by Anand Gopal
The Afghans were just settling down to end their Ramadan fast when Karzai broke the news: a large Taliban convoy was en route from Kandahar to recapture the town, and they would likely arrive sometime in the morning.
It was exactly as Amerine had feared. He was invited to stay and eat, but he was in no mood for dinner. It was already close to midnight and, judging by the map, the enemy could arrive as soon as daybreak. A large convoy—that meant hundreds or even thousands of enemy troops against twelve Special Forces soldiers and maybe thirty ragtag Afghan militiamen, if Karzai could muster even that.
Back at the command center, Amerine relayed the news to a roomful of silent Green Berets. Men pored over maps, assessing possible Taliban infiltration routes. Incoming intelligence was now suggesting a convoy of nearly one hundred trucks. Amerine looked at the dozen men in the room. There was only one equalizer in a situation like this.
Shortly after one thirty a.m., Sergeant Alex Yoshimoto, an Air Force combat controller, received word that a patrolling F-18 fighter jet had spotted eight trucks speeding toward Uruzgan. It might be the lead element of the convoy. Yoshimoto looked at Amerine. “Are we clear to engage?”
Amerine was a man of solidity, a fighter who thought deeply about the conduct and meaning of war. With a bachelor’s degree in Arabic, he had a facility with foreign cultures rare for a soldier. He quoted Tennyson and the Stoics and spoke of duty and honor. Now, for the first time in this mission, he faced the grim calculus of wartime, where a mistake could wipe out whole families or, conversely, throw your own men into danger.
In the end, for him, as for ground commanders everywhere, the choice was never really in doubt.
He told Yoshimoto, “Smoke ’em.”
* * *
What could possibly compel anyone to face the might of American airpower? It was something I often wondered as I followed the invasion in the news. Back then, every day seemed to bring reports of dozens or hundreds of Taliban mowed down, only to have more of them sprout anew days later. They had the faceless quality of old Hollywood henchmen, always willing to sacrifice themselves in a mindless drive to satisfy some devious master. That certainly didn’t sound like anyone I’d ever met, and it was one of the things I found most interesting about the Taliban.
Years later, I asked Jason Amerine for his thoughts on the enemy. “For ten years I had a lot of questions and what-ifs,” he said. “You wonder who they were really and what they were after. What they were really about.” Amerine had come to Afghanistan because, on some level, he felt he was responding to his country’s needs after 9/11. It seemed to me that his counterpart, the Taliban commander rushing in to retake Tirin Kot, might, in a way difficult for us to grasp, feel similarly—that he, too, might regard himself as responding to his country’s needs, or whatever warped perceptions of these needs he held.
When I mentioned this to Amerine in the hotel bar, he set his whiskey down and stared hard at the table. Then he said, “You know, I wish I could meet him. Sit down and talk to him. Or at least find out somehow what he was thinking.”
* * *
In 2011, I visited the guesthouse of a tribal elder living in Kandahar city. Men sat in the shade of the porch out front sipping their tea and fanning themselves, looking on wordlessly as I approached. They were wrapped in pattus, the woolen shawls customary in those parts, and their beards glistened with sweat. It was past noon. The street outside was still and desolate and the people inside were readying themselves to sleep the sleep of a Kandahar summer’s day.
Mullah Manan rose nervously to greet me, his pattu concealing everything but his eyes and forehead. He spoke quietly and with great precision, as if under examination. When he removed his shawl, it revealed a gaunt frame, high cheekbones, and shy eyes. Back in 2001, he said, he had helped lead the Taliban’s push to retake Tirin Kot. He was, in other words, Jason Amerine’s counterpart.
“I knew Karzai was up there with some fighters,” he said. Refusing a chair—sitting in them wasn’t his habit—he instead curled up on the floor in the corner, his eyes on his lap as he spoke. “We had all the intelligence. So my job was to capture the town and get rid of him.”
As Jason Amerine and Karzai pulled into Tirin Kot, Mullah Manan’s soldiers, nearly a thousand of them, had climbed onto dozens upon dozens of flatbed trucks and armored personnel carriers and HiLux pickups, some fitted with antiaircraft guns, and headed north from their Kandahar base. They drove along dirt roads, kicking up plumes of dust that could be seen for miles. By early evening, they had reached the red foothills of Uruzgan’s southern border.
The mountain shadows were running long over the land and Manan found his thoughts turning to mealtime after the day’s Ramadan fast. They stopped at a tiny roadside village with a lone restaurant, and the crowd of soldiers soon overwhelmed its supplies and began dipping into their own provisions for the coming days. Manan knew that they’d probably have to spend a few nights in Tirin Kot, so he radioed back to his base in Kandahar to request additional meal rations. An eight-truck convoy carrying food and blankets was promptly dispatched.
After breaking their fast, the soldiers stretched out on the gravel road, leaning against their truck tires, drowsy with food. On the horizon, the dark forms of Uruzgan’s mountains stood waiting. As a native son, Manan understood the province well. He’d grown up an illiterate farmer, and joined the Taliban after witnessing the criminality of the mujahedeen warlords. Now he found himself in charge of hundreds of lives, but that wasn’t troubling in the least, for the Tirin Kot he knew was an unimpressive little town with unimpressive defenses: an old, rusted antitank weapon from the Soviet days and a few rocket-propelled grenade launchers. His side had everything you could have asked for: mines, mortars, and, most important of all, many loyal men.
Manan and his three fellow commanders decided to rest the troops here and hit the road again at first light. Settling in next to a tire, he listened as his men chatted away under the stars. A few were already asleep, stretched out on the backs of their trucks. Somewhere in Tirin Kot, he thought, Hamid Karzai and his insurgents were probably finishing their own meal, getting ready to turn in for the night. They’ll be fast asleep, Manan realized. If his men moved now, they could strike before Karzai even knew what hit him. He mentioned the idea to the other commanders, but they were united in opposition. Karzai’s group could just as easily be handled at daybreak, they said, especially since intelligence reports indicated an enemy numbering no more than twenty poorly equipped fighters. To Manan, it seemed that the element of surprise should never be squandered, but he kept these thoughts to himself. He had never been one to invite confrontation. Instead, he’d always tried to be all things to all people, the consummate diplomat. It was how God had made him, and it had gotten him this far without a problem. He curled up next to his tire, and the night fell silent.
The sky paled and the muezzin sang and Manan awoke to say his prayers. The others clambered onto their trucks and started the engines. He checked his walkie-talkie and his rifle, a trusty semiautomatic in use since the Russian days, and rolled out to near the middle of the convoy. As they picked up speed, Manan noted that the eight-truck convoy bringing supplies had never shown up. There must have been confusion at headquarters, an occurrence far too frequent for his taste.
The trucks carried the men through the empty reddish desert. Up ahead lay the Tirin Kot pass, a narrow defile cut into the coppery mountains that formed Uruzgan’s natural southern wall. The town lay twelve miles from the pass, the mountains extending in a semicircle around it like half of a giant earthen bowl.
As the first touches of orange streaked the eastern sky, Manan’s radio came to life. “I can see the governor’s house,” said his friend Rahim from the lead vehicle. Rahim had made it through the pass and was inside the bowl, a good mile ahead of him. They would reach the town in no time.
As the pass appeared, Manan prepared to steer through. It was then that he noticed the sound of planes, not too far away.
* * *
It was near four a.m. when Hamid Karzai showed up at Amerine’s command center with the small band of guerrillas he had managed to cobble together, many of them friends and relatives of Jan Muhammad. Amerine loaded the recruits and his own team onto pickups and headed for the Tirin Kot pass.
The vehicles drove across the rolling earth through a web of hills that stretched for miles. The desert eventually gave way to a two-hundred-foot-high ridgeline, and the trucks pulled to a stop. It was a perfect vantage point overlooking the pass, two miles off. From here, the Afghan guerrillas could fire rocket-propelled grenades and Amerine’s men could call in air strikes.
The Afghans were placed in fighting positions, and the Green Berets set to work establishing communications with air support. Not long after, the team spotted dust clouds near the pass. Amerine glassed the area with his binoculars and saw something coming straight toward them. It was moving fast, and it was not a car or a truck—it looked like an armored personnel carrier. He issued an order and Sergeant Yoshimoto radioed to the F-18s waiting above. Moments later the air pulsed with a massive boom, but the vehicle appeared untouched. A second strike sent a shock wave across the basin. When the smoke cleared, all he could see was a burning lump of metal.
Amerine turned to his guerrillas—but they were scrambling back to their vehicles. After the first bomb missed, they decided that they’d seen enough. “Hey, what the fuck is going on?” a soldier shouted. “Where are they going?” The first trucks pulled away. Amerine and his team would be stranded, left to the Taliban. For a moment, he contemplated shooting the drivers. But what would Karzai think? Or the townsfolk? He’d have to go with them, even if that meant abandoning the position. He and the other Green Berets jumped onto the last vehicles as they were about to speed off.
The developing situation had now caught the attention of command centers in Pakistan and back home. A dozen or so Green Berets were facing the largest Taliban assault of the entire war, and every available air asset across the theater was directed to Uruzgan.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, Mullah Manan eased his vehicle through the pass. When he emerged, he gasped—Rahim’s armored personnel carrier was a heap of burning metal and billowing smoke. He looked skyward for planes. Nothing. For a moment he considered stopping to look for bodies, but the basin was too exposed. He pressed ahead, toward a shallow ridgeline.
Back in Tirin Kot, the Americans unloaded the guerrillas and drove two jeeps back themselves to a small hillock just outside of town. Amerine surveyed the area. If the Taliban made it past here, he knew he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to authorize air strikes—not with all those people, all those houses. If Taliban trucks breached this point, the town would be theirs.
Mullah Manan forced himself to concentrate on the road. He told himself that Rahim was resourceful, that he would have made it out somehow. He’d go back for him after securing Tirin Kot. His vehicle was now moving so fast that every bump sent a jolt of pain up his spine. This blitzkrieg-style attack, which he’d learned against the Northern Alliance, almost always caught the enemy off guard. He estimated he was about six miles from town.
On the hill, Amerine received word from pilots that the Taliban trucks had split into three columns. “Put it all on the center column for now,” he said.
Manan was focused on keeping a tight distance from the truck in front of him when a massive blast slammed the column to his right, spewing dust everywhere. It felt like an earthquake. The Americans are here, he thought, searching the sky.
On the hill, the Green Berets were busy coordinating strikes. When Amerine looked up, he saw Tirin Kot residents—men, women, and children—emerging from their homes, coming up to the hill to watch them work. News of the awe-inspiring strikes was spreading, and cheers erupted with every blast. Many of the onlookers were Jan Muhammad’s tribespeople.
By now, vehicles were exploding into flames all around Manan. Yet scanning the ridgelines, he couldn’t see a soul anywhere. Where were the Americans? What kind of impossibly advanced machines were they using? This wasn’t a battle, not when you couldn’t even see your enemies. No, it was some sort of wizardry, majestic and cowardly all at once. He pressed his sandaled foot to the pedal and barreled ahead. He was now four miles from town.
Amerine had a problem—there were just too many trucks. The sky was stacked with at least thirty aircraft, but there was no end to the Taliban vehicles pouring out of the pass. Short on payload, pilots began strafing runs, which he knew would expose them to antiaircraft fire. But with the convoy largely intact, there seemed to be no choice.
That was the first time Mullah Manan actually spotted one of the planes. It swooped in, firing rapidly at the column to the east, and he saw windshields fracture and heard a tire somewhere pop. Already the column was breaking up. Trucks struggled to turn around or lay jackknifed across the road. But Manan was not panicking. It looked like there were just one or two planes in the fight, and they were targeting the other columns. His drove on untouched. They must not be able to see us, he thought. He was now only three miles from town.
“Work on the western column, and then the eastern one,” Amerine ordered. Within moments, a jet dove toward Manan. He heard machine-gun fire and looked up to see the plane’s belly flash past. The first vehicle hit was a food truck, which crashed into a second truck, scattering loaves of flatbread everywhere. Manan swerved, only to see another jet speeding toward him. He veered off the road just as it flew past, machine-gunning a truck behind him. Grabbing his walkie-talkie, he screamed: “Turn around!”
Amerine received news of the arrival of a fresh wave of jets carrying 500-pound bombs, which they were dropping up and down the column.
Manan looked up. The sky filled with an almost deafening roar. He started praying, promising God that if he made it out of this he’d quit fighting forever. Driving back toward the pass, he ran into a stream of oncoming trucks. Vehicles were stacking up in both directions, a traffic jam right there amid the hills. Without hesitating, Manan slammed on the brakes, tossed aside his weapon, leapt out, and ran, heading east toward the sunrise. He didn’t look back.
On the hill, Amerine caught sight of a truck that had somehow made it all the way to Tirin Kot. Suddenly, machine-gun fire erupted somewhere nearby. For a dark moment he thought the Taliban had penetrated the town. But then he saw that it was the townsfolk firing at the truck, sending the driver scrambling away.
Everywhere, explosions echoed through the basin. Manan’s fighters were abandoning their vehicles and fleeing on foot. The townsfolk jumped into trucks to give chase. Those they caught, they executed. The battle was over, and soon the Taliban would be as well.
* * *
News of the victory at Tirin Kot spread fast, spurring Taliban officials throughout the south to defect. But it could easily have been otherwise. When I described Mullah Manan’s account of the battle to Jason Amerine, he leaned back thoughtfully. Had Manan convinced his comrades to drive on through the night, Amerine said, his team would not have been in position in time. “We would have lost. We wouldn’t have held Tirin Kot because there was no way I could have bombed the town.”
For two days the Green Berets waited for a counterattack, but nothing came. Still, Amerine knew the war wouldn’t be over until Kandahar city was theirs, and he prepared to march south with Karzai’s growing guerrilla army. Before leaving, however, he wanted to fully explore the area. There was one valley in particular, about ten miles due east, yet to be visited. When he raised the possibility with Karzai, though, it was dismissed. The guerrillas shouldn’t venture there, Karzai said, because “they don’t like us and we don’t like them.”
In that very valley, Mullah Manan was sitting in a stranger’s home, shell-shocked and nursing his wounded ambitions. He had hiked for hours through a maze of hills in order to seek refuge among his clan, members of the Ghilzai tribal confederation. They had long been marginalized in an Uruzgan dominated by the Popalzais and r
elated tribes. The Taliban had upset this hierarchy—the sole reason a poor Ghilzai farmer like Manan could ever have risen to command hundreds. In steering Amerine away, Karzai understood what his American friends did not yet grasp: not only individuals but entire tribal communities were winners and losers in the invasion. Time would reveal this in a most painful way.
More than anything, Manan wanted to hear from his comrades in the convoy, or from the Kandahar leadership, or from anyone at all with news. But for three days he heard nothing. He needed direction, a sense of how the others were coping, an idea of what would come next. He would have to risk a trip to his home valley.
Walking up the dusty bazaar road of his hometown, he headed toward the office of the town mayor, a friend of his. Just then, a shopkeeper stepped out and shouted, “Where’s your weapon now?” Someone else jeered, “You call yourself a man? Go home to your wife!” Five years of Taliban authority were crumbling before his eyes. A week earlier, these shopkeepers would have hugged him and prayed for his safety. It was hard to believe.
At government headquarters he learned that the mayor had fled, along with his assistants, the gardener, the tea boy, and the night watchman. Manan headed home. Embracing his sisters and parents, he recounted his harrowing escape. Then he went to the backyard and hoisted himself onto the mud wall overlooking their tiny wheat field. There was his brother, hunched over in sweat, as always. He’d turned down the fighter’s life for a chance to run the farm. At that moment, as his brother turned the soil with his bare hands, Manan saw the honor of simple work, the type that belongs to you alone.
That month, thousands of Taliban confronted the same reality. Their movement had failed a great test of endurance and legitimacy. Now the mandate of authority was passing to the Americans and their Afghan allies.
* * *
On November 30, almost two weeks after the battle of Tirin Kot, Jason Amerine’s Green Berets escorted Hamid Karzai and his CIA handlers to Kandahar with a caravan of Afghan militiamen and tribal elders. Along the way they passed through the battle-scarred hills of the failed Taliban assault, the roadside dotted here and there with circles of rocks, hasty graves erected wherever fighters had fallen. On reaching Uruzgan’s southernmost mountains, the edge of the bowl, they stopped at the same ramshackle village that had hosted Manan’s forces a few weeks earlier.