by Mark Moyar
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, proponents of American special operations forces trumpeted Colombia as a role model for all the countries where special operators were helping partners contend with insurgency, criminality, and other scourges. Through broadened and prolonged training of allies, SOF could help contain localized threats at a low cost and with little fanfare. For those who had joined the military profession to kick down doors and blow things up, the world seemed to have become rather boring.
JUST TWO MONTHS before President Clinton’s trip to Walter Reed Medical Center, special operations forces had been the new toy that no one wanted to put down. Clinton and his advisers, few of whom knew anything about military affairs, had hoped that JSOC could quickly and easily put a silver bullet through the heart of America’s Somalian nemesis. After events in Somalia disabused Clinton of that notion, he shoved the special operators back into the toy box, pushing them down near the bottom lest their appearance give cause for rueful remembrance. Veterans of Gothic Serpent would long remember how the political leadership had sent them into battle and bragged about it, then abandoned them when the political winds shifted. Nor would they forget that their political masters had refused requests for resources that could have averted tactical and strategic catastrophes.
The Joint Special Operations Command had been created in 1980 to execute raids in hostile territory, but prior to Gothic Serpent it had seldom carried out any missions, and it had never attempted to defeat an insurgency. In Aidid’s militias, it faced a large enemy that enjoyed support from the people and intermingled with them for self-protection, a combination that afforded the militias strong defenses against sporadic raids, the principal weapon in JSOC’s arsenal. Only large-scale counterinsurgency operations, requiring far more troops than the JSOC possessed, stood a chance of defeating this sort of popular insurgency.
Other special operations forces might have been able to accomplish more in Somalia by training Somalis in counterinsurgency. The Colombian experience would soon show that the US Army Special Forces could make a real difference in that capacity. Counterinsurgency training, however, was not a quick fix, either, for a country lacking a professional officer corps requires a decade or more of foreign assistance to build effective security forces. Colombia, moreover, had a population that was more highly educated than that of Somalia, and it had political leaders who were more committed to the nation’s well-being—both of which were key ingredients in Colombia’s remarkable turnaround.
In the short term, therefore, a large foreign military presence was the only viable way to prevent the insurgents from taking over Somalia. The withdrawal of US forces in the spring of 1994 enabled the insurgents to regain their strength, and the departure of the last UN forces in 1995 allowed the militias to overrun the whole country. Not until large Ethiopian forces entered Mogadishu in 2006 to drive out a recently installed extremist group would Somalia have a central government that was favorably disposed to the West.
Special operators and their political backers had billed the deployment of Task Force Ranger to Somalia as an opportunity to show that SOF were a strategic force, capable of winning a war on their own. Some JSOC veterans would maintain that the task force could have achieved strategic success had it been permitted to continue operations, pointing to the physical and psychological damage sustained by Aidid’s militias. For most observers, however, the events of October 3–4, 1993, and the ensuing US withdrawal discredited the idea that special operations forces could decide strategic outcomes. That idea would lie in hibernation for nearly two decades, until Gothic Serpent had faded from the consciousness of political and military leaders.
To the conventional military, Gothic Serpent demonstrated conclusively the absurdity of SOF pretensions to strategic might and tactical invincibility. With the White House disowning Gothic Serpent, and the operation’s participants unable or unwilling to explain what had happened, critics found it easy to assemble a montage of SOF incompetence, featuring the mistaken arrests of UN and Somali officials, the crashing of American helicopters, the hauling of dead Americans through the streets, and the termination of the hunt for Aidid. Conventional military officers who had resented the diversion of resources to special units and the self-importance of special operators viewed the debacle as a self-inflicted comeuppance. “Special ops people are hard to deal with,” one former military official commented. “They are arrogant, they overestimate their own capability, and they’re very secretive. This all came back to bite them in Somalia.”
CHAPTER 8
REGIME CHANGE
Ascending a mound of charred and smoldering rubble, George W. Bush grasped a bullhorn in one hand while putting his other arm around Bob Beckwith, an elderly fireman in an oversized blue fire helmet. As Bush brought the bullhorn to his mouth, conversation ceased and notebooks flipped open among the pool reporters who had been pursuing the president through the debris of the World Trade Center. Few among the press had supported Bush during his election the preceding year, but at this dire moment in history, they appeared as eager as any Americans to see him rise to the occasion and, like Pericles before the Athenians, deliver an oration with the passion and majesty to buoy a traumatized nation.
“I want you all to know,” Bush began, then paused as people swarming toward the scene urged him to turn up the volume on the bullhorn. “It can’t go any louder,” he said with a wry grin.
“I want you all to know,” the president intoned, “that America today is on bended knee, in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. The nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.”
Rescue workers and firemen toward the rear of the throng bellowed in salty New York accents, “We can’t hear you!”
“I can hear you!” Bush exclaimed. “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
Chants of “USA! USA! USA!” erupted across Ground Zero, and at offices, schools, construction sites, and watering holes across the country. Americans of all persuasions, even Manhattanites who looked down their noses at Bush as a Texas boor who had stolen the 2000 election from Al Gore, would hail Bush’s impromptu Ground Zero speech as a model of presidential leadership. The event, eight months into Bush’s first term, may have been the zenith of his eight-year presidency.
In Washington, Congress was on this same day, September 14, 2001, voting on a bill authorizing the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” The bill passed the House 420–1 and the Senate 98–0. At no other time in the nation’s history had the American people been so unified in their outrage, so unequivocal in their resolve for retribution.
Before taking the nation to war, Bush would offer some of the accomplices a chance to be spared from America’s terrible swift sword. On September 15, his CIA station chief in Pakistan, Robert L. Grenier, met secretly with a high emissary of the Taliban government of Afghanistan, the government harboring Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda militants behind the 9/11 attacks. The United States, said the station chief, wanted the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden and his associates to the United States, or to kill them in the trying. The message was relayed to Mullah Mohammed Omar, supreme commander of the Taliban regime and the founding father of the Taliban movement. The one-eyed Mullah Omar concluded that the Americans were bluffing, telling a senior subordinate that there was “less than a ten percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats.” Calling the supposed bluff, Mullah Omar refused to evict his guests. War it would be.
The 9/11 attacks touched most Americans in some way, but few were to be as affected as America’s special operators. The ca
taclysm was to draw the United States into wars that outlasted a pair of two-term presidents, in which America’s special operations forces went into harm’s way more frequently than any other military force. The demands of these unending wars would transform special operations, special operations forces, and the special operators themselves. Relations between special operations forces and the White House, Congress, conventional military forces, and the American public would be forever altered.
CAPTAIN JASON AMERINE had just been seated at a restaurant in Kazakhstan when his senior communications sergeant phoned him to report that two planes had flown into the World Trade Center. Jumping up from the table, Amerine rushed back to the military installation where his Special Forces team was based. There, the Americans watched the Pentagon burn and the Twin Towers collapse.
“This means war,” Amerine intoned to his team sergeant. Their lives were about to change, Amerine believed, though the only change he could foresee with any confidence was the premature termination of the team’s mission of training Kazakh paratroopers. Where would they go next, he wondered, and what trials awaited them there? The same questions whirled through the heads of special operators in the jungles of Latin America, the deserts of Africa, and the rice paddies of Asia.
Within days, Amerine’s team and many of the others would be pulled out of their assignments and ordered to prepare for deployment to Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan’s northern provinces, a collection of 22,000 Afghan militiamen known as the Northern Alliance had been waging war against the Taliban for the past five years. Outnumbered four to one by the Taliban’s armed forces, the motley Northern Alliance militias clung to isolated enclaves, from which they occasionally launched fruitless attacks on the Taliban-held cities. For President Bush and his national security team, lending support to the Northern Alliance was the obvious first step in a military campaign against the Taliban. Landlocked and ringed in by countries hostile or standoffish toward the United States, Afghanistan was too far removed from US air and naval bases to be invaded in the near term, so supporting the resistance groups would have to be America’s main effort until American expeditionary forces could be marshaled. Bush quickly authorized the insertion of small CIA teams into Afghanistan and gave them $1 billion in cash for buying the assistance of the Northern Alliance and other rebel groups.
Hank Crumpton, head of special operations at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, handpicked the teams from the CIA’s paramilitary corps. A shadow of its Vietnam-era self, the paramilitary corps consisted of only a few dozen personnel, ensuring that the number of CIA personnel entering Afghanistan would remain low. The first of the CIA teams, code-named Jawbreaker, arrived in the Panjshir Valley on September 26. Leading the seven-man team was Gary Schroen, a sixty-year-old veteran with deep Afghanistan experience and a rank that was the CIA’s equivalent of a three-star general.
CIA Director George Tenet asked the Defense Department to send special operations units to Afghanistan to work alongside Crumpton’s teams. These special operators would provide a layer of protection for the CIA’s lightly armed officers, train Afghan forces, and direct air strikes onto enemy positions. Tenet offered to place his CIA teams under the authority of General Tommy Franks, who as head of Central Command was the chief US military commander for Afghanistan. It was an exceptional act of bureaucratic altruism in the turf-conscious world of Washington, DC, of the sort that rarely occurs except in time of national crisis.
For several weeks, Tenet’s request for special operators went unfulfilled. Franks and Major General Dell Dailey, the JSOC commander, worried that sending troops into an area beyond the range of US rescue helicopters posed inordinate risks. Some senior military commanders saw little need to hurry, because they expected that US assistance to the Northern Alliance would have minimal impact. One American officer recounted that leaders at Central Command “thought they’d let the Special Forces go in and play around for a few months, and then the real fight would occur when the 101st and the 82nd Airborne arrived.” Further delaying matters were squabbles within the special operations community over who would get to deploy first and who would work for whom.
The insertion of Jawbreaker, combined with a British news story showing that mere reporters had been able to visit the front lines with Northern Alliance commanders, finally persuaded Franks to put special operations forces with the Northern Alliance. Several more weeks were to pass before any special operators set foot in Afghanistan, however, as the Defense Department was still in the process of securing permission from Afghanistan’s next-door neighbors to use bases from which it could provide the necessary logistical and air support for a few hundred troops.
Afghanistan fell within the area of operations of the 5th Special Forces Group. Prior to 9/11, the 5th Group had given little attention to Afghanistan, its exertions focused instead on other places in its operational area where it believed conflict more likely to occur, principally Egypt, Jordan, and the countries fronting the Persian Gulf. Most of the Green Berets in the 5th Group had taken lessons in Arabic or French. None had received training in the languages of Afghanistan.
In the wake of the 9/11 catastrophe, the 5th Group commander, Colonel John Mulholland, put his Special Forces teams into an isolation facility at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The first job, Mulholland stated, was to acquaint themselves with Afghanistan’s geography, people, and government. Team members searched public and classified databases for information on the Northern Alliance, but the best they could find were a few books on the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s. The amount of information they obtained on the Northern Alliance commanders with whom they were hoping to work could fit onto a single index card.
As reports came in from Crumpton’s teams, though, it became clear that the Special Forces were not needed for their ability to bridge linguistic or cultural divides. The CIA personnel with whom they would work in Afghanistan included enough individuals with country expertise that the CIA could deal with Afghan political issues. The resistance forces of the Northern Alliance had already been organized and trained, moreover, so the unconventional warfare skills of the Special Forces were not in high demand. What the Afghans did need from the Special Forces was their ability to guide American bombs.
In preparation for deployment to Afghanistan, Mulholland’s Special Forces teams were assigned Air Force tactical air controllers who had trained and deployed with the Special Forces in the past and were versed in the employment of the laser acquisition marker. Resembling a pair of oversized, tripod-mounted binoculars, the laser acquisition marker used an infrared laser beam to pinpoint targets several kilometers away for destruction by “smart bombs”—computerized bombs that steered themselves to the laser point. The air controllers also knew how to aim Joint Direct Attack Munitions, which were guided to map coordinates by means of GPS technology.
Just before departing the isolation facility for Afghanistan, members of the 5th Group wrote letters that would be forwarded to their families in the event of death. Mike McElhiney wrote to his eight-year-old son, “I hope Mommy has explained where I am and what I had to do. This war and what has happened to me is for you and all children of your age. I have gone and suffered this fate so you don’t have to. You are now the man of the house and I know this is a big responsibility but when you grow up you will understand. Take care of your mother and sister and I will be watching over you from heaven. I love you always. Your Daddy.”
On October 10, Mulholland and his headquarters arrived at K2 Air Base in Uzbekistan, to which the US government had just acquired basing rights. Mulholland assumed command of Joint Special Operations Task Force–North, also known as Task Force Dagger, which would direct the special operations forces heading into northern Afghanistan. The first two Special Forces teams entered Afghanistan on October 19 aboard Chinook helicopters piloted by Nightstalkers of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
The twelve Green Berets of Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha
(ODA) 595 arrived at the Dari-a-Souf Valley, about fifty miles south of Mazar-i-Sharif, at 2 a.m. A sandstorm was sweeping northern Afghanistan that night, giving the landing an ominous resemblance to Desert One. The Nightstalker pilots, however, delivered the Green Berets safely and departed the scene without incident.
Out of the swirling sand, the Special Forces saw the approach of Afghans whose robes and strange dialect reminded at least one of the Americans of the Sand People in Star Wars. The mysterious Afghans guided ODA 595 to a camp held by General Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of the top Northern Alliance commanders. What little information the Special Forces had been able to find on Dostum was not especially encouraging. Said to be a ruthless Uzbek warlord in his mid-fifties, Dostum was reputed to have fought for the Soviets against Afghanistan’s Islamic rebels in the 1980s and led an independent militia in the civil warfare of the 1990s. Word had it that he was in ill health. The ODA commander, Captain Mark Nutsch, was worried that Dostum might try to kill the Americans at their first meeting.
At sunrise, the Green Berets watched thirty rough-hewn soldiers arrive on horseback, AK-47s and machine guns poking through their robes and long checkered scarves. A second wave of twenty horsemen followed. One of these men, riding a white stallion with a red pom-pom embroidered into the coarse hair of its forehead, jumped from his saddle. Shaking hands with each American, the regal figure introduced himself as General Dostum.
To the surprise of the Americans, Dostum was a healthy and vigorous bear of a man. Standing over six feet tall and weighing at least 240 pounds, he had a barrel chest and a short beard flecked in black and gray. Affable and outgoing, he did not seem capable of the cruelty that he was rumored to have perpetrated in years past.