by Eric Blehm
“Very nice to meet you, Jason. We will be meeting again later this morning, I suspect?”
“Yes, ten A.M. I’ll see you then.”
With a smile and a slight bow, Karzai continued down the hall.
Amerine watched him walk away, thinking about the Big Fucking Knife in his rucksack and sensing that Hamid Karzai was not the kind of man to whom you would present a BFK.
Back in ODA 574’s room, Mag had just woken up when Amerine returned.
“How’s it going, sir?” asked Mag, shoving his sleeping bag into a stuff sack.
“Good,” said Amerine. “I just met our guerrilla leader.”
“Is he a badass?”
“Well…not exactly.”
Standing together in the conference room of the safe house, the Green Berets were a wall of camouflage and big smiles as the Afghans, led by Karzai, filed into the room. Each wore a well-tailored robe of a different color—tan, gray, midnight blue, burnt orange—while their feet were bare or strapped into severely worn sandals. To Mag they looked like biblical characters.
One had hennaed hair, the rusty color accentuating streaks of gray at his temples. One was heavyset and exuberant, grinning cheerfully at everyone. Another handled a string of beads and stared at the ground. The youngest man and the last to enter stood out to Amerine: His jaw was set, his arms were crossed, his eyes were penetrating and fierce. He appeared to be in his late thirties, with a slender physique that wasn’t commanding, but Amerine suspected that in this group of tribal leaders, he was the one warrior.
The eight Afghans and six Green Berets settled onto plastic and metal chairs arranged in a circle while Rosengard remained in the background with Casper and two other spooks. Karzai introduced “Captain Jason” to his men in Pashto—the language of the Pashtun tribe—and Amerine greeted the Afghans, nodding to each, then directed his attention to Karzai and said, “We’re here to learn what it is that you want to accomplish in southern Afghanistan and how we can support you.”
Closing his eyes, Karzai raised his chin, drew in a deep breath, and exhaled. “That,” he said, opening his eyes, “is something I have waited a long, long time to hear. I am honored.” He nodded to each American in the room, coming back to Amerine.
“I would like to begin by telling you that without these men”—Karzai motioned to the tribal leaders—“I very likely would not have survived my journey from exile back into Afghanistan. I would not be here to humbly tell my story and convey to you some of the great hardships my country has suffered under the Taliban and the foreign terrorists who have made our country their home.
“There were four of us on two motorbikes, and none of us had a gun, or any weapons.” He described how they had pulled over to the side of the road as they neared the border and prayed. “We all knew the dangers, but I was the reason they were there, and so I felt that I needed to ask them if they were ready to be captured or killed. I told them that our chances to survive were much less than our chances for death.
“And these men, all of these men”—he again indicated the assembled Afghans—“watched their elders die and spent their own youth fighting the Russians for a land that no longer exists.”
Karzai spoke of his childhood memories: riding horses, flying kites, playing games, eating grapes—“oh, the grapes in Kandahar are like no other grapes in the world”—then, coming out of his reverie, said, “These have been troubling times for Afghanistan: the foreigners, the terrorists, and the bad Taliban…. You have to understand that not all the people in the Taliban are bad. There are good men still among them, many who were forced to join the regime out of fear. If a young man refused recruitment, his family was killed, their bodies hung in trees on the streets where they lived. It did not take many examples like this to grow their army. These young men will be the first to lay down their weapons and join us.
“The Taliban began as a Pashtun movement in Afghanistan, then spread into Pakistan. Now the Pakistani Taliban have earned the reputation as the most cruel in the Afghan villages I visited. In Afghanistan, they are away from their own homes and villages and seem to carry out their atrocities more readily. They are trained to be terrorists in the most fundamental sense of the word: to become legendary for the creativity of the horrors they’re able to commit.”
Lowering his voice, Karzai said, “The Pakistani Taliban will be the last to lay down their arms, along with the foreign terrorists—they would all rather die.”
For nearly two hours Karzai recounted the story of his recent weeks in Afghanistan, evading the Taliban as he moved from the border town of Chaman northwest to Kandahar, then farther north to Tarin Kowt, stopping in villages along the way to hold secret meetings with tribal leaders and mullahs. In Tarin Kowt, the capital of Uruzgan Province, just north of Kandahar Province, he had stayed at the home of a mullah he knew from their years spent fighting the Soviets. The mullah had gathered four influential tribal leaders, one of whom asked, “Do you have the Americans with you? Are they behind you, as they are behind the Northern Alliance?” Karzai had shown him the satellite phone and said he had been promised support, though whether that meant ground forces or just supplies and weapons, he did not know.
Another tribal chief had held up leaflets dropped by American planes across Afghanistan, urging the populace to rise up. One was a cartoon of an Arab walking a mullah on a chain as if he were a dog, with the caption: “Who really runs the Taliban? Expel the foreign rulers and live in peace.”
“You have a phone,” the leader had said. “Have the Americans bomb the Taliban command here in Tarin Kowt—we can tell them which buildings.”
“I cannot do that,” said Karzai.
“Then you will never win,” retorted the leader.
The mullah told Karzai that the Pashtun needed proof that the United States was behind them before they would rebel. “The people are sick of the Taliban; they will stand behind you. But the Taliban will fire their cannons, crush our homes, and send the flesh of our women and children into the trees. Our lives are not good—it is not the Afghanistan we remember—but it is still life. Get the Americans to come, and we will fight.”
The word of a mullah could be trusted, Karzai informed the Green Berets. “But pieces of paper do not stop bullets and rockets. Paper promises that fall from the sky cannot be trusted.” He explained that the Afghans were well aware of what happened in Iraq during the Gulf War, when the Shiites and Kurds believed the leaflets the Americans dropped urging them to rise up against Saddam Hussein. They did, and the Americans did not come. Saddam’s forces had retaliated by massacring the insurgents. “The Afghans in the south fear the same fate—they need to be assured that a powerful friend will stand with them and fight.”
Karzai spoke in English, translating his words into Pashto as he went around the circle, praising each of his countrymen. When he reached the man Amerine had pegged as a warrior, Karzai said, “Bari Gul is the youngster in this group, but do not consider his age a reflection of his experience or bravery. This man saved my life. As the Taliban pursued us into the mountains north of Tarin Kowt, it was Bari Gul, with just a few men, who covered our escape. When I called and you sent your helicopters to pick us up, he did not wish to leave the mountains of Uruzgan—he felt that he and his men could have kept fighting the Taliban off. He is the lion here, stuck in his cage, but he represents the Pashtun population.”
Karzai paused, as if catching his breath.
“Tarin Kowt is the capital of Uruzgan Province,” he said at last. “It is very remote but is considered the heart of the Taliban movement. Liberating Tarin Kowt will strike a demoralizing blow to the Taliban. If they cannot control Uruzgan, their credibility will unravel all the way to Kandahar. If we take Tarin Kowt, we rip out the heart of the Taliban.”
As Karzai spoke, Amerine began to wonder why the man had not received more support from the United States from the beginning. Osama bin Laden had been identified as the greatest threat to the United States years before
9/11, so it seemed that the CIA should have been laying the groundwork for an insurgency in anticipation of war, then stepping aside for the Special Forces teams to do their job as the combatants running the revolution. Unable to establish effective contacts inside the Pashtun tribal belt, however, the CIA had focused almost exclusively on the Northern Alliance. Now, out of desperation, the Agency had essentially procured a warm Pashtun body and was passing him off to the Green Berets to create a revolution from scratch.
For the first time, Amerine fully understood the magnitude of his mission: There was no master plan for Afghanistan. The entire military campaign for the southern half of the country had to be shaped by the first Americans to infiltrate the region—he and his fellow Green Berets from 5th Special Forces Group.
Two days after Amerine, Mag, and Alex left for Pakistan, the rest of ODA 574 was in purgatory at K2, having heard nothing from the captain. All Conrad would tell them was that Amerine and the others were still in Pakistan, which meant that JD, sick with a bad cold, was in charge. He was feeling nostalgic for home when Conrad offered him and the other men on the team a “morale call”: two minutes for a personal phone call, under supervision in order to protect operational security.
Since meeting his wife, Mi Kyong, in 1985, when he was on his first overseas assignment as an Army medical specialist at Camp Howze in South Korea, JD had been deployed an average of seven months out of the year. For the two years before ODA 574’s most recent deployment to Kazakhstan, however, he had taught at the Special Forces Selection and Qualifications Course at Fort Bragg, working normal hours and living in the nearby town of Hope Mills, North Carolina, with his family. He was able to coach his seven-year-old son Jesse’s flag football team and bonded with his eleven-year-old daughter, Cristina, over long talks on their porch. For the first time the Davis family experienced what life would be like once JD retired from the military.
Still, Mi Kyong was used to being alone with the kids for long stretches. She wasn’t used to receiving calls from her husband while he was deployed, even in peacetime, so she was shocked to hear his voice after she picked up the phone.
She immediately gave the phone to Jesse, beginning to cry when she saw how happy he was to hear his father on the line. When Jesse handed the phone back, she tried to suppress the trembling in her voice as she asked JD if there was anything he needed.
“Besides you,” he said, “I sure would love some Rice Krispies Treats.”
Mi Kyong spent the morning making the bars, wrapping them in wax paper, foil, and plastic, and packing them into a box with beef jerky, cold medicine, a Harley-Davidson magazine, and the most recent family photo she could find. Then she drove the package to Fort Campbell and hand-delivered it to a warrant officer at 5th Group, who promised her that it would be shipped to JD as soon as possible.
In Uzbekistan, JD returned to the team’s tent and finally wrote his death letter to his wife and children.
For two days the Green Berets holed up in the safe house in Pakistan, learning from Karzai about southern Afghanistan and formulating a workable plan to take Tarin Kowt—a town of 10,000 located approximately seventy-five miles north of Kandahar.
Situated in a high desert valley rimmed by mountains, the town’s only access to the outside world was a dirt track, barely a thread on the map. Karzai called this segment of the Kandahar Road an “appalling journey,” so treacherous to navigate in places that it took at least fifteen hours to drive the distance. A few other roads branched out from Tarin Kowt through mountain passes into even more remote districts. The town, which relied upon its few trade routes to supply the populace with the staples of life, had experienced a recent drought that greatly reduced the productivity of the little farmland was still irrigated from the receding waterways. All of this information contributed to the Green Berets’ basic plan to disassemble the Taliban in the south: The region was ideal as a base from which to start a guerrilla war to seize Kandahar.
The plan was to infiltrate near Tarin Kowt, raise a guerrilla fighting force big enough to close off the surrounding mountain passes, and put the town under siege; the Taliban defending it would ultimately surrender, and additional A-teams would be brought in. Under the direction of the Green Berets, Karzai’s guerrillas would then occupy Tarin Kowt and continue to grow Karzai’s army with recruits and volunteers from the citizenry.
This “Southern Alliance” of Pashtun clans, along with their Special Forces advisers, would branch out, seizing all the major features—roads, waterways, and mountain passes—in Uruzgan Province. Taliban-held and Taliban-sympathetic villages would either surrender or fall as Karzai’s movement continued south into Kandahar Province, where they expected the Taliban to make its final stand.
Once Karzai’s army reached Kandahar, there was a good chance that the Taliban leadership would want to negotiate a surrender with him, a fellow Pashtun. If Karzai’s campaign failed, there was almost no chance the Taliban would surrender to the Northern Alliance or the U.S. military, which the Taliban had vowed to fight to the death in the streets of Kandahar.
The success of the plan hinged on Karzai’s support base, and nobody present could say how big that would become. That he had required rescue meant whatever support he currently had was not enough. Since his “infiltration” a month earlier, Karzai’s following had increased from three men on motorbikes to the fifty who were chased on foot into the mountains. Amerine and Thomas, ODA 594’s team leader, concluded privately that Karzai’s fledgling resistance did not require, nor was it worth risking, two ODAs, each capable of training and leading a force of three hundred.
The two captains approached Lieutenant Colonel Rosengard, who was standing in the safe house’s conference room with Casper, studying a large table map of southern Afghanistan. They told Rosengard that only one team was needed on the ground to see if Karzai had indeed raised a credible fighting force.
“I agree with sending fewer men,” said Rosengard, “but on that note, considering what little we know and how vague the situation on the ground is, I’m thinking this might even be a split-team mission—maybe five or six men.”
Amerine couldn’t argue: ODAs were designed to be broken down into “split teams” if the situation called for a leaner, faster unit.
“You’re thinking of going in with just six guys?” Casper said with what sounded like trepidation.
“Initially,” Amerine said. “That’s how we operate.”
Amerine had been told by higher command that for this war, the spooks were “tourists and cashiers,” there to observe and dole out cash. The CIA had no authority over the Army’s campaign, and Casper had made it clear that, though armed, he and his men were leaving the combat operations to the ODA.
“Well, it’s your fight,” Casper told Amerine.
That evening, as Rosengard was preparing to return to Kazakhstan with Captain Thomas, he told Amerine to make sure both of his split teams were fully operational. “The way things are stacking up,” he said, “another mission will emerge. Limit what you tell your guys when you break the news that you’re splitting the team. You don’t want to blow their chance for a mission and bench them as ASTs by telling them too much.”
Now Amerine had to decide which men would join him in Pakistan and which would stay with JD, the leader of the other split team. Since Alex, with his extensive communications background, was already in Pakistan, Amerine would bring the junior commo sergeant, Wes, and leave Dan, the senior commo sergeant, with JD. Mag was an engineer, so the other engineer, Victor, would stay with JD. JD was a medic, which freed Ken to join Amerine. That left the weapons sergeants—Ronnie, Brent, and Mike—and Amerine could take only one more for his split team. Ronnie and JD were pretty tight, and Brent was the junior weapons sergeant, so Mike would come to Pakistan and Brent would stay with the more senior team members.
In Uzbekistan, Conrad told JD, “This has become a split-team mission. Amerine gave me a list of team members to send to Pakistan. They need to
prepare immediately for a flight.”
Trying not to sound disappointed, JD passed along the order as emotionlessly as possible to the men. “Pack your bags,” he said to Ken, Mike, and Wes. “You have a plane to catch. The rest of you just sit tight.”
Mike started to pack immediately, the silence in the tent reminding him that those staying behind must have felt as if they’d just been kicked in the balls.
When the three men arrived in Pakistan just before midnight on November 6, the first thing Mike said after shaking Amerine’s hand was “The rest of the guys aren’t very happy, sir.”
“I know,” Amerine said with a shrug. It wasn’t his job to make his men happy; it was his job to complete the mission—and bring them home alive. “There is no such thing as a beloved captain in Special Forces,” his mentor Dennis Holloway had told him. “But you can take care of your men, lead from the front, and they’ll respect you for doing what’s right.”
At the Department of Defense press briefing on November 6, Secretary Rumsfeld announced that an Afghan named Hamid Karzai, who had been attempting to stir up a rebellion in southern Afghanistan, had been extracted from that country by the U.S. military and taken to Pakistan. During the six years Karzai lived in exile, his warnings about his homeland had been buried in the foreign-update sections of the world’s newspapers. Now, when it was crucial that Karzai remain in the shadows, Rumsfeld had pushed him into the spotlight.
That same day, ABC’s Dan Harris reported the same information on the evening news broadcast, adding that Karzai was in Pakistan consulting with U.S. Special Forces.
ABC then played an audio clip of a telephone interview with Karzai, who was forced to “correct” Rumsfeld and Harris. “No,” he said, “I am in Afghanistan.”
The Americans working with Karzai in Pakistan understood the need for this deception. “Retreating” to another country would have been considered a terrible sign of weakness to the Pashtun, threatening the meager support Karzai had built over the past few weeks.