Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  The very air in the fort seemed diseased. The men explored its maze of dank rooms and dark passageways, the halogen beams of their flashlights passing over rough mud walls that sprouted tufts of animal hair and straw—crude building materials—and revealed odd sights. Some rooms were filled floor to ceiling with small sticks; others were piled high with shoes; some seemed to have been the scene of horrific struggles, the floors tracked with heavy boots and dried pools of blood. After a half hour of wandering, the men would step out of a doorway and into another part of the fort without any idea of how they’d arrived there. The Magic Castle, some of them called it.

  As part of postwar operations, Mitchell was busy preparing to dispose of the immense weapons and ammunition cache that the Taliban had left behind. Six Conex trailers hulked in the weeds in the southern compound. The rear doors of the trailers swung open with a screech. Inside lay hundreds of rifles, rockets, ammo, grenades, mortars, and BM-21 rockets, enough matériel to outfit an army. These were the Taliban’s spoils of war after three years of occupying Mazar.

  Mitchell marveled over the World War I rifles of French extraction, the Russian long guns, and the World War II–era machine guns. He picked up a British Enfield and admired the glint of its bayonet in the stormy half-light of the metal trailer.

  A bayonet! It was stamped with a date: 1913.

  On the day he was to cart the weapons away to a distant stretch of desert where they would be blown up, the ammunition cache started exploding on its own. The racket was incredible. At first, Mitchell wondered if they were under attack. He ran from his office to see what was the matter. (Mitchell would never discover the cause of this spontaneous explosion.)

  It took about a minute to run from the north balcony to the southern courtyard. Passing though the tall gate in the middle dividing wall, he heard the small-arms ammunition—crack crack crack—and then the mortars—shhhwwwooom—followed by BM-21 rockets. The rockets banged around inside the metal trailers and sailed out the open doors, smashing into the interior walls of the fort, or sailing cleanly over and exploding outside in a surrounding field.

  Mitchell retreated immediately. The fireworks lasted several hours. When he reconned the trailers, he saw that most of them had blown up and been incinerated. The insides were a cooked mess, consisting of twisted gun barrels and charred hunks of steel.

  Several trailers were more or less intact. Mitchell wanted to take care of these, too, and he made a note in his green, hardback notebook to have this done as soon as possible.

  If by some fluke the fort was attacked and fell into the hands of the Taliban, well, Mitchell didn’t even want to imagine that.

  Two days after they arrived in the city, the Americans received good news that the battle in other parts of the country was also going well. Northern Alliance soldiers had captured Herat, 60 miles west of Mazar, and Kabul, 150 miles to the south. Soon, other villages—Tashkurgan, Hairatan, Pul-e-Khumri, Taloqan, Bamiyan—fell, too. From Kabul, the Taliban had headed south to Kandahar, their spiritual base. In the north, they retreated to Konduz, 60 miles east of Mazar. The Taliban government was collapsing.

  In Kabul, young men like Rocky Bahari, an amateur boxer and schoolteacher, were ecstatic to see the Taliban leave the city.

  After the Taliban took charge of Kabul, at the height of the civil war, in 1997, there had been fewer robberies by highway bandits. Fewer explosions in the middle of the night. But Rocky had discovered that the security the Taliban had brought to the country came with a heavy price. One’s very freedom.

  Rocky did not understand why the Taliban made religion seem like a jail. They didn’t let women go to school or work. If a woman’s husband died, she had to beg on the street: “For the sake of God, give me money!” Often she and her children would starve.

  In defiance to their rule, Rocky had refused to grow a beard. One day he was arrested on his way to the university where he was scheduled to take an exam. Rocky ended up spending a week in jail because he was clean-shaven. It had almost seemed humorous.

  The Taliban executed women in the soccer stadium for sleeping with men who weren’t their husbands. They cut off the hands of robbers. White-coated doctors would anesthetize them on the warm grass on the soccer pitch and do the operation in front of thousands of cheering people. This was disgusting. Beyond human comprehension. He believed that the future had to be brighter than the darkest past.

  Rocky had lost his father, sister, and brother during the fighting with the Soviet troops. They had been riding in a taxi when it crashed with a Russian Army truck. Rocky had to go to work selling milk to support his family after that. With the Soviets gone and Afghans fighting each other, there had been little work in the city for any man, except to join the Taliban and fight the Northern Alliance.

  Rocky sat in his small food shop all day, waiting for life to change.

  One day, he was walking down a street in Kabul when he saw a jet from one of the warring faction’s air force streak overhead. Rocky saw the jet drop a bomb on a nearby house, and he watched the house’s roof fly off and go twirling across the street and crash.

  He heard a rubbery sound—plop—and looked down at the ground.

  At his feet was a woman’s hand. It had fallen out of the sky.

  It was lying with the fingers extended in the dirt, palm down, as if gripping the earth.

  What Rocky noticed were the woman’s fingernails. They were painted red with nail polish. She was wearing a ring. She was somebody’s wife, he told himself. She had been somebody’s mother.

  Back at Qala-i-Janghi, Mark Mitchell heard stories about Taliban soldiers who’d “punished” children by cutting off their arms and legs to avenge their parents’ attempted escape from the city of Taloqan, twenty-five miles from Konduz. The stories horrified him and made him think that any battle in those cities would be enormously challenging. In fact, as the Taliban’s control of the rest of the country collapsed, it did appear that Konduz would be their last stronghold, which they would defend to their deaths.

  On November 13, the British media reported that Osama bin Laden had a videotaped statement claiming responsibility for the attacks on American soil nine weeks earlier. “History should be a witness that we are terrorists,” he said. “Yes, we kill [American] innocents.”

  Despite Pakistan’s diplomatic reassurances that it was America’s ally, Al Qaeda’s ties to Afghanistan and Pakistan were increasingly clear. The CIA was picking up intelligence that approximately thirty-five Al Qaeda members, based in Pakistan, were planning to blow up the U.S. Consulate in Peshawar. Moreover, it appeared that Al Qaeda planned to use Pakistan’s nuclear capability for further attacks.

  This news reminded Mitchell that the war was far from finished.

  Four days after arriving in Mazar, Bowers convened a series of meetings at Qala-i-Janghi with Dostum, Atta, and the Hazara general, Mohammed Mohaqeq, hoping to lessen tension among the three warlords. He wryly referred to these as “the Paris peace talks,” after the 1972 cease-fire discussions between North and South Vietnam.

  Bowers realized that he needed to unite these men, bound together by the war, in common cause or risk a repeat of the tribal warfare that had erupted when the Soviets left. “This is your country, not ours,” he began. “We will help you all we can. We have no desire to take anything, or to be responsible for your government.” By the end of the meetings, the warlords had decided who would run the electric plant, the water system, and humanitarian efforts—the critical miscellany of daily life in a fifteenth-century town of shopkeepers, doctors, and teachers struggling in the twenty-first century.

  Next, Bowers and the warlords turned their attention to Konduz, sixty miles away, in the country’s eastern corner.

  Konduz was a city under siege, a place of hellish spectacle. As intel reports trickled in, indications were that the city of 220,000 was boiling over with Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers. The streets seethed with bandits, freelancers of no political stripe taking advanta
ge of the chaotic situation. Soldiers broke into restaurants and stores looking for food. Families were killing their burros and eating them. Refugees were fleeing the city to camps outside of Mazar—or trying to. Men were shot in the back at checkpoints as they ran beyond the city limits.

  Those who escaped spoke of atrocities committed by the Taliban, of citizens forced to run across minefields to the amusement of Taliban soldiers looking on. To prevent soldiers from abandoning their ranks, Taliban leaders ordered that the suspicious among them stuff their shoes with thorns.

  Those citizens who managed to make it to refugee camps found conditions that were not much better.

  Alex Perry, the Time reporter, discovered thousands of people living in stick tents draped with black garbage bag tarps on the outskirts of Mazar. Families of eight or nine were forced to share one blanket through the increasingly cold nights.

  Perry saw that the refugees owned nothing except a few pots and pans. When the American soldiers pulled up in their pickups, men, women, and children swarmed the vehicles, saying, “Thank you, thank you,” and making a hand-to-mouth gesture: I’m hungry.

  Stu Mansfield, on Dean’s team, gave one of his guards a pair of new boots to replace a pair of worn slippers. The guard thanked him profusely, and then gave the boots to a young boy who ran downtown, sold them, and returned with some money, which the man pocketed. Mansfield could only shrug, thinking that he had still done the right thing.

  In an attempt to make the Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers surrender in Konduz, B-52s trolled overhead, dropping bombs on fleeing trucks and tanks. At night, Spectre AC-130 gunships pounded the hillsides where the enemy forces were camped in trenches. In the dark, the specially outfitted planes flew at high altitudes and remained invisible to the enemy on the ground. The Spectre could shoot thousands of bullets per minute from Gatling guns and could fire artillery shells, barrels poking from the side of the plane. The enemy soldiers on the ground, believing they were concealed by darkness, often didn’t know where the deadly fire was coming from.

  On board each gunship, a weapons officer tracked enemy movements on a video screen. Human bodies resembled glowing grains of rice. The engines of trucks appeared as intense hot spots in the plane’s heat-sensing optics. The weapons on board were aimed by means of a joystick.

  The torrent of fire from the plane was relentless and accurate. Dostum had been delighted to discover that one of the Spectres’ crew members was a female. He had been listening to his radio when he heard her voice amid the pilots’ chatter. Dostum, who was standing alongside Nelson as the night attack unfolded, turned and asked, disbelieving, “Is that a woman?” Even though he professed an egalitarian streak, Dostum had met few women in positions of power in his lifetime.

  “Hah!” he chortled into the radio, talking to the Taliban soldiers. “The Americans think so little of you that they have sent a woman to kill you!”

  The Taliban shouted into their radios, cursing Dostum and the Americans.

  “I will call her ‘the Angel of Death,’” Dostum kidded the Taliban. The Taliban were apoplectic.

  After several days of daily and nightly bombardment by B-52s and Specter gunships, all roads in and out of Konduz were sealed. For the Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers trapped there, they had one choice to make: surrender or die.

  The trapped fighters fell into two camps: the “Afghan” Taliban who, if they did surrender, were allowed to join the Alliance or else return to their villages and pick up their lives. A man’s newly sworn allegiance was his bond. These conscripts weren’t even searched when they switched sides.

  The other camp was comprised of “foreign” Taliban—soldiers from Chechnya, Pakistan, and China, and their hard-core brethren, Al Qaeda, with whom the Taliban had allied. Surrenders by these men were rare and often perfidious. An enemy soldier would walk up to a member of the Northern Alliance and blow himself up with a grenade hidden in his clothes.

  “We are going to be martyrs,” one of the hard-core fighters announced to the press. “We are not going from Konduz.” The Northern Alliance soldiers decided they had no choice but to shoot “foreign” Taliban soldiers on sight.

  There were approximately 3,000 of these committed soldiers in Konduz, and Bowers knew that his team’s next move would be to rid this city of would-be martyrs.

  Meanwhile, a faction of these otherwise suicidal fighters did entertain surrender—if they could keep their weapons and were offered safe passage from the city. When he learned of the proposal, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Washington, D.C., refused to accept it. He warned that if these particular prisoners were allowed to go free, they’d live to fight another day, and that this wasn’t a palatable outcome.

  “My hope,” he told the press, “is that they will either be killed or taken prisoner.”

  In preparation for the battle in Konduz, Bowers and Mitchell’s team moved their headquarters out of the squalid conditions of Qala-i-Janghi to some place more hospitable. Over the previous ten days, Mitchell, like everyone else, had grown ill in the fort and he was glad to settle nearer downtown Mazar, into a modern five-story building known as the Turkish Schoolhouse.

  The new headquarters offered a commanding view of the city. From the roof, Mitchell could see the Blue Mosque, located less than a mile to the west in the middle of town. Traffic streamed steadily past on the road fronting the school, piercing the air with the screech of brakes and the braying of car horns.

  The Turkish government had built the boys’ high school in the 1970s as a gift to the Afghan government. It had once been a gleaming monument to bureaucratic elegance with its rows of small, tinted windows and decorative, concrete facade. The Taliban had ripped the plumbing and electrical fixtures from the walls during their hasty exit twelve days earlier and now the building was a mess. But in comparison to Qala-i-Janghi, the place was clean and well lit.

  At the same time, Nelson’s team moved to a safe house owned by General Dostum located several miles from the fort. Spencer and his team hired local workers to paint the walls, fix the plumbing, and tile the floors. As if a spell had been broken, the health of all the men improved once they moved out.

  Mike Spann and Dave Olson moved into the fifth floor of the Turkish Schoolhouse, along with several other paramilitary officers.

  Mitchell, Bowers, and eight more Special Forces soldiers lived on the third floor, with the local interpreters on the fourth. The second floor became the operations and support center, occupying what had been, when the Taliban lived in the building, a mosque. Sensitive to the fact that he was using a religious space for other purposes, Mitchell was savvy enough to ask local Afghan clerics for permission to do so. Permission was granted and his Afghan colleagues in the building appreciated the gesture. Brains before bullets, thought Mitchell. Outthink ’em so you don’t have to outshoot ’em.

  The ground floor consisted of a tiled foyer, a large cafeteria, and a functioning kitchen that had running water and heat. Workers taped cardboard over the windows that had been smashed by the Taliban. Electricity was provided by gas-powered generators that broke down on a regular basis but were repaired by Afghan workmen using, it seemed to Mitchell, little more than a hammer and a piece of duct tape. He marveled at their good cheer in the war’s aftermath.

  Life in Mazar, it seemed, might begin to assume predictable rhythms. Sergeant Brad Highland of Dean’s team sketched a diagram of a barbecue grill on a piece of scrap paper and Atta’s men built one from spare metal they scrounged in the city. They butchered a cow and Highland next taught them how to grill hamburgers, which they’d never eaten.

  Chief Warrant officer Cal Spencer, of Nelson’s team, enjoyed watching the antics of the local children as they teased Garful, an aged Afghan who’d been assigned as one of the team’s bodyguards.

  Wherever Spencer went in the city, the children often trailed close behind. Spencer had to tell them that he was busy and that they should leave him alone. He was trying to be stern but this was har
d. The kids wanted to shake his hand. Garful was less tactful. He would charge at the kids, waving a stick, “Leave the Americans alone! They have things to do!”

  The kids would jump away and laugh, and Garful, looking over his shoulder, would wink at Spencer and smile. Holy cow, thought Spencer. Garful’s like us. He’s making a joke. Spencer and Garful started laughing.

  But this familiarity aside, increasingly, out on the city streets, the teams found themselves thrust in the middle of family blood feuds that had been left to simmer during the Taliban occupation. And there were larger, more violent ethnic battles to contend with. Six of Atta’s men were killed in a gunfight when they tried to prevent some Hazara soldiers from stealing a taxi driven by a Pashtun man. Even though the driver had done nothing to the Hazara soldiers, he happened to be a member of the same ethnic tribe as the Taliban, and this had awakened the Hazaras’ bloodlust. Atta’s men had prevented the robbery, but at great cost.

  Such incidents were becoming more frequent. One faction of fighters kept asking Dean and Nelson to bomb individual dwellings, claiming that each was a Taliban safe house. Without exception, the men would discover that the house did not belong to a Taliban soldier, but to an old enemy of the group that had requested the air strike. Dean started calling this “attempted assassination by bomb.” It was clear to both him and Nelson that the sooner they put the city back together, the sooner the Afghan soldiers might lay down their arms and reenter civilian life.

  Amid the ongoing conflict and the wreckage of war, however, there were other signs of life, including desire itself. Wherever he went on the city streets, blond-haired and blue-eyed Sergeant Brett Walden managed to draw a crowd among the women in their veils. They walked past him in their burkhas, upright and stiff as giant thumbs, faces hidden behind a fabric screen that fluttered in and out with their breath.

  Walden was shocked when one woman beckoned him with a wave, Come here. He walked over and she lifted her veil, just a peek. Her beauty stunned Walden. He realized that he had stupidly assumed all the women were ugly just because he couldn’t see their faces. This woman would have been stoned by the Taliban for this very behavior. Walden tried discouraging it. The team prided itself on being culturally sensitive and it was inappropriate for him to see any Afghan woman’s face. But the problem only grew worse.