Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  JOSH RAN INTO THE SECOND major crisis of the deployment weeks later. After building up for months, the Taliban attacked the eastern city of Ghazni in August 2018. Ghazni had over a quarter million residents, and in 2013, the UN had designated it an Asian Capital of Islamic Culture for its rich heritage and its many historical sites that needed to be preserved. It was also strategically important due to its location on the main highway connecting Kabul and Kandahar. The insurgents had been consolidating in the districts surrounding the provincial capital for months, but the ODAs stationed in the province were unable to go out on operations because they couldn’t find a partner force. The commandos were dispersed around Ghazni and beyond. The teams watched security deteriorate with little scope to react until the day the city collapsed.

  Almost immediately, the Afghan army sent two helicopters to reinforce local troops on the ground, who had retreated to fortified bases on the outskirts. It was a bad idea. Ghazni’s airport was in the middle of the city, and both helicopters were shot down. The Afghan government continued to broadcast messages claiming that the situation was under control, but images of the Taliban and other local militias ransacking the city showed otherwise. Once again, the spotlight fell on how the Special Operations Task Force, under Josh’s command, was going to regain control of Ghazni.

  Josh didn’t have any teams in the city, and there was no chance of flying them into the airport without getting shot down. The only solution was to send them by road. He committed three teams from nearby provinces along with the AOB company commander to the mission. They planned to secure footholds inside the city and regain control of the main government buildings by pushing outward.

  It was a time-tested playbook, but the CONOP-approval process was slow. By the time the team in Kabul, ODA 1334, was approved to leave, their Afghan partner forces had left, and they were forced to travel alone. Josh tried to use air support to scatter an ambush that targeted the Afghan convoy ahead of them, but they ran into trouble at a different section of the road, twenty miles north of Ghazni. The route was planted with roadside bombs, and insurgents lay waiting with RPGs. The teams came under attack, and Josh had to medevac two team members immediately; a third stayed on with shrapnel wounds to a hand.

  As an added frustration, Josh had to wait forty-eight hours to receive strike authority in Ghazni. Until authority was delegated down to him, every strike that wasn’t carried out in self-defense had to be approved by high-level commanders at Resolute Support headquarters, and opportunities disappeared by the time approval came down.

  A second team, ODA 1333, fared even worse in Ghazni city. They ran into an ambush and got pinned down while driving between government buildings to respond to a call for support from the Afghans. The team was pummeled with rockets, and all four vehicles in the convoy ended up disabled. Josh told them to get to safety and hunker down. They hooked the damaged trucks to others that were still running and limped to the nearest base.

  By then, it seemed that every rogue insurgent group or criminal gang had seized on the opportunity to contribute to the mayhem in the city. Shops were looted, and black smoke rose above the buildings. The disorder in Ghazni made headlines around the world. The Taliban turned off cell phone towers, which made it impossible for the US teams to send images to counter the ones that showed the city in chaos. Flying imagery out was too risky, so they were limited until the signals team built an alternate system that was dropped in. It took Josh’s units ten days to fully regain control of the city. The United States estimated that it killed 226 enemy fighters through airstrikes alone, while just 10 US soldiers were wounded and none killed.

  After the deployment, Josh was asked to fill out a report that asked him what he would do to control Afghanistan if he were in charge for a day. He offered a controversial solution. Instead of buying bombs for airstrikes, he would spend the money on paying local leaders and strongmen in exchange for peace. Everyone had a price, and the United States could afford to buy off Afghanistan. It was often hard to tell when Josh was joking and when he was serious. But that’s what he said in the official report.

  “The most foolproof way to get Taliban leaders over to our side is to buy them off,” he wrote. “Many of them are just local strongmen that aren’t tied to a specific ideology, but will side with whoever enables them to best lead their tribe/village. If we can be that entity then we will secure their support.”

  Footnote

  1 Under the Commander’s Emergency Response Program.

  PART FOUR

  ENDINGS

  CHAPTER 28

  Back to War, Again

  HUTCH

  THE TRUMP administration settled on Army General Austin “Scott” Miller to lead the war in Afghanistan. Gen. Miller had spent his life in Special Operations and was in charge of secretive missions at Joint Special Operations Command, including Delta Force and SEAL Team Six. He was short but had a strong, athletic build and looked fitter than many younger soldiers. He had a full head of gray hair and did everything with a sense of purpose. Gen. Miller had enjoyed a legendary career, having served as a Delta Force captain in Somalia during the Battle of Mogadishu, the story of which was told in the book and movie Black Hawk Down. He was also known for aggressively stepping up Delta Force operations while in charge of the unit in Iraq. His arrival was expected to mark a similar escalation in US operations in Afghanistan. He started the job in September 2018.

  Gen. Miller inspired a cult-like dedication in his team. He was respected at all ranks and viewed as the sort of rare general officer that looked out for his men. He had spent enough time in Afghanistan to know many mid-level Afghan commanders on a personal basis, including some that by then had ascended to senior ranks in the government. With restrictions on US operations lifted, there were anecdotes of Afghan commanders who called Miller personally from the field to request support.

  He brought austerity to Resolute Support, the US and NATO headquarters in Kabul. Thirty-nine nations still contributed to the mission. The close quarters, concentrated numbers, and shared alcohol smuggled into RS had caused relationships and dramas to blossom. Gen. Miller insisted on the strict enforcement of rules and did away with recreational activities that he viewed as unsuited to the seriousness of war, like evening salsa-dance classes and the drinking of contraband booze.

  He also led intense physical-training sessions on Sunday mornings that aimed to build team spirit among the many branches and nationalities that made up the NATO mission. He invited me to join when I visited Afghanistan in mid-2019 to research this book. Watching Gen. Miller lead the session reminded me a bit of the movie War Machine. He was in better shape than anyone his age—in stark contrast to the graying NATO generals who struggled in the dusty, smog-filled air that hung over Kabul in the summer. The youngest, fittest soldiers took it as an opportunity to show off, competing to lift the heaviest weights or perform acrobatic exercises.

  Hutch was there too. Gen. Miller had personally requested him for an open-ended assignment, and he had deployed to Kabul in late 2018. Even minus the fun, the sprawling Resolute Support headquarters wasn’t a bad place to live. There were still restaurants, a salon, and an Italian supermarket that sold prosciutto and cheese. A bazaar on the base opened daily for shopping. Hutch hadn’t expected to set foot in Afghanistan again after the hospital bombing. But institutional memories in Afghanistan are short and turnover is fast. Several other Green Berets had also been given another chance under Gen. Miller after falling from grace for one reason or another.

  Gen. Miller chose Hutch for his experience during the Village Stability Operations (VSO) setting up village-level militias. Hutch’s new mission was to assist with the creation of a similar nationwide force of local units, known as the Afghan National Army Territorial Force (ANA-TF). The theory made sense: communities were more invested in their own security and more likely to fight for it. The practical application was more complex. To some, it seemed to be a repackaged effort to sell the village militias, kno
wn as the Afghan Local Police (ALP), under a new name but with less supervision and fewer resources than before. The strategy raised alarm among human rights groups. Hutch often found it difficult to sell as a new concept. “I spend most of my time explaining how it isn’t the ALP,” he said.

  The design of ANA-TF, sometimes called the territorial army, was supposed to address mistakes that had been made during the VSO. The ANA-TF was meant to break from the past, first by being incorporated into the Ministry of Defense rather than the Ministry of Interior. A review of the program by the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a locally based nonprofit that produced some of the best research on the country, noted that many changes addressed previous pitfalls.

  For one, it was to be staffed by soldiers hired from the local population, but crucially, they were to go through the same basic training course as the regular army. Each local force was put under the command of officers drawn from the reserves in different provinces to reduce the risk of capture by local, factional interests. As an added safeguard, each company would be responsible for an entire district rather than a village and its surroundings. Soldiers that had previously served in the local police or other militias weren’t allowed to join. The salary was 25 percent lower than the salary paid by the regular army, to reflect the benefit of serving near home, but the soldiers still had to live on the base.

  The initial plan was to start a pilot program in ten locations to measure progress and then to adjust the program as needed. The ANA-TF received its first recruits in April 2018. The Afghanistan Analysts Network review found that by the summer, Gen. Nicholson had fast-tracked the expansion and opened fifty-two more locations, initiating phase one before the pilot program was complete. His action confirmed fears that once again the US military would rush into a project only to abandon it halfway through. In this instance, expanding the program without the proper checks in place could create yet more militias that were difficult to control, the last thing Afghanistan needed. That in turn would further alienate the population and add fodder for the insurgency.

  When Gen. Miller took over in September 2018, he halted the expansion and tapped Hutch to lead the program. Hutch was remembered for helping to drastically reduce violence in Paktika by setting up a local village force that pacified and secured a Taliban stronghold. He knew Afghan culture well, having spent back-to-back deployments living in villages without electricity or running water; in this sense he was an ideal pick.

  Among the many problems that emerged with the territorial army was the shortage of officers in the reserves to command the various units. The Afghanistan Analysts Network quoted a defense ministry official who reported that only eighteen hundred out of eighteen thousand reserve officers on the payroll showed up for duty. The rest were dead, had left the country, or were otherwise missing.

  In Afghanistan, Hutch recruited a small group that included one of his former team members from his Viking days in Paktika. Few outside of Special Operations circles knew of Hutch’s association with the ill-fated campaign in Kunduz. He was evidence of the short memory caused by the turnover at headquarters, which someone once described as the “annual lobotomy.” But more than anyone, Hutch represented the generation of US Special Forces soldiers that had given their adult lives to the war and for a host of reasons were unable to let it go. Afghanistan had made his career, destroyed it, and now presented him with a second chance.

  Hutch was in his element in his new role. Green Berets were trained to work with indigenous forces, and it was his job to oversee the local units across the country. He was comfortable navigating all channels, whether it was discussing Paktika tribal politics with rank-and-file Afghan soldiers, talking to generals about policy, or explaining the ANA-TF to skeptical academics. He was among a lucky few. Green Berets in Afghanistan still commonly griped that they were being used to put out fires instead of building ties with foreign armies. Their language and cultural training went to waste. There was no time to build rapport with Afghan commandos, who were either stuck on checkpoints or lived on separate bases due to the risk of insider attacks.

  IN LATE JUNE 2019, I was invited to spend the day with Hutch in northern Baghlan province, an impoverished, mostly agricultural area that had long been considered an insurgent stronghold. Baghlan lies between Kabul and the northern province of Kunduz, and its main strategic importance is the highway connecting the capital to the north, a road that was often closed down by fighting or Taliban checkpoints.

  Hutch organized the visit to give the Afghan defense ministry a chance to take ownership of the scheme to develop the ANA-TF. The trip started in the VIP waiting area at the RS headquarters, where leather sofas were arranged around glass coffee tables, and refreshments of tea, coffee, and juice were laid out alongside American-style cookies and cereal bars.

  One of the first people to arrive was a member of Hutch’s new team named Greg, a tall, very fair man in his thirties who was instantly recognizable as one of Hutch’s former Viking crowd.

  “You know Hutch’s history, right?” he asked me. He fished out his phone and showed pictures of his old team, asking if I could identify them. With his white-blonde hair and beard, Greg was the easiest to spot. I recognized Hutch a few moments later, disguised among the others with a thick beard. I had only ever seen him clean-shaven.

  Next, Greg scrolled to a picture of the camp on fire, with flames licking out to the sky, a column of soldiers ambling to the rescue. No one looked particularly concerned.

  “Rocket,” Greg explained.

  Reminiscing about the good old days concluded with the arrival of military bureaucrats and protocol. Three paunchy Afghan generals and their staff settled into chairs, followed by various British and Italian military officers, whose purpose there was unclear except for the fact that they were NATO advisers. It was hard to imagine what any of them could contribute at this stage. The entourage was set to expand further, as the German army was sending advisers to Baghlan as well, because the province fell under Train, Advise, and Assist Command–North, the regional headquarters technically led by Germany.

  More people arrived, including two young American soldiers from public affairs who were shooting video for internal use and had vague instructions to make sure I didn’t wander off or get lost in Baghlan. Last to show up was a female deputy minister who, according to Hutch, had caused a local media scandal on a previous trip by wearing open-toed shoes.

  We were divided into groups and dispatched to Baghlan on Chinooks, flying open ramp. A lone airman sat on the edge of our aircraft, attached by a strap, his legs swinging into the abyss. We coasted over the vast settlement of houses that makes up Kabul, climbed to the edges of the Hindu Kush mountains, and flew among its soaring peaks toward the gorge that forms the Salang Pass. The peaks were still capped with snow in the height of summer. Cool, crisp air filled the interior of the Chinooks. Our helicopter fired a flare into one of the valleys, which set off with a whoosh and a bang and left behind a trail of smoke. It was supposedly to scare off anyone attempting to shoot us down, though the mountains looked empty to me.

  We landed at the Afghan military base in Baghlan, where the heat was intense and everything was the color of dust. The Afghan soldiers had prepared a salute for the generals, and the German military was waiting as well. Greg and Hutch were unable to fit inside the meeting room with the top brass; instead they took off on a tour of the base to find the territorial army and see “what’s really going on.” Hutch turned back a handful of infantry soldiers who were following him and Greg around. “Someone has to stay behind and watch our gear,” he told them.

  The first challenge was to find someone who could work as an interpreter since the only one assigned to the visit was busy in the meeting. Eventually, an Afghan computer technician with broken English became our guide, and Hutch and Greg asked to see the barracks. At the barracks for the commandos, a handful of young, worn-out-looking soldiers emerged from the darkness and shooed me back to the entrance. No women allow
ed. The stench of sewage was strong even from the doorway, and the tiled floor was dirty and dark.

  “Urdu-e Manteqawi,” Hutch explained, asking to see the barracks for the new territorial army, not the commandos. Hutch spoke only limited Pashto, not Dari, which all the soldiers seemed to find entertaining, especially after he mentioned the fearsome Commander Aziz of Paktika, his former VSO partner, who had been murdered during a picnic a year earlier. Eventually, the officers in charge of the territorial army appeared, men who probably looked about ten years older than their age.

  The deputy commander, Islamuddin, was a thuggish-looking fellow with thick, jet-black hair. He had a permanently amused expression on his face, as though the arrival of all these foreigners was privately entertaining. Islamuddin told us he’d come down from Faryab, another area that was perpetually on the brink of collapse, to take command of a force that numbered 79 men, out of a total of 120 slots to fill. It wasn’t a bad ratio, for Afghanistan. The officers explained that the new territorial force was being used to guard two checkpoints near the base and was not able to run missions out in the district because it still lacked critical equipment.

  We were led to their armory, where everything was annotated with serial numbers and labels. The somber-looking staffer in charge showed us the weapons assigned to each soldier: a DShK or PK machine gun plus some RPGs and ammunition. The main problem, the soldier explained, was that the radios didn’t work—which, as Greg pointed out later, could easily have been fixed by getting them antennas and batteries.

  Greg and Hutch fired off every possible question that could be covered with our limited translation; even I had been recruited to help with the Dari. Do you have water? Electricity? What about uniforms? How many people at the check posts? How are they resupplied? What do locals think about the territorial army? (We got stuck on the word for “support,” which the Afghans thought meant sport or physical training: “Oh yes, every morning.”) Can you go home? (It was too dangerous for them to do so in uniform, so the soldiers went in civilian clothes and vehicles.)