After Headquarters Company made its way through the first series of houses, soldiers started finding huge caches of ammunition and weapons—82-mm recoilless rifle rounds, AK-47s, thousands of rounds of 7.62-mm ammunition. There were, however, no men to be seen. Families reported that their husbands and fathers “had gone for work in Jalalabad.” Soon, the Americans started to find caches in the tree branches, signs of a hasty retreat by insurgent forces. Vowell’s signals intercepts quickly picked up Taliban walkie-talkie chatter that helped corroborate this. His interpreters repeated the words of Taliban commanders: “‘We weren’t able to get our things out before the Americans arrived.’”
Vowell then joined Captain Reedy and C Company to assess how they were coping with the enemy engagement. The Cougars had not only lost three soldiers shortly after their insertion; several others had been wounded right off the landing zone. Convinced that Reedy’s men were in full control, they lifted off and flew to the location of Vowell’s operations officer and tactical air controller, who were with the battalion’s tactical command post on a mountain ridge half a mile west of his scout platoon, which had assumed a position on a ridgeline separating the two villages. Vowell wanted to link up with his operations and intelligence officers. Where was the enemy? Why hadn’t the Taliban attacked since the first firefight that greeted C Company?
No sooner had Vowell landed on the ridge than dense clouds engulfed them in haze and took away their ability to see the other elements, as well as their air support from lithe OH-58 Kiowas and lethal AH-64 Apaches, as well as full-motion video from unmanned aerial vehicles. It was then that Vowell and No Slack discovered where the enemy had gone. They were all around the Americans.
Vowell’s position started taking sporadic fire, then well-aimed fire. The scout platoon to his east came under heavy fire. Then Reedy called—they were under intense, concentrated enemy fire. Vowell could hear attacks on all of his positions even as he was pinned down. With a radio on his chest rack, Vowell quickly tried to figure out what to do. With no helicopter air support, only mortars and artillery, Vowell divided up his weapons systems to defend units that were all being severely pressed.
Sergeant First Class Ofren Arrechaga and Staff Sergeant Frank Adamski of Headquarters Company were hit several times in the middle ground between two compounds at Barawala Kalay. Bounding from one compound to the next, they had moved into an intense barrage of accurate fire. Both were severely wounded, shot multiple times and losing blood. Specialist Jameson Lindskog, the newly assigned platoon medic, moved to help Arrechaga, who was trapped in the kill zone. Moments after he started triage, Lindskog was shot in the chest. In excruciating pain, Lindskog kept on treating Arrechaga. Soon other soldiers reached them, just as Lindskog was starting to lose strength and could no longer help Arrechaga. They dragged Arrechaga and Lindskog out of immediate danger. Lindskog continued to explain how to treat Arrechaga. He slowly drifted out of consciousness, saying that he was “sorry” that he didn’t have the strength to help. He died moments later.
Once the weather cleared, Vowell’s helicopter lifted off from the ridgeline between the villages, but Vowell stayed behind because the position allowed him to talk to all three engaged companies assaulting the villages. Vowell had lost a total of six soldiers by then. Part of him wanted to go back and join Headquarters Company at Barawala Kalay, as they would have a tough time clearing the village. If he moved, though, he would lose the ability to communicate with C Company, given the mountain range separating them and their objectives.
As the battle raged throughout the day, Vowell asked his brigade commander, Colonel Andrew Poppas, to commit an Afghan commando unit from Forward Operating Base Fenty that night. The Afghans, 120 strong, had been trained by U.S. Special Forces and were highly effective for twenty-four to forty-eight hours of intense combat operations. They were lifted in during darkness, and their arrival and reinforcement of the Cougars proved decisive, enabling C Company to consolidate and continue the clearance of Sarowbay.
The assault of the two villages ultimately involved eight hundred coalition and Afghan soldiers. The added combat power was needed to overcome an intense enemy defense in which insurgents occupied the middle ground between the village and the top ridgelines above the village. The insurgents attacked from this middle ground for the next four days, until they were exhausted. When night fell, Vowell turned a number of sophisticated sensors on the enemy positions, using electro-optical, radar and infrared intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to direct Apaches to the Taliban hiding places. Once Vowell found them with weapons, it was easy for the pilots to engage, killing more and more of the insurgents. With each day, the enemy attacks grew weaker. In short order, the Taliban could no longer precisely target Vowell’s forces. Every time they tried, they would expose themselves to a myriad of withering fires from both the air and the ground. Vowell called in a total of ninety-six precision-guided bombs on enemy positions.
Headquarters Company wound up clearing Barawala Kalay by itself, with just A Company to the north providing protection. C Company, along with the Afghan commandos, cleared all of Sarowbay, finding arms cache after arms cache, including one with more than two hundred hand grenades. The scout platoon found the long-sought Radio Shariat transmission center, which the insurgents had used to broadcast Taliban propaganda to Kunar Province and into Pakistan as well. Captain Billig and his platoons found weapons, six dead fighters, communications equipment, wads of Pakistani rupees and numerous cell phones on a ridgeline south of Sarowbay. They also found six machine guns, including one that was hidden in the wall of a home, and collected biometric data that would help determine which leaders were among the dead. When the smoke cleared, Vowell’s forces had confirmed killing 132 enemy fighters between the northern Marawara Valley and Ganjgal Valley. No Slack lost six soldiers, and the Afghans fighting alongside them lost three, all in direct firefights.
This was what the war in the eastern mountains was like as U.S. commanders tracked insurgent movements with drone reconnaissance and human intelligence and then responded, either with large-scale air-assault operations, smaller Special Operations Forces raids or drones firing Hellfire missiles at specific high-value targets. These tactics would enable them to keep the insurgents off-balance. But the days when the United States would think of establishing dozens of combat outposts in the mountains and valleys of eastern Afghanistan were over. With U.S. forces drawing down, there would never be enough soldiers deployed to man such efforts; nor, as American and Afghan leaders had come to recognize, were such outposts the answer in some of the more remote areas.
AS THE BATTLE raged in the mountains of Kunar Province, 220 miles to the southwest, in the lush vineyards of the Arghandab River Valley, Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn, the commander of the 1st Battalion of the 320th Artillery Regiment, the “Top Guns,” sat amid the dignitaries at the opening of a new mosque at Tarok Kolache, the empty, IED-infested village he had flattened with saturation bombing in October. The villagers who had been driven out by the Taliban were back, now that Tarok Kolache was free of all the homemade bombs that had made it uninhabitable. There’d been no gunfire there for five months. The day began with Flynn meeting reporters at the helipad and walking with them to the village, describing battles from the previous fall as he proceeded.
The new mosque was part of a major reconstruction project that included rebuilding every home and replanting every field of pomegranate trees destroyed in the bombing. The project also included the building of a combat outpost in the village to keep the Taliban from intimidating the villagers for working with Flynn’s soldiers and civilian engineers and builders. The public affairs office at Regional Command South at first did not want any Americans present, but Flynn would have none of that. The locals had worked very closely with Flynn and his men for several months, and they expected him and some of his key leaders to be there.
Flynn thought the threat o
f an attack on the mosque opening was low, and he didn’t want security officers to flood the zone as they had for Secretary Gates’s recent visit. This time, Flynn kept them behind the tree line so they were not visible from the road. When he picked up the reporters, he went “slick,” leaving his Kevlar body armor and helmet behind. Though out of sight, security was still substantial.
With the fighting season again upon Afghanistan, the Taliban had shown themselves to be a tough and adaptable enemy. The Top Guns in the Arghandab River Valley and the No Slack battalion in the mountains of Kunar made it clear that massing force against the Americans was a losing proposition. So the Taliban had turned to infiltration attacks on ISAF and Afghan forces, in addition to resuming its campaign of suicide attacks and assassinations.
On his way to see the governor of Kandahar Province several days later, Petraeus flew over Tarok Kolache so he could get a peek at the new mosque and progress on the houses. He had tracked developments there closely and had been heartened by the progress. However, the Taliban had pulled off a brazen attack that day in Kandahar, sending insurgents wearing suicide vests to attack a police and military training center, followed by an ambulance that the Afghans assumed was there to pick up casualties from the first attack. The ambulance was actually loaded with explosives that detonated inside the compound. The twin attack killed six Afghans and wounded twelve others. It was Kandahar’s third eruption of violence in a week.
In his appearance with the governor in Kandahar, Petraeus addressed the recent burning of a Koran by a minister at a church in Florida, calling it an “inhumane action.” It had, in fact, been a catalyst for violence in Kandahar and several other cities in Afghanistan and left many Afghans badly shaken. Later, he stopped at Forward Operating Base Wilson to see Flynn and his boss, Colonel Arthur Kandarian, commander of the 101st’s Strike Brigade, which had done much of the heavy fighting around Kandahar. Petraeus acknowledged that Kandarian’s brigade had weathered a tough fight over the past year. Flynn arrived after Petraeus and joined him as Petraeus chatted with Kandarian and several other officers.
The Strike Brigade was in the final weeks of its deployment and understandably felt a sense of considerable accomplishment, albeit tempered by recollection of the human price paid along the way. Petraeus was there to pay tribute to the Strike Brigade’s troopers and to speak to their leaders. They should, he told them, be very proud of what their troopers had accomplished. Several days later, Lieutenant General David M. Rodriguez, head of ISAF’s Joint Command, informed Flynn that he would be awarded the Silver Star for courage and valor under fire in rallying his forces during the Battle of Bakersfield. Flynn and his unit had been down a tough road since their first operation with the paratroopers of the 82nd, establishing themselves as among the finest counterinsurgents Petraeus had ever seen. He told Flynn as much in private.
LESS THAN a week later, Petraeus lifted off from the soccer field at ISAF headquarters in his Black Hawk to visit Vowell’s No Slack battalion in the Kunar River Valley, several days after Vowell’s troops had cleared Barawala Kalay and Sarowbay in Operation Strong Eagle III. He had last met with Vowell and his soldiers in August, following their opening victories in the mountains, Operations Strong Eagle I and II. Accompanied by Major General John Campbell and Colonel Andrew Poppas, commander of the 101st’s Bastogne Brigade, Petraeus had come to pin on medals, present awards, receive an intelligence briefing and review lessons learned from the battlefield, all tasks he never tired of doing.
Following the removal of all U.S. forces from the northern part of the Pech Valley in February, Operation Strong Eagle III had been conceived to create “time and space” for the realignment of those forces elsewhere in the region. At the time of the withdrawal, Petraeus had said that “the math didn’t add up,” meaning there simply weren’t enough troops there to sustain U.S.-led population-centric counterinsurgency operations, as had been envisioned for the area years prior. Nor were they necessarily the answer in that area. In fact, he had come to agree with Lieutenant General David Rodriguez that the small outposts were not achieving what had been intended when they’d been emplaced years earlier. Consequently, they made the decision to consolidate forces elsewhere. Building forty bases over five years in an effort to extend the reach of the Kabul government in the rugged mountains of the east had cost more than dozens of Americans their lives. But the people who lived in this forbidding region had no interest in aligning with the Karzai regime, or with the Taliban, for that matter. “The failure in the Pech does not mean that counterinsurgency is a failed concept,” Petraeus disciple Ollivant said in Washington. “But it shows that it certainly will fail—or be exponentially more difficult—when it is attempted against isolated peoples who have consciously opted out of the state system. Yes, these non-state spaces do leave room for terrorists to find sanctuary. But it’s awfully hard to attack Manhattan from the Pech Valley.”
Petraeus sat between Campbell and Poppas for the intelligence briefing, conducted by the No Slack battalion’s intelligence officer. The Taliban, he said, called Kunar the “Gateway to Afghanistan.” It was largely an unrestricted transit area from Pakistan, a rugged route for fighters and munitions. It also contained remote training areas for insurgents, some of whom had relocated their families there. The enemy typically moved at night. They sometimes even wore women’s clothing for cover. This was the same area where Linda Norgrove, a British woman working for a USAID contractor to build roads and bridges and improve agriculture in the area, had been kidnapped in September by insurgents wearing Afghan army uniforms. She had been killed in early October by a grenade thrown by a member of a Navy SEAL team attempting to rescue her. Generally speaking, Afghans in this area were not particularly forthcoming. The intelligence officer noted that “significant activities”—typically attacks—had increased in the area from 77 in 2009 to 234 in 2011. The increase, he told Petraeus, was due, in part, to the past two mild winters. There had been no snow in the area until February, so insurgents had freedom of movement throughout much of the normally bitter winters. Beyond that, the insurgents had sought to expand their footholds in this forbidding area with few coalition and Afghan forces.
There were different groups of insurgents in the area, Petraeus noted, and competition among them that needed to be understood. He knew the Pakistan side of the border from his days at Central Command, and his focus since July had been on the southern and southwestern regions of Afghanistan. In recent months he had been focusing more on achieving “granular knowledge” of the east, and he pressed the commander about the way forward. “You know the enemy will return in months if you don’t ultimately find a way to hold,” Petraeus said, offering that Afghan security solutions had to be the answer.
The discussion then turned to the recent operation. Vowell and his operations officer explained that they had established three communications centers to maintain adequate command and control of the battle. With temperatures dipping into the twenties at night, they had conducted fourteen complex air assaults with only four helicopters available: two UH-60 Black Hawks and two large CH-47 Chinooks. In the treacherous mountain terrain, there were few cleared areas where helicopters could safely land. All of the attack and maneuver operations had to be planned around available points of insertion. “We used historic sites, but we also had to clear several new areas,” he explained. “Sir, it was the most demanding operation we’ve ever done.”
Petraeus, who had commanded numerous huge air-assault operations in Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne, asked Vowell question after question about the insertions, and how they had worked the synchronization of air support and communications. Then he shifted the focus from tactical to strategic. “Your task right now is to ‘disrupt,’” he told Vowell. “Once you’ve cleared this area, your task will have to become to ‘deny’ the enemy his safe havens. They will use Kunar if it is wide-open. You must figure out how to hold by employing various local security solution
s. That’s the only way to deny the Taliban additional safe havens.” He also stressed the importance of their partnership with Afghans. “Ultimately, as you know, you’ll have to shift your mission to work more with the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army. Use every tool you can use so that we can eventually hand off to ANSF. . . . The main effort in the larger campaign will eventually shift here to the east, but, perhaps sooner than that, we will have to begin the drawdown. We won’t get more U.S. forces.”
The Afghans had already shown that they were capable of working with the Pakistanis on some parts of the border at the tactical and operational levels. Given the porous state of the border, the location of which was unclear in many areas, Pakistanis and Afghans in tribes straddling the border had grown up knowing one another. Campbell explained how he and other ISAF officials had worked directly with the “PakMil” on a plan for this area, an initiative Petraeus applauded, as a comprehensive border plan was one of the greatest challenges for ISAF commanders and their Afghan partners.
Beyond attempting to disrupt the ability of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda to reestablish themselves in the mountain passes and the border, Vowell’s battalion was also involved with the creation of Afghan Local Police detachments, as well as a small “allegiance” program for individuals who wanted to lay down arms and reintegrate.
“The formula doesn’t matter,” said Petraeus, explaining that the exact size and nature of the programs employed for convincing the insurgents to stop fighting was less important than the outcome, as long as the programs met certain redlines. “If the concept includes locals running acceptable governance mechanisms, and they are not engaged in violence or causing problems, that equals success,” assured Petraeus. “We have to see how Pech plays out; it is a test case.” Petraeus thought the challenge in Kunar was in determining the right mix of U.S. and Afghan forces, given the inevitable limitations on forces.
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