, where the earliest Islamic State members had made their pledges of allegiance. It was a poor, rural area near the mountainous border with Pakistan, made up of rugged hills and grassy fields, with clusters of mud-brick villages scattered throughout the farmland.

  For a number of reasons, including a lack of available Afghan commandos and a need to win over the locals, the Green Berets were assigned to work with forces from the villages in the province. These forces were streamlined into a new project known as the People’s Uprising Program; it seemed very much like the Afghan Local Police program, which was being wound down.

  Jordan’s team was the second to arrive in Kot district. In contrast to his previous deployment in Helmand, his team had access to everything they needed for the mission, and the rules were more relaxed. Morale was high. They set up a patrol base and began clearing outward toward the mountains. The villagers knew the ways around thick belts of buried IEDs. There had been a massive exodus from the area after Islamic State fighters began experimenting with brutal enforcement methods like those used in Iraq and Syria. Jordan’s team slept in their trucks every night, and in the mornings they pushed out. There was no sign of the government on the road, and villages were mostly abandoned. Mud-brick homes and padlocked shops had been left to the elements.

  An additional team sent to augment the effort in Kot from a different part of the district was pulled out immediately when their Fox stepped on a bomb and lost part of a leg. Others were injured in the same blast. Jordan had never seen so many IEDs in a single place, not even in Helmand. But air support came when needed, and they seemed to have access to unlimited amounts of ammunition and other supplies. They stayed in Kot for twenty-three days and then moved on to Achin district. The Islamic State had clustered there in the Mohmand valley, at the foot of the Spin Ghar mountain range, which formed a natural border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and contained some of the tallest peaks in the world.

  When the United States first invaded, the snowcapped mountains had been a refuge for fleeing Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, including bin Laden, who was believed to have been holed up in the Tora Bora cave complex, located farther west. Another team in Achin district suffered the first KIA of the deployment when Mark de Alencar was shot in an entrenched battle at the foot of the mountains, where the grassy, fertile plains met the rocky, barren peaks. Mark, also a Bravo, had qualified for the Special Forces only a year earlier. He was thirty-seven and left behind a wife of fifteen years and their five children. The operation was barely covered in the US news. His sister-in-law told reporters that she had thought the war was over.

  Less than a week later, however, the next step in the offensive seized world headlines. US and Afghan teams were ordered to pull back a few miles for their safety, to allow for an airstrike. For some time, the US military had been wanting to use a bomb that had never been tested in combat, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), nicknamed the “Mother of All Bombs.” It was dropped on a complex of tunnels an
d caves in the Mohmand valley on April 13, 2017, setting a new record as the biggest conventional bomb ever deployed on the battlefield.

  The United States did not release an assessment of casualties, but the spectacle had instant effect. The US media took the strike as a signal that things were going to be different under the Trump administration. Some outlets even suggested that it was a warning to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un with whom President Trump was engaged in a verbal standoff over the country’s nuclear and missile programs.

  In Afghanistan, local media questioned whether the country, in its final humiliation, had become a testing ground for American weapons. Similarly, even some in the US military speculated that the strike was motivated by a desire to make use of the Trump administration’s flexibility to try out new equipment. At the US military’s headquarters in Kabul, word was that the bomb was dropped to avenge the death of the Green Beret in the valley a week earlier. There was also apparently a second GBU-43/B in the country and talk that the US military was looking for a second target to drop the bomb on.

  Though the strike had been meant to break the deadlock at the foot of the mountains and to avert further casualties, Jordan believed that it was also partly motivated by revenge. But the Mother of All Bombs didn’t appear to have much impact on the ground. When his team reached the scene, the front lines hadn’t changed significantly. They returned to their former positions, more or less, and continued to press forward, slowly clearing ground that was heavily mined and defended by cave complexes.

  After several kilometers, they set up a camp that became known as Combat Outpost Blackfish and continued to patrol deeper into the valley, trying to clear more ground and taking fire daily. A rocket hit the post and almost landed on top of them on one of their last days there. On the way out, their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb that killed an interpreter. In later years, Combat Outpost Blackfish became a major post on the frontline against Islamic State.