At the White House, Obama welcomed Petraeus with a firm handshake. They once again sat down one-on-one next to each other in the same two armchairs in which they’d sat in late June 2010, when the president asked Petraeus to go to Afghanistan. Obama observed that the hearings on Afghanistan that week had seemed to go well. According to aides briefed after the meeting, he then raised the issue most on Petraeus’s mind. He noted that he had, for some time, been “intrigued” by the notion of making Petraeus the director of the CIA. He told Petraeus he thought he would be a great director. There was no better place than the CIA, Obama said, for Petraeus to continue to contribute to the missions in which he’d been engaged throughout much of the past decade. Petraeus’s field experience, including that with the intelligence community in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and the greater Central Command theater, and his intellectual acumen seemed to make him a natural fit.
Obama added, however, that he thought that Petraeus should run the agency as a civilian. The CIA wasn’t the military, and Obama was sensitive about the already blurry lines between the two. Having Petraeus in uniform would only further confuse the matter, especially when he traveled to the CENTCOM area and met with national leaders. Petraeus said he understood completely and had already discussed the issue with Secretary Gates and decided that he would retire from the military if offered the job. He told Obama that he thought taking the uniform off would send a powerful message to the CIA workforce. Obama agreed. They then discussed how Obama felt the CIA director should operate. He thought the director should represent the agency’s analysts’ positions on issues, but Obama would welcome Petraeus’s personal views on occasions when they might differ somewhat from those of the analysts. Petraeus agreed, and Obama closed the conversation by saying he needed to discuss Petraeus’s selection with others and he would finalize the decision in the weeks ahead.
Petraeus was in a light mood as he left the White House and jumped into his black Yukon. He opened his laptop and read an e-mail that had the letter “U” as the subject line.
“Good luck. Think U won,” wrote his mentor Keith Nightingale.
Petraeus was elusive in his responses.
“Thx, Keith, pretty good week, in fact. Just leaving one-on-one with CINC,” Petraeus replied.
“Congrats. Good guys win. When is it official?” Nightingale replied.
“Don’t jump to the wrong conclusion, Ranger! Good, though . . . ,” Petraeus replied, elusively.
“If you are happy we will be also. Press on!” wrote Nightingale.
“RLTW,” Petraeus responded—short for “Rangers Lead the Way.”
“Get some sleep. U earned it. The world can wait. Yes. RLTW!” Nightingale responded.
“Indeed, it can, Keith. Great week . . . And exciting prospects . . . ,” Petraeus said.
“What counts is your view of the task and your assessment as to what you can do with it to further meaningful service. All else is superfluous. Carpe diem,” Nightingale said.
“Spot on, Keith. Or, as a tanker would say, ‘Target!’ RLTW—Dave.”
Petraeus drove to the Capitol building for an awards ceremony for a team of Floridians who had gone above and beyond in supporting Central Command troopers—a ceremony originally scheduled for last July that had been delayed eight months—and he then hosted a small dinner, with Holly, at a local restaurant. He was gregarious, but his mind was preoccupied with all that had transpired that week, especially the job prospect. As far as the team around him knew, even his closest aides, they would be heading back to Afghanistan with their future uncertain. The meeting, they thought, had not brought any resolution for them, but it had not closed any doors, either.
Overall, Petraeus and his team were pleased with how the week had gone. Petraeus’s team usually conducted after-action reviews after congressional testimony to brainstorm how he might have answered questions better, what went well, and what “questions for the record” his Commander’s Initiatives Group would have to draft answers for over the next few weeks. This round of testimony was probably the “most uneventful” he’d ever delivered, his aides believed. “They only threw softballs,” said one inner-circle member who had been with Petraeus for every congressional appearance since he assumed command of the surge in Iraq in 2007.
The team flew back to Kabul via London. Petraeus briefed Prime Minister David Cameron, the ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs, and the chief of Defence Staff on the state of the war in Afghanistan and the dynamics in Washington. The team stayed two nights in London and followed their normal routine. They stayed at the Grosvenor House Marriott, across from Hyde Park, with rooms for entourage members, “designated thinkers” on the CIG and all of their classified communication equipment. The Grosvenor House staff knew Petraeus, and he enjoyed the stark contrast to his Conex container housing in Kabul. The team couldn’t wait for a run in Hyde Park—a 4.2-mile loop at sea level in the relatively clean London air. It contrasted starkly with their runs around the eight-hundred-meter loop at ISAF headquarters, where the air was heavy with the acrid smell of burning garbage. The first evening in London, Petraeus attended a dinner hosted by the chief of Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards, ISAF commander in 2006 to 2007, along with Sir Max Hastings, a British journalist and Oxford-educated historian. They quietly discussed the war’s progress and challenges as they sat in a booth at Wiltons restaurant.
The next day was full of meetings with VIPs. In the morning, Petraeus met Queen Elizabeth II and gave her one of his COMISAF brushed-steel coins, given to recognize noteworthy achievement and a prize coveted by soldiers in his command. It was engraved with his signature and had a red four-star flag embossed over a black silhouette of Afghanistan. FOR EXCELLENCE was printed across the top, along with COMMANDER, NATO INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE on one side. On the other, an embossed picture of the ISAF NATO-OTAN patch in black and tan. “And here is another one for your grandson, Harry,” he said as he gave her a second coin. Prince Harry, in his early twenties, had been quietly serving in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as a forward air controller the previous year, guiding jets toward suspected Taliban targets, until he was “outed” by the press a month or so before the end of his tour. Petraeus could relate to the concerns about one’s offspring serving in a war zone. He also expressed his gratitude for the U.K.’s continuing support. “She is one well-informed lady,” he mentioned to his staff on the way out of Buckingham Palace. That afternoon, Petraeus headed to 10 Downing Street to meet with Prime Minister Cameron, who had been well briefed on progress in Afghanistan. The team then went out the back door to meet with the secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, William Hague, to discuss the forthcoming announcement by Karzai of the first phase of the ISAF transition of provinces to Afghan control. They also discussed campaign progress and the challenges of the political process. Petraeus felt these stopovers with a key ally were beneficial for bilateral relations, and they also helped ease the jet lag between continents.
On March 22, shortly after Petraeus’s return to Kabul, Karzai made his long-awaited statement on transition as part of his graduation address at the National Military Academy. In July, as the United States began drawing down its forces, he explained, Afghan troops would assume sole responsibility for securing three relatively secure provinces: Panjsher, in northeast Afghanistan, Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, and Kabul, the capital province. The Afghan troops would also assume responsibility for four province capitals and municipalities: Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north, Herat, in the west, Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand Province, in the south, and Mehtar Lam, capital of Laghman Province, in eastern Afghanistan. Without mentioning the United States by name, Karzai also used the opportunity to criticize his NATO partners for recent civilian deaths and urged them to stop night raids.
A spokesman for the Taliban called Karzai’s transition plan “a symbolic act to deceive the people” that w
ould not “help resolve the main problem, which is the occupation of Afghanistan by foreign forces.” Karzai appeared torn in his feelings about the Taliban. On one hand, he saw them as fellow Pashtuns and Afghans. On the other, he considered them extremists who kill government officials and tried to undermine the Afghan constitution.
The same day that Karzai spoke, Foreign Policy published an article arguing that the Afghans’ ability to assume security control of even limited sectors in Afghanistan was, most likely, a fantasy. Beyond a “staggering attrition rate and a serious gap in quality recruits,” the authors wrote, were the obstacles of illiteracy, drug use and medical problems.
Fernando Lujan disagreed. Lujan was just returning from an unprecedented mission in which he and two other members of the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team had embedded for a week with an Afghan unit in Zabul Province, the first place in Regional Command South that Afghan forces would begin to operate independently. Lujan was still working toward his goal of taking the CAAT concept inside the Afghan military. Kosh Sadat, an impressive Afghan special forces major who was Petraeus’s Afghan military aide, had joined his advisory team. Together, the team’s five members—three Americans and two Afghans—ate, slept, showered and patrolled with the Afghan people. The team grew beards, wore Afghan uniforms and conducted all their briefings in Dari or Pashto. Sadat flew down to Kandahar a few days early so that he could participate in planning and team-building exercises. When they briefed an Afghan corps commander before the embed began, Lujan could tell that the general was moved that an Afghan was working as part of the CAAT team. “Kosh told the soldiers and officers everywhere we went that it is possible to rise up through the ranks and make a career for themselves, even if they didn’t have money to ‘buy’ a position,” Lujan said once he’d returned from the embed. “He basically said that if they worked hard and set their mind to it, they could become leaders of the army. I know it sounds simple, and we as Americans take it for granted, but I’m telling you, there was something special about what we were doing.” At one point, the CAAT team accompanied Afghan troops on an IED-clearing mission. Lujan watched as Afghans, thinking they’d spotted something suspicious in the road, got down on all fours and probed for bombs by hand. “These guys are just fearless sometimes,” he said. “It’s a whole different perspective riding in the trucks with them.”
No sooner had Lujan’s team written the report and filed it on a classified computer portal accessible to the Afghans than Tanzola initiated a security investigation of Lujan and his team members. Their team’s collective offense: including a minor sentence that contained terminology classified U.S. Secret (NOFORN), as opposed to ISAF Secret, which was releasable to Afghans and NATO partners. As committed as the U.S. military was to its NATO partners, the Pentagon did not share its most sensitive classified information with all of them. Instead, it insisted that U.S. personnel follow highly detailed classification rules that spelled out what could be shared with ISAF partners. “At the very most, this is a minor ‘oops’-type incident, but looks like it’s going to cloud the whole Zabul report,” a senior CAAT officer said. Soon investigators were interviewing the team. “Always a great experience,” a few members of the team grumbled. “Now we see why people don’t take initiative.”
Petraeus, meanwhile, was briefed on Lujan’s Zabul embed and said that he was looking for the “right” CAAT leader to replace Tanzola when the time came. He was cheered by the news that his aide Kosh Sadat had been such an inspiring presence among the Afghans. “Kosh is a national asset to Afghanistan,” he told his staff. “Good to see how he was able to contribute.”
Settling back into the rhythms of command after his visit to Washington, Petraeus thought of the coming spring and the warming weather as “teeth in the enemy’s jugular time” in the south, around Kandahar and Helmand, and in the eastern mountains of Kunar, Paktika and Nuristan provinces. He knew the Taliban would mount a spring offensive. He and his staff had spent the winter formulating plans to disrupt their operations and their thrusts into Afghanistan from across the border in Pakistan. He felt ISAF had the momentum, partly because the Afghan forces that Lujan championed were growing and fighting better. He did not want the Taliban to take the momentum back.
CHAPTER 9
HIGH STAKES
Lieutenant Colonel J. B. Vowell knew he had achieved surprise when armed Taliban fighters scrambled away as the rotor blades announced the approach of the Americans in the dead of early morning. Vowell enjoyed the high ground, in a UH-60 Black Hawk command-and-control helicopter equipped with a suite of specialized communications gear. He ordered the pilots of Apache Longbow helicopter gunships, flying with him to ensure that the landing zones were clear, to target the fleeing Taliban with infrared sensors and kill whatever enemy they identified. A dozen insurgents were killed by the attack helicopters before the ground assault had even begun. Vowell could only hope that the element of surprise would keep the Taliban from ever recovering.
Vowell’s 2nd Battalion of the 327th Infantry Regiment, was part of the storied Bastogne Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. The attack Vowell was leading, code-named Strong Eagle III—the regiment’s third major operation in the rugged Kunar Province, in eastern Afghanistan—began at 2:00 A.M. on March 29. Helicopters carrying Vowell’s soldiers were approaching two villages, Barawala Kalay and Sarowbay, each in the forbidding mountains of Kunar Province, half a mile from the Pakistan border. The villages were only three miles apart, but separated by nine-thousand-foot mountain ridgelines. Vowell knew these two villages were strongholds of insurgent forces in Kunar, providing security, supplies, natural resources and a pliable population. They were “pivots of maneuver,” or staging bases, from which Taliban operations could be planned and executed. No foreign soldiers—not the Americans, the Pakistanis or the Soviets—had ever gone this deep into the mountains. Vowell’s spring counteroffensive was designed to deny the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups freedom of movement and maneuver along a corridor, or “ratline,” they had used for years connecting the Kunar River Valley and the Pech Valley from which a sister battalion, the 1st of the 327th, had recently withdrawn after handing off their base to an Afghan army battalion.
Vowell had the benefit of earlier air assaults, and his staff had been able to identify landing zones above the villages. His troops could cordon the villages and control all routes to and from them before clearing operations began. The key was holding the high ground, which would draw insurgent fighters to their positions. This kept the Taliban from massing in a defense of the villages and forced them to attack up the mountain, where the Americans were dug in with machine guns.
After the Apaches gunned down the fleeing Taliban outside the village of Sarowbay, three platoons from C Company, the “Cougars,” commanded by Captain Tye Reedy, began touching down around 2:00 A.M. As the lead fire team began to approach the village, a third of a mile away, insurgents opened up on them from close range. The Apache pilots had missed some of the enemy, and the Taliban had positioned in trees, from which they were now firing down at the advancing Americans. In the brutal, up-close firefight, Private First Class Jeremy P. Faulkner, 23, of Griffin, Georgia, was killed, and Specialist Dustin J. Feldhaus, 20, of Glendale, Arizona, and Staff Sergeant Bryan A. Burgess, 29, of Cleburne, Texas, were grievously wounded. A platoon leader, Lieutenant Jason Pomeroy, and his soldiers exhibited what Vowell considered “extreme heroism” as they took fire through a wood line to recover the wounded. It would take another forty-five minutes before Vowell could get medevac aircraft to rescue Feldhaus and Burgess, due to intense enemy fire. Both soldiers later died at a trauma center at Bagram Air Base. The operation was off to a tough start.
Soldiers from C Company began moving into Sarowbay to clear a series of compounds. No military-aged males were to be seen, only older women and men. Once the soldiers had worked their way through about a third of the village, a house be
hind them exploded. It was wired with a house-borne IED, most likely remote-controlled, a common Taliban tactic. Why it wasn’t detonated with half a dozen Americans inside would remain a mystery.
As C Company assaulted Sarowbay, Vowell’s Headquarters Company, the “Wolverines,” joined by an Afghan unit, touched down at a landing zone high above Barawala Kalay. The two companies were supposed to move simultaneously on the villages, though the Cougars landed much closer to their target.
Finally, A Company, the “Gators,” commanded by Captain Tom Billig and 1st Sergeant Kenneth Bolin, air-assaulted farther north of Barawala Kalay to isolate the village. If Vowell’s hunch was correct, Billig’s forces, which included a company of Afghan National Army soldiers, would be in for a stiff fight just preventing the enemy from coming onto the main battlefield. Billig’s forces would, in fact, kill forty-five insurgents over the next six days during which the enemy attacked from both close range and with distant fire, but Billig had the assistance of a talented joint tactical air controller and a .50-caliber machine gun with plenty of ammunition. Their defense kept the enemy from getting anywhere near Headquarters Company as it cleared Barawala Kalay.
Vowell landed and linked up with Captain Ed Bankston, commander of Headquarters Company, joining his assault on Barawala Kalay. They had to traverse a very steep, rocky piece of terrain, waiting for daylight just to see their steps in front of them. Each soldier wore body armor and a Kevlar helmet, and carried an assault pack with enough batteries, ammunition, explosives, medicine and water to last for three days. The No Slack battalion would resupply each position once a day by helicopter, but the battle plan depended on the force being able to fight for more than three days in order to prevail. The Taliban believed that the Americans couldn’t sustain their high-tech force for more than three days. Vowell was determined to prove them wrong.
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