Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  He had served two combat tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. From the start, he had a clear picture in his mind about what he wanted to achieve during the deployment and energetically threw himself into planning for the mission. US Special Forces had three advanced operations bases (AOBs), or regional headquarters, made up of eighteen teams in total, which for several years had been firefighting all over the country alongside some eighteen thousand Afghan commandos to prevent major towns and cities from collapse.

  Josh had the daunting task of reversing the impression that the country was descending into chaos, and his first goal was to prevent the loss of any provincial capital. It had happened every year in Afghanistan since Kunduz first fell in 2015, giving the Taliban a steady stream of opportunities to make it look like the government was unable to control its territory. He planned to use the floating teams to distract the Taliban and draw them away from major city centers.

  Second, Josh resolved to accelerate the US military’s operations against the Islamic State affiliate in the east. The group was lodged in the mountains, and he planned to try to push them even farther out, if not erase their presence altogether. Some reports said that Islamic State Khorasan Province, as the military called the affiliate, had established a capital in Deh Bala, and he planned to take it. He thought he could use the defeat as propaganda to slow funding and recruitment.

  Josh spoke to his men in plain terms ahead of the tour. “I’m not going to tell you we can win this war, but I am going to make sure that we will damage the enemy more for every risk you take.”

  The younger Green Berets were excited about the upcoming deployment, but it was sobering to the older soldiers who had lost friends on every trip and had already completed multiple tours in the nearly seventeen-year war in Afghanistan. At almost forty, Josh had shed much of the idealism that had driven him to join the Green Berets after the 9/11 attacks. But he believed that channeling his near-limitless reserve of energy into the tour would do justice to the men whose lives were on the line. As was the case for many Green Berets, his commitment to the force had come at a price: a strained marriage, missed events in the lives of his children, and traumatic stress after multiple overseas tours.

  Josh’s vigor came naturally. He had been raised in a hardworking family in Indiana. His mother worked as an intensive care nurse and studied nights to get a university degree, while his father owned a small sporting-goods shop and fought a constant existential struggle against superstores and online retailers. His grandfather was a World War II veteran and local celebrity as the longest-serving volunteer firefighter in the nation, having served for sixty years. He often made the local news, and his grandmother collected all the clippings, which Josh looked forward to receiving year after year.

  He scraped his way into West Point to escape small-town Indiana and traded his first assignment at Fort Lewis for a prized one in Hawaii with a soldier who wanted to live in Washington State to be near his girlfriend. “Networks of influence are more important than class rank,” he said. He had planned to leave the army after five years, but like so many he changed his mind after September 11. He had a new purpose: become a Green Beret and answer the call to serve, like his grandfather had sixty-five years earlier.

  Josh made it through the Special Forces Qualification Course and graduated in 2005. It took longer to get to the war. His first overseas tour wasn’t to Afghanistan or Iraq, but to the island of Papua New Guinea for a mission to train the local army; he lived there for several months with his team at a small former Australian base surrounded by densely packed forest, volcanoes, and deadly snakes. It was another year before he got to Iraq for his first tour in 2007.

  By the time Josh took over the battalion, nearly a decade had passed and the war in Afghanistan was ramping up. He ordered his intelligence unit to read through two hundred years of Afghan history and to take note of key battles, nodes, and events, all in an effort to discover a pattern of attacks that would predict the Taliban’s behavior that summer. Josh was interested in war games and strategic analysis.

  The intelligence unit spent weeks trawling through books and then entering data for the seven changes of power that had taken place in Afghanistan over two centuries into Palantir software, used to analyze data. Josh had previously used the software in the Philippines to identify two militant leaders. He grew excited when two strategies for taking control of Afghanistan emerged. One began in the south and moved through rural provinces, forming a ring around Kabul until the capital fell—the Taliban’s strategy in the 1990s. The second was a Kabul-first approach, popular with foreign invaders, like the Americans had done in 2001.

  Josh finalized the troop disposition accordingly, matching up teams to areas and skill sets. He put a number of ODAs in hot spots like Helmand and Kunduz. Breaking with tradition, he decided the rest would float. Teams usually were assigned an area and expected to master the details of its geography, power structures, and networks. Turning them into mobile strike forces was unconventional, but because the teams were constantly firefighting anyway, he decided it was best to maximize flexibility.

  In March 2018, the battalion arrived in Afghanistan and took over the war from 10th Group. Josh found there were still too few ODAs to deal with the many crises and a shortage of Afghan commandos available to pair up for missions. Although the Afghan army was churning them out, the commandos were seeing rising attrition rates from casualties and unauthorized absences, and were still being used primarily to guard checkpoints and VIPs or to rush to one crisis or another with little notice. There was virtually no limit on the scope of their operations under the new presidential administration. Resources, rather than authorities, curbed their missions.

  Josh started out with a surge of five teams in Helmand and Uruzgan in the south to target Taliban prisons and drug labs to cut off the group’s sources of income and drive the insurgents farther north.

  In Logar, just south of Kabul, he had a team led by Captain Kyle Harnitchek that worked with the Afghan intelligence agency to push the Taliban away from the capital. Security in the province, which had long been problematic, was worsening. During the team’s first week on the ground, Logar’s deputy governor and his bodyguards were assassinated in broad daylight after falling into a trap and stopping at a fake checkpoint operated by the Taliban. The Taliban administered government resources, from the subjects that were taught in schools to who got government jobs. Their white Islamic Emirate flags were visible from the main highway. Kyle’s team’s first big mission aimed to take out the Red Unit, a local team of Taliban “special forces” that had executed the deputy governor, and over several days they hunted down and killed all twenty-two members.

  In Nangarhar province, near the border with Pakistan, Captain David Kim led the team, ODA 1331, responsible for laying the groundwork for a major operation planned against Islamic State. David had been born to South Korean immigrants in New Jersey and was raised to believe that “you’re not a man until you’ve served.” It was his third tour in Afghanistan, after two with the conventional army.

  At the end of April, David’s team drove into Deh Bala district, past miles of poppy farms until the fields ran out. The Taliban grew poppy and controlled most of the district. When Islamic State took over an area, they brought in their own families and customs, and banned growing poppy. It was easy to tell where the Taliban’s territory ended because the poppy fields disappeared. Using poppy fields as a marker, David’s team stopped the convoy and began work to set up a mission support site, named Camp Blackbeard, and an observation post on a ridge overlooking an Islamic State settlement. It was believed to be the group’s capital, located in Gurgoray valley, which led to the Spin Gar Mountains. The Battle of Tora Bora had been fought there nearly two decades earlier, and Osama bin Laden was thought to have fled into Pakistan over those same peaks at the start of the war. The team ate military rations, known as meals ready to eat, or MREs, until the kitchen was set up. They were grateful when the Afghans b
rought food—steaming rice with raisins, carrots, and greasy chunks of meat on the bone—even if someone always got sick afterward.

  The team also located a settlement of displaced Afghan villagers who had fled their homes to escape Islamic State brutality, and sent a psyops team to conduct interviews with the locals.

  JOSH WORKED ON A PLAN with the AOB-East commander to launch the offensive once the teams were ready. They planned to focus attacks from the observation post to drive Islamic State to build up defenses toward the east. After a month, they would drop in teams behind the Islamic State settlement and attack it from behind. Their goal was to complete the operation before the Brussels Conference in the late summer, during which nations would once again meet to pledge financial aid to Afghanistan.

  Josh found that planning a large operation required a certain amount of lobbying for resources. He got to know the commanders in charge of various air assets and organized weekly dinners with them. He also tried to get Brigadier General John W. Brennan Jr., the commander of US and NATO forces in eastern Afghanistan, on board. Gen. Brennan was interested in the plan but skeptical about obtaining a weeklong commitment of air support from the coalition.

  “What if we do it on Eid?” Josh said. Eid al-Fitr was a Muslim holiday that marked the end of the holy month of Ramadan, the equivalent to Christmas in Afghanistan.

  The US general in charge of air assets agreed to support him. The last question was how to convince the Afghan army to sign off on the plan. President Ghani and the coalition had promised no offensive operations against the Taliban during the holiday period, which meant the commandos would be free—and Islamic State wasn’t the Taliban. Josh outlined the plan for Gen. Nicholson, emphasizing the suffering of locals under Islamic State and the potential to go after foreign fighters. The argument that the group was made up of foreign invaders won favor. The plan was approved. Josh ordered the psyops team to brief the Afghan commandos about the interviews with the villagers. Everyone was fired up.

  CHAPTER 27

  Special Forces to the Rescue

  JOSH

  JOSH’S plans to launch the operation against Islamic State were interrupted by his first major crisis of the deployment: a Taliban assault on the capital of Farah, a remote and sand-swept province on the western border with Iran. A vast rural area sparsely populated by poppy farmers, smugglers, and bandits, it was where one of the first Islamic State affiliates had surfaced years earlier.

  Farah’s capital city, also named Farah, had a population of around fifty thousand. It had come under repeated attacks and swiftly erupted into chaos in May 2018. As always, the skirmish started in the early hours of the morning. The governor fled, but security stayed behind to guard the compound, which by noon appeared to be the only building still under government control. The police chief was killed in the assault. The Taliban claimed to have captured the city within hours and posted pictures and videos of themselves driving around in Afghan army vehicles and celebrating in the main square.

  The attack was a blow to Josh’s goal to make it through the tour without losing a provincial capital. Military leaders, as they had during the crises in Kunduz and Helmand, turned to the Green Berets and Afghan commandos. Much in the same way that Col. Johnston had been ordered to save Kunduz years earlier, Josh found himself tasked with regaining control of the city.

  “Go now. You have all priority for assets in Afghanistan,” Gen. Nicholson told Josh as the reports came in during his visit to the AOB-South headquarters in Kandahar.

  Josh tapped the AOB-South commander, John King, to fly into Farah with two teams to work with the commandos to restore order. John, an old Afghan hand, flew in and set up a control center in the city. Farah’s layout was a big point in their favor; the airport was located on the outskirts of town and surrounded, conveniently, by an expanse of desert territory. John arrived with a light tactical vehicle equipped with a satellite system that could send and receive information, including surveillance feeds and imagery the US military and the commandos could use once they had driven the Taliban out of the city, to show that the situation was under control.

  The first two teams landed within ten hours of the attack, and a third arrived by road in four armored trucks from Herat province, the only way to ensure they would have access to vehicles. The command center operated from the airport, while the teams took turns using the four trucks to go out alongside the commandos.

  Josh watched it all from the joint operations center, where his seat in the middle gave him a view of approximately twenty TV screens that transmitted feeds from drones and other aircraft. His staff included a strike cell, a battle captain, and an intelligence unit that reviewed reports as they came in. Within a day, the Taliban were gone.

  As usual, US military officials who briefed reporters did not disclose the key role that the Green Berets, backed with close air support, had played in restoring order to Farah city. The Trump administration had loosened the rules, but the spin was the same: it was a training and support mission, and the US role in the war was over. A spokesman acknowledged that the US military had ground attack jets flying over Farah but credited the Afghans alone for recapturing the provincial capital.

  “The Afghan security forces are bringing their full capabilities, consisting of army, police, commandos and Air Force, to bear on the situation,” the US military said in a statement. “As we have seen over the last couple of days, the Taliban are unable to hold terrain during such isolated attacks.”

  Despite the relatively quick reversal in the city center, the Taliban continued multipronged attacks in other parts of Farah province and harassed police and army checkpoints at night, sneaking up on isolated posts and killing everyone inside before reinforcements could arrive. The Taliban evaded US surveillance by choosing to attack when skies were cloudy. On night five, the Taliban group miscalculated. An Apache pilot, who volunteered to fly in harsh wind and sandy conditions, caught them off guard and chased down the insurgents, killing most of them as they fled. There were no more ambushes on remote government outposts in Farah after that.

  In the east, the team responsible for managing the offensive against Islamic State had set up Camp Blackbeard for the operation and was ready to launch; they were equipped with a surgical team, resupply for ammunition, and food and water. David, the captain, looked forward to rising every morning to a view of the mountains—peaks and ridgelines as far as the eye could see. The Islamic State had built defensive bunkers out of concrete, and for several weeks the team had focused on getting rid of those using mortars.

  The operation was named Hamza 003—the third in a series of campaigns that had taken place each year to drive the Islamic State affiliate deeper into the mountains. David was also trying to work with provincial officials in Deh Bala to raise a village-level force that could hold the territory once it was cleared. In late May, six teams deployed to the district and surrounded Gurgoray valley, making it the focal point of American military might in the country.

  As an opening move, Josh had the US Air Force drop four two-thousand-pound bombs on the ridge to clear roadside bombs and create a fighting position for the Green Berets. The F-16s usually carried five-hundred-pound bombs; he had specially requested the larger munitions under an authority known as terrain denial fires. It was another example of how things had changed under the new administration; in earlier years, airstrikes had only been allowed as a last resort, in self-defense. Now, no one questioned the tactic as a means to clearing a path for US troops to launch an attack.

  The valley was shaped like a teardrop. One team became responsible for strike operations in the north while two others dropped into the west without commandos, attacked the Islamic State settlement from the rear, and began clearing operations. Although they usually operated with commandos, in this instance insertion was complex, and resupplying a large force in that area would have been difficult.

  The sudden, large-scale assault surprised the Islamic State affiliate, which had b
uilt trench-like defenses on its eastern flank; as Josh had anticipated, the group was unprepared for the attack on the west. On day two or three, Islamic State put out a call for all cells to come and defend the capital of the caliphate. That confirmed to the coalition teams on the ground the true value of taking the valley, which turned out to contain administrative records and documents of foreign fighters who had traveled from as far as Europe to join the group.

  The villages they recaptured in Gurgoray valley were mostly in ruins through a combination of neglect and damage caused by the clearing operation that unearthed dozens of IEDs, some charged with seventy or eighty pounds of explosives. Almost immediately, Afghan villagers began trickling back to inspect the remains. Many had been away for nearly three years. Josh used emergency funds1 to pay for local police to cover the area, but in the end they still fell short. When US troops and Afghan commandos pulled out at the end of the operation, they were forced to leave a portion of the newly cleared ground unguarded.

  There were no US casualties during the operation, but David’s team ran into trouble later in the deployment. The combat controller stepped on a roadside bomb and lost a leg; others nearby suffered shrapnel wounds and traumatic brain injury. Another teammate was shot in the face in a separate incident. Luckily for him, the round went through his cheek without striking bone.

  In June, during Eid al-Fitr, the Taliban agreed to a three-day cease-fire with the government that gave the world a shocking preview of what life in Afghanistan could look like without the war. Afghan soldiers and police hugged bearded Taliban fighters in tunics and camouflage vests, wept, and ate ice cream in the town centers. It wasn’t to last. Once the three days were up, fighting resumed, and repeated US and Afghan-government efforts to produce another cease-fire were in vain.