Full Battle Rattle

by Changiz Lahidji

  The course lasted nine weeks, with our days starting at 0530 hours when all the recruits went on a five-mile hike in all weather conditions, including pouring rain and snow. While they ran, I packed a Humvee with M4s, Glocks, 6,000 rounds of ammo, food, and water. After breakfast half of the recruits would march off for classroom work, while my SF buddy John and I loaded the remaining thirty-eight into four trucks and escorted them to a firing range about forty-five minutes away. It consisted of a field with a 2,000-foot hill on the right, topped with a French flag.

  We taught them how to care, clear, reload, and fire M4s and Glocks. Then we’d return to Camp Watan in the afternoon and take out the second group. Friday—a day of rest in Afghanistan—was our only day off.

  After dinner, I’d sit with the Afghan recruits and tell stories about living in the States, and my adventures in the SF. One night, one of the Afghan guards assigned to man the base watchtowers was in the room next to ours cleaning his AK. Apparently, he hadn’t cleared the chamber first. When I heard the gun discharge, I hurried in to find him slumped to the floor with a bullet entry wound under his chin. I ripped off my shirt, wrapped it around his head, and shouted to the Afghans to fetch a truck.

  Once loaded in the vehicle, I drove him to the field hospital contained in the ISAF compound across the street. The Canadian doctors there declared him dead.

  Most days when we approached the firing range, kids would run out of nearby huts to greet us. I always carried a bag of candy, which I’d hand out to them. One morning when we reached the range, an old man hobbled over to tell me that a six-year-old boy had fallen into an oven and was badly burned. I ran to the hut and found the boy’s family huddled around the unconscious six-year-old and praying. A medic was summoned and the two of us cooled the boy’s burns with water and then wrapped him in oil gauze.

  The burns were so extensive I thought he’d die. Every time I went to the range, I’d stop in to look in on the kid, bring him medicine, and give MREs to him and his family. Slowly he recovered. After five months the boy was healed enough to stand and give me a hug. It touched my heart.

  Two months before graduation, we hired a local tailor to measure the thirty-five students (out of seventy-six) who had passed. All of them were given three suits, shirts, and three pairs of shoes, socks, and underwear. I showed them how to march and stand at attention for the ceremony. US ambassador Robert Finn came with thirty other US and Afghan VIPs. President Karzai was expected but didn’t show.

  All of us instructors took a ten-day break and then started to train a second class of recruits. Meanwhile, the first class served as the outer ring of security around President Karzai and supplied logistical support to the State Department inner detail.

  One of the biggest pleasures of working in Afghanistan was making friends with local military and intelligence officials. During the months I spent at Camp Watan, I grew close to two high-ranking Afghan police and intelligence officials—Zacur and Abdullah. Both were Pashtuns; Abdullah’s father was a high-ranking military officer.

  One afternoon, while the three of us were drinking tea and talking, I asked if they had any idea where Osama bin Laden was hiding. At the time, bin Laden’s location was a big topic of conjecture in both the US and Afghanistan.

  Everyone knew that he had managed to slip across the Pakistani border in December 2001. Most experts thought he was living somewhere in the lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas of western Pakistan where the Taliban leadership was based. But no one knew for sure.

  What had been widely announced was that the United States had put a $25 million bounty on his head. The size of the reward attracted a wide variety of fortune seekers, from Afghans in the city of Jalalabad (near the Pakistani border), to a private investigator from Texas who was arrested on his way to Syria, to a construction worker from Colorado who was detained by Pakistani authorities in a forest near the northwestern tribal area of Chitral carrying a samurai sword and loaded pistol.

  At my next meeting with Zacur and Abdullah, they informed me that Afghan intel sources had told them that bin Laden was back in Afghanistan living in a valley in the mountainous Tora Bora region near the border with Pakistan. That made sense because he had maintained a camp and private residence in that very remote area since the war against the Soviets.

  In December 2001, he and several thousand of his followers had been discovered there by a handful of Special Forces and CIA operatives. For the next fourteen days, US officials called in air strikes. They had cornered bin Laden and a large concentration of Al Qaeda fighters in some of the most forbidding terrain on earth.

  The air strikes were so devastating that bin Laden expected to die. In his last will and testament, written on December 14, 2001, he wrote, “Allah commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole. Allah bears witness to the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah that has dominated my whole life.”

  But appeals to General Tommy Franks for 800 Rangers to block bin Laden’s escape were rejected. And on December 16 bin Laden and a group of his bodyguards crossed the border into Pakistan.

  His location had remained a mystery since. In September 2003, I asked Zacur and Abdullah if they could take me into Tora Bora so I could see bin Laden with my own eyes. They agreed and recruited another of their Afghan intel colleagues to escort us.

  We dressed like local farmers with Pashtun-style hats, baggy pants, vests, and robes. With my long graying beard and dark eyes, I blended in.

  On an overcast morning, the four of us climbed into a white extended-cab Toyota pickup—the kind favored by local warlords and farmers—and set off north on the asphalt Jalalabad–Kabul highway, which The New York Times had recently described as the most dangerous road in the world. Taliban and IED (improvised explosive device) attacks on ISAF convoys occurred daily. Under my robes I carried a Glock and four mags.

  Abdullah, at the wheel, turned off the paved road before we reached the Darunta Dam and continued on a dirt road east into the mountains. The scenery was spectacular, a big lake and valley to our left, sharp peaks of the White Mountains to the right. After passing the village of Azizkhan we turned right again onto a smaller, rougher path and climbed for another two hours until we reached the Melva Valley.

  It was immediately obvious to me why bin Laden had used this area as a hideout for so many years. First of all, it was extremely remote and populated by only a handful of farmers and their families. Secondly, access was so difficult that it was easy to stop anyone coming up the steep narrow paths. Finally, the terrain offered hundreds of hidden gorges, natural caves, and valleys to hide in.

  The road ended at a little gathering of huts. A couple of battered pickups rested nearby. Abdullah parked, and we followed him to a crest of a hill dotted with tall pine trees. From there we looked down into a valley.

  I saw furrowed fields and steep, winding paths, but no people.

  Then, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It belonged to Abdullah, who whispered in Dari, “Above.”

  As I looked up, a chill shot up my spine. “Where?”

  About sixty feet above stood another flat ridge. Just beyond it rested four trucks. Sitting and crouching around them were two dozen men holding automatic weapons. On their right periphery four men stood talking. One of them was six or seven inches taller than the others.

  “That’s him,” Abdullah whispered. “The Sheikh.”

  The tall man wore a Pashtun cap and had an AK slung over his shoulder. When he turned, I saw a face I’d seen many times on magazine covers and posters—Osama bin Laden.

  “Holy shit!”

  I was so excited I felt an impulse to climb up to the ridge and attack him. But there were more than twenty of them and four of us, and they were armed with AK-47s and we only had a few pistols. We would have been quickly wiped out.

  So I followed Abdullah and the other Afghans back to our pickup, where I drew a rough map of the path we h
ad traveled and our location. We spent the remainder of the day with Abdullah’s uncle, who lived nearby in a small gathering of huts, never mentioning the reason for our visit.

  We returned to Kabul that night. The following day, I drove downtown and parked near Freedom Circle, which was lined with stores selling everything from fruit to shoes. From there I walked several blocks to the US Embassy. After identifying myself and entering the building, I asked to speak to an intel officer.

  I was told to wait in a room on the third floor. Twenty minutes later a middle-aged man entered and identified himself as a military attaché. I related the account of my trip into Tora Bora and what I’d seen.

  He left and returned a few minutes later with three young intel officers.

  I showed them the primitive map I’d drawn and told them who I’d seen.

  “Are you sure it was him?” one of them asked.

  “Absolutely. He’s taller than most people here and stands out.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  I described everything from boots to cap.

  “How far away were you standing?”

  “Not far. No more than sixty feet. Maybe seventy.”

  “And you’re sure it was him?”

  “Absolutely sure. I have three witnesses. Three Afghan intel officers went with me. I can bring them here, if you like.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  The three US intel officers seemed excited by my news. They asked if they could keep the map.

  “Of course,” I answered.

  “We need to show this to some people.”

  “I understand. If you want me to escort a team of special operators to the area, I’m happy to do so. I would suggest it be a small team and they all disguise themselves as locals. We’ll need to infiltrate the area at night. Drive up to a certain altitude then complete the rest on foot wearing NVGs.”

  “Yes.”

  “It won’t be easy, but it can be done with trained operators.”

  The three men nodded.

  “I can draw up some plans if you want.”

  “Thanks,” they said, rising from their chairs. “Go ahead and do that. We’ll be in touch.”

  Days passed and I never heard from them. Thinking that maybe they had sent a team into Tora Bora without telling me, I followed the daily military action reports carefully. But I didn’t see any mention of any military engagement in Tora Bora.

  Curious as to why the intel officers hadn’t responded, I returned to the US Embassy a week later. But this time no one wanted to speak to me. Disappointed, I returned to Camp Watan, where I ran into a Delta operator I knew and trusted. I told him what I had seen in Tora Bora and how the US intel officers I spoke to had reacted.

  My Delta buddy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Maybe the guys running the show don’t want to catch him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Or they don’t want to catch bin Laden yet.”

  “Who are talking about?” I asked.

  “The big shots in DC,” he answered. “Think about it. They’re so deeply invested in the war on terrorism. We’re in Afghanistan and we’ve invaded Iraq. We’re committed to rebuilding both countries. If the president announced tomorrow that we’d killed bin Laden, how is he going to justify staying in Afghanistan and Iraq?”

  “Good point.”

  * * *

  I remained in Afghanistan and trained several more classes of recruits for President Karzai’s personal protection detail. At the end of 2003 we got a new team leader. In the past I had always handed out ammunition to the students for their M4s and pistols after we arrived at the firing range. Our new leader wanted the recruits to load their weapons before we left Camp Watan.

  I considered this unwise and explained that arming the students before they reached the range would put them at unnecessary risk. He insisted we follow his protocol.

  Feeling I couldn’t do that in good conscience, I submitted my resignation. Three other SF trainers did the same. A few weeks later, the four of us were hired to go to Pakistan and train members of their new antiterrorism unit. Spurred by the influx of vanquished Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from Afghanistan, Pakistan was experiencing its own upswing in terrorism and the government of General Pervez Musharraf was determined to stop it.

  Meanwhile, military contracting firms I’d never heard of before were contacting me on a weekly basis. What I was witnessing was a virtual explosion in the private military contracting sector. Unable to fill all the needs associated with running and supporting the war on terrorism and rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon and State Department were handing out huge contracts to private firms. The USG—US government—was outsourcing everything from military training, to supplying food to base dining facilities, to maintaining air assets.

  Starting in late 2001, even jobs like intel gathering and quick reaction forces that had once been the exclusive purview of the Army were now being transferred to private contractors. The contracts awarded by the USG were enormous—$1.5 billion to Triple Canopy to provide security teams in Iraq, and $293 million to Aegis Defense Services to support and protect the USG’s restructuring of Iraq. Firms based in DC, London, and Stockholm like G4S, MPRI, Securitas AB, and others were becoming billion-dollar operations overnight.

  According to the DOD, by 2011, they had hired more contractor personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq (155,000) than uniformed personnel (145,000). This meant that the need of private contracting companies to hire qualified people was massive.

  I saw this with my own eyes in Afghanistan in late 2003. While I was completing my training assignment in Pakistan, a contracting firm I had never heard of used my résumé and those of some of my former SF colleagues to win a $60 million contract to train guards to protect the US Embassy in Kabul.

  When we arrived in Kabul in late 2003, my colleagues and I quickly realized that the firm didn’t have the staff or resources in place to run the project. Everything had been slapped together at the last minute. Managers were ineffective and quarreled over responsibilities. Rather than renting a house to accommodate a dozen trainers, the contracting firm put us up at an expensive hotel.

  Shocked by the amount the hotel was charging, we took it upon ourselves to locate a four-bedroom house a few blocks behind the embassy. A few days later we met the recruits the firm wanted us to train only to learn that they were Peruvian and could barely speak English. Things went from bad to worse, and a year later the State Department terminated the firm’s contract citing inadequate personnel.

  Sadly, it was only one example of poor staffing by private contractors. To my mind it was a result of a failure of policy. In both Afghanistan and Iraq we had taken on the burden of trying to heal fractured societies and rebuild institutions. It was an impossible task. How were we going to fix other countries’ problems when we couldn’t solve the long-standing issues in dysfunctional, crime-ridden neighborhoods of our own?

  13

  DARFUR

  March 2004 wasn’t the best time to be in Baghdad, but that’s where I chose to be, in the action and living in the heavily fortified Green Zone. Signing my paycheck was the military contractor DynCorp. DynCorp was based in Reston, Virginia, and one of the federal government’s top twenty-five contractors with billings of over $1 billion a year. Prior to 9/11, DynCorp provided aircraft and helicopter maintenance crews to support the US military during the First Gulf War. Its pilots and planes flew defoliation missions in Colombia. It managed border posts between Mexico and the US, made up the core of the police force in Bosnia, and serviced the fleet of Air Force One presidential planes and Marine One helicopters.

  Since 9/11, DynCorp had expanded its operations to fill the needs of the USG in Afghanistan and Iraq and grab part of the $18 billion the US Congress had recently appropriated to rebuild Iraqi schools, factories, and oil facilities. Additionally, the USG was forced to allocate additional resources to deal with the deteriorating security situation in the cou
ntry.

  One year after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom—aka the invasion of Iraq—the peaceful transition from the authoritarian rule of Saddam Hussein to a representative form of government wasn’t happening. From my perspective on the ground, I saw a constant escalation of attacks by Sunni extremist groups against Coalition forces, Shiites, and Kurds in an effort to provoke civil conflict.

  The invasion launched by the US and Coalition partners Great Britain, Australia, and Poland on March 19, 2003, had shocked and awed Iraq’s army and forced Saddam Hussein into hiding. On May 1, 2003, President Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and, with a huge MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner behind him, announced the end of major combat operations.

  No doubt military planning and execution of the war had been highly effective. But postwar planning … not so much. When the Saddam government imploded, Iraqi police and military abandoned their posts, leaving a security vacuum in much of the country. With an insufficient number of Coalition troops to police a population of 26 million, mobs looted museums, banks, hospitals, government facilities, and businesses. Thousands of ancient artifacts were stolen, along with cached weapons, and hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives.

  In this unstable political atmosphere, US special envoy Paul Bremer and the Bush administration made two decisions that destabilized the situation further and set a perilous course for the country’s future. One was to disband Iraq’s army and replace it with a brand-new one built from the ground up. The second was to bar senior members of Iraq’s secularist and nationalistic Baath Party, which had ruled the country since 1968, from holding positions in the new government.

  Both decisions were made counter to the advice of CIA, State Department, and Pentagon officials. In the political uncertainty that followed, suspicion and hostility exploded between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds that the secular government of Saddam Hussein had managed to keep in check.

  Sunni extremists who felt disenfranchised by the US decision to curtail the Baath Party started to unleash violence on Coalition and Shiite targets. Every day saw more IED attacks on military convoys, bombings of soft civilian targets, kidnappings, and assassinations. Shiite-led militia groups responded. Militia leaders on both sides gained influence through intimidation and by offering protection, undermining efforts of the US to organize a new Iraqi government.