All In

by Paula Broadwell

  That night, Flynn set up a dinner with all of the wounded at a local restaurant in town. An older woman with her husband told Flynn, with tears in her eyes, that the first round of drinks was on her. They were quite a spectacle: a long table filled with legless young men in wheelchairs. Flynn finished the night with a short speech in their honor. He told all of them that he was committed to them for life.

  CHAPTER 10

  TRANSITION

  Petraeus sat in the small common room off his bedroom reading e-mails later than usual on Sunday, May 1, the night after his return from Washington. He had stayed up in anticipation of what he knew was about to happen—and had told no one about. He left his quarters in ISAF headquarters’ “Florence Village” compound in workout shorts and a T-shirt fifteen minutes before midnight and walked in the darkness to the Joint Special Operations Command’s Situational Awareness Room that supported ISAF headquarters. He was the only person on the compound who knew the full details of the impending operation: Navy SEALs were about to raid a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency was reasonably confident they would find Osama bin Laden.

  Though Petraeus had gotten wind of the developments of the hunt for bin Laden when he’d been in Washington in March, he hadn’t taken it overly seriously. That changed when he was in Washington on April 28, after meetings at the White House to discuss his next job. The Central Command commander, Marine general James Mattis, had called Petraeus with an alert, and shortly after, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called Petraeus to provide additional details. Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, commander of the JSOC, briefed him in Kabul two days later, upon his return, with the concept, timeline and planning for various contingencies, some of which could have significant consequences for ISAF and U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

  The stakes were enormous. Petraeus, however, didn’t get excited about many operations; he strove to keep a steady demeanor. He had geared up for big military operations in the past, only to have them canceled due to weather delays or some other last-minute glitch. To be sure, some operations—like the killing of Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, by the 101st Airborne and Special Operations Forces, in the summer of 2003—had been executed roughly as scheduled. But the Abbottabad raid had already been postponed twenty-four hours due to weather. Petraeus flashed back to his airborne days, sitting in the aircraft, hesitating to get too psyched up before conditions for a drop were confirmed at the drop zone. He’d learned to keep his emotions at bay.

  As he walked through the night, he thought of the importance of the operation, and he calculated the second- and third-order effects of the raid. He had flown over Abbottabad the week prior with the Pakistani army’s chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, and a year earlier he had spoken at the military academy a mile or so from the compound. He could picture the city. He also thought of the 1979 Iran Hostage Rescue Mission that had been aborted in the Iranian desert before ever getting to Tehran, much less to the U.S. Embassy there. Petraeus understood, in great detail, why the nation’s nascent special operations community had failed in 1979, particularly in the intelligence and aviation arenas, just as he now knew how the JSOC had flourished in the most lethal sense to become a key force in Afghanistan—and in the broader war on global extremism. But would the Special Operations Forces be good enough on this night? If they failed, as they had in Iran more than thirty years ago, what would it mean for U.S.-Pakistani relations? And if they succeeded in capturing or killing the al-Qaeda leader, the casus belli that had brought Petraeus and hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, what would that mean for the war?

  Petraeus knocked on the unmarked secure, vaulted door to JSOC’s Situational Awareness Room and surprised the night shift. He’d dropped by many times before, but never unexpectedly so late at night. He asked everyone to leave but the senior officer in the room, a colonel who was the liaison officer between Joint Special Operations Command and Petraeus. After the room had been cleared, Petraeus asked the colonel, “Do you know what’s going on?” The colonel told him he was monitoring nine operations ongoing in Afghanistan that night and that there were a few others “on deck.” Petraeus sat down at a computer terminal, logged in to a Special Ops “chat room,” and waited for midnight Kabul time, when the helicopters were to arrive at the bin Laden compound. It was only when the helicopters carrying Navy SEALs were on the ground at the objective in Pakistan that Petraeus told the colonel that an operation was under way to target bin Laden.

  The Situational Awareness Room was filled with large computer screens for streaming video of ongoing operations and flashing SIGACTS—significant actions—alerts. But they were focused on the normal operations inside Afghanistan. To maintain situational awareness on the bin Laden raid, Petraeus used a special online “chat room” that connected him to individuals in the operations center in eastern Afghanistan that was overseeing the mission. There was no radio or video feed available for him, but Petraeus, making occasional phone calls and using the secure online chat, was able to track the mission, since he’d be the one to commit some of ISAF’s U.S. assets if any of various contingencies arose. Some of the Special Operations Forces under his control were on alert, even though the mission was not “operationally controlled” by the military.

  The Title 50 authority for this operation, which allows the U.S. government to conduct covert action or “deniable” missions, dictated that the operational chain of command went from the president to the CIA director to the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command to the Special Operations Forces element conducting the raid, meaning that Petraeus and the Pentagon were effectively out of the chain of command. For the raid, members of Navy SEAL Team 6 and other JSOC elements had been placed under the agency. Still, Petraeus was read into the raid, because various contingencies—none of them good—could have required soldiers under his operational control to serve as a rapid-reaction force. It was amazing for him to closely follow the operation as commandos stormed the highly secure compound in Abbottabad and opened fire on four occupants until they found “Geronimo,” bin Laden’s code name, on the third floor of the building in which bin Laden had apparently spent years. After forty minutes inside, the message finally came: “Geronimo EKIA.” Bin Laden had been killed by a shot each to his chest and to his head above the left eye.

  Petraeus clenched his fist and reflected on all that had transpired since the hunt for bin Laden had begun. There were no high fives; rather than celebrate, Petraeus and the colonel focused on what came next—the extraction of the body and the exfiltration of the SEAL team—and the possible implications of various contingencies for the forces in Afghanistan. The operation was not unlike those the colonel monitored from his post each night. There were, in fact, now thirteen Special Operations raids under way that night in Afghanistan, executed by the same highly trained troops, based on precise intelligence and employing stealth tactics. Several that night were judged to be “more demanding” in various respects than the operation in Pakistan, but none had even remotely the same strategic significance—though the operations that night resulted in the capture of five important Taliban leaders. With all that activity, the colonel quickly tuned back to monitoring the operations in country, while Petraeus continued to monitor the events in Abbottabad and allowed the other JSOC personnel back into the room.

  The raid team had reported killing “Geronimo,” but JSOC commander Admiral McRaven wanted to confirm bin Laden’s identity further, in part through DNA tests. While bin Laden’s body was flown out of Pakistan to an aircraft carrier, hair and other samples were expedited for verification. After the fastest DNA test run in the history of Bagram Air Base, McRaven and all the other observers in Afghanistan and Washington breathed a sigh of relief. There was a very high probability, McRaven said later that morning, that they’d killed “number one.”

  Petraeus remained in the windowless room in Kabul for
a few hours more, monitoring the continuing operation and tuning in to open-source news in Pakistan to try to gauge what the reactions would be as night turned to day. Given the eight-and-a-half-hour time difference between Washington and Kabul, it was nearing time for the president to deliver the extraordinary news to the American public, planned for approximately ten o’clock on a Sunday night. The president’s announcement, however, was delayed an hour. Petraeus and his team gathered to hear it, delaying—for only the second time in his command—his regularly scheduled morning stand-up briefing and directing all stations within the ISAF Command to turn on their televisions to observe the president’s announcement from Washington.

  “Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against [a] compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan,” Mr. Obama said. “A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

  Following a moment of excitement for those at ISAF headquarters, Petraeus quickly returned to the business at hand. Bin Laden’s death would not immediately change the dynamic on the ground, he suspected. But the global implications could be enormous, affecting U.S.-Pakistani relations, the future of al-Qaeda and, ultimately, the coalition’s will to fight in Afghanistan, now that the iconic terrorist leader who had plotted the 9/11 attacks in camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border was dead. Still, Petraeus remained cautious. He wasn’t sure it was the end of an era, just an important inflection point in America’s longest war; and it wasn’t clear that the effects in Afghanistan would be that significant, in the near term, at least.

  TWO DAYS BEFORE the bin Laden raid, the Defense Department released a document it had produced for Congress, “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan and United States Plan for Sustaining the Afghanistan National Security Forces.” It confirmed Petraeus’s most recent testimony on Capitol Hill. The U.S. troop surge had arrested the Taliban’s momentum and wrested safe havens in Kandahar and Helmand from its control. Governance and economic development, however, were lagging behind these tenuous security gains. “Overall, the progress across Afghanistan remains fragile and reversible, but the momentum generated over the last six months has established the necessary conditions for the commencement of the transition of security responsibilities to Afghan forces in seven areas this summer.” The Afghan Local Police had expanded from eight districts in September to thirty-four in March and were helping put “unprecedented pressure on the insurgency.” The Afghan military was growing in capability as well. According to a Defense Department report, by the spring of 2011, 95 percent of all ISAF military operations were being conducted in partnership with Afghan forces. Afghans, in fact, had provided 60 percent of overall force strength during Operation Hamkari, in Kandahar Province in September 2011. By contrast, the Afghans’ force contribution to Operation Moshtarak, in Helmand Province in March 2010, had been only 30 percent.

  An Afghan public opinion poll showed the Taliban were less popular than ever, with 75 percent of Afghans surveyed saying that it would be bad for the country if the Taliban returned to power. The report also referenced “indicators” that ISAF attacks were “steadily eroding insurgent morale.” And yet the insurgents continued to fight at undiminished levels and continued killing Americans at a steady rate. More Americans had been killed (122) and wounded (1,178) during the first four months of 2011 than during the same period a year earlier. While the report noted that community council elections had actually been held in March in Marjah, in Helmand Province, the scene of heavy fighting by the Marines in March 2010, security incidents had increased in both Helmand and Kandahar. “The Taliban’s momentum has been halted and much of their tactical infrastructure and popular support removed,” the report concluded, “although hard fighting is expected through the spring, summer and fall of 2011.” Progress was tough to judge.

  The Taliban announced the start of their spring campaign the very next day. In a prepared statement, the Taliban said they would target NATO troops as well as contractors, Afghan and foreign, who were assisting them and the Afghan government. The Taliban said they would take special pains to avoid harming Afghan civilians, warning them to stay away from troop convoys and military installations.

  Forecasting that the nexus of the war would eventually shift from the orchards around Kandahar, now cleared, to the forbidding mountains in eastern Afghanistan, which were still teeming with insurgents, Petraeus went to visit Major Jim Gant, “Lawrence of Afghanistan,” in eastern Kunar Province, on the Pakistan border. Petraeus considered Kunar perhaps the most difficult province for which to develop a strategy for moving forward, given the low density of NATO and Afghan forces, the difficult terrain, the porous border with Pakistan’s tribal areas, a myriad of local government challenges and a number of tribes—Malik Noorafzhal’s was the exception—who rejected outsiders. For two years Petraeus had been looking forward to meeting Gant again, ever since he’d recommended Gant’s monograph, One Tribe at a Time, as required reading throughout the U.S. military and helped change Gant’s orders from Iraq to Afghanistan. Gant first met Petraeus in Iraq after he had been awarded the Silver Star. Gant had spent the year since running Village Stability Operations in Mangwal.

  After Petraeus’s helicopter touched down, Gant briefed him on conditions in Mangwal and walked him to Malik Noorafzhal’s home, where the two had lunch and spent several hours deep in conversation. Though some in the Special Forces community thought Gant took too much credit for initiatives and a philosophy that had already been embraced by many key leaders in the community, Petraeus thought Gant’s monograph had laid the basic groundwork for the whole Village Stability Operations program—and, by extension, the Afghan Local Police. Petraeus knew that while Gant might not have been the first to develop the concept, he had been the first and most effective in describing the concept and writing about it. The ALP were establishing the patches of security that would make up the patchwork quilt of a pacified Afghanistan, assuming they could be stitched together as part of a campaign involving both conventional troops and special forces—which would increasingly be Afghan.

  Petraeus was impressed by how Gant had blended soldiers from the Iron Rangers, the 1st Battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division—an infantry unit Petraeus had (over the objections of some other senior officers) assigned to the Special Operations Task Force to augment the nationwide Village Stability Operations effort—into his Special Forces A-Team. This unusual partnership had helped “thicken” the Green Berets, the nickname for Special Forces troopers, so that Special Forces ODA teams like Gant’s could multiply, covering more terrain. It remained to be seen whether the conventional military units could adapt to the Special Forces culture, or merely provide security and support. They wore the “modified” uniforms Gant favored and sported beards, some quite wispy on young men barely old enough to shave.

  Malik Noorafzhal, whom Gant had given the nickname “Sitting Bull,” told Petraeus that he needed jobs for young men in his tribe. He wanted Mangwal to be connected to the electrical grid, and he requested both an expanded local force and an assurance that local forces would be robust enough to keep the Taliban away. Petraeus left impressed by Gant and the malik.

  The Taliban’s first big attack in their spring offensive came in the south, that same day, May 7, as if to remind the general that the gains his troops had made in Kandahar were indeed fragile. Teams of insurgents, including suicide bombers, fanned out across Kandahar and opened fire on a series of government buildings. The fighting shut down the Taliban’s onetime home city. The insurgents never came close to regaining control of the city, though their ability to drive bomb-laden vehicles through the streets suggested that they had had some inside assistance. The Taliban’s new reliance on assassinations—and their infiltration of Afghan police and
military units—illustrated the enemy’s resilience. As Petraeus and his forces planned for transition, so did the Taliban.

  Vowell and the No Slack battalion returned to Fort Campbell in May. Vowell was convinced they had left their replacements in a much better position than they had been in a year earlier, thanks to all of the Taliban they had killed and cleared and their work with the district governments in Kunar. With Operation Strong Eagle III, he believed they had preempted the Taliban’s spring offensive.

  Vowell was firmly of the opinion that the war would be won at the district level. It was the same point his friend Doug Ollivant had made to Petraeus a year earlier. The United States had spent enormous amounts of money on the central government, Vowell believed, and had little to show for it beyond Kabul. No one had ever truly governed effectively at the district level. The notion of Afghanistan as a modern state was more of a concept than a reality, Vowell had come to realize.

  He had lost eighteen soldiers and had nearly two hundred injured. The price, he thought, was almost too high. The three key districts they’d fought to secure, Noor Gul, Khas Kunar and Sarkani, continued to be examples of effective and independent local governments. As Vowell had counseled Campbell and Ollivant back in the summer of 2010, they never had to be reinforced to progress on their own. Two Afghan battalions had been added to No Slack’s area of operation over the winter, and by the time the battalion left, the Afghans were taking the lead for daily security in many areas of the valley.

  Upon his return to the United States, Vowell learned that the hardest part of the deployment was knowing how to talk to the wives of the six soldiers killed in Operation Strong Eagle III. They wanted to know why it had been necessary for Vowell to take on this mission a month before rotating home. Why hadn’t he just sat tight? He had no immediate answer, except explanations of military necessity that he knew didn’t translate to young women who had lost their husbands. He remembered something Petraeus had said when he visited the battalion in the aftermath of those six deaths: Do everything humanly possible to reduce the risk of casualties on the battlefield. “I now understand what General Petraeus was getting at: Casualties are inevitable, but the cost is expensive,” Vowell said. “Whereas we move on in the military and our own lives, our families pay that burden forever.”