Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Hagenbeck heard nothing back from Mikolashek. His frustration gave way to resignation. On January 25 he boarded a plane and flew to Kuwait, there to brief Mikolashek on another plan his staff had drawn up: the one for their imminent return to Fort Drum.

  3.

  WITHIN forty-eight hours of his return to K2 after briefing Mikolashek on his plan to take his headquarters back to the States, Hagenbeck was finally read in on some of the compartmentalized intelligence hitherto denied him. The man sharing the intel was Colonel John Mulholland, a bear of a man who commanded 5th Special Forces Group. Mulholland had every right to be pleased with the course of his war so far. Under his command a task force of just 316 Special Forces soldiers had entered Afghanistan, organized, trained, and, in some cases, equipped the Northern Alliance and the anti-Taliban Pushtun militias, toppled the Taliban government in Kabul and routed its fielded forces. The entire campaign, from the first A-team flying into Afghanistan on October 19 to the collapse of the Taliban’s home base in Kandahar on December 6, had lasted only forty-nine days. Notwithstanding the critical contributions made by the CIA, air power, and other special operations forces, the defeat of the Taliban was Special Forces’ finest hour.

  Special Forces have been part of the Army since 1952. For much of that time they have been treated like a bastard child. The “big Army” never really felt comfortable with the independence bred and trained into SF soldiers. Unlike the conventional Army, which often maneuvered in 600-soldier battalions, Special Forces’ cutting edge was provided by twelve-man operational detachments alpha, more commonly known as ODAs or A-teams. By 2001 Special Forces focused on “unconventional warfare”—teaching insurgents how to wage war against enemies of the United States. Afghanistan seemed to validate their approach. But that didn’t stop CENTCOM from ensnaring Special Forces in a confusing and often conflicting chain of command that was to affect with nearly disastrous results the rest of the war in Afghanistan.

  The commander of all of CENTCOM’s “white” (i.e., those whose existence is not classified) special operations forces was a former head of SEAL Team 6, the Navy’s rough equivalent of the Army’s Delta Force. That officer, Rear Admiral Albert Calland, split the special ops command in Afghanistan. In the north, where the Northern Alliance’s presence offered great opportunities for unconventional warfare, he created Task Force Dagger, with Mulholland’s 5th Group at its core. To special ops planners, the south offered more potential for a force designed to conduct special reconnaissance and direct action; in other words, a force that specialized first in finding the enemy, then killing him. The force Calland established to do that—Joint Special Operations Task Force (South)—was led by another SEAL, Commodore Robert Harward, and comprised largely special ops units from allied countries, rounded out by some SEALs and Special Forces. It was called Task Force K-Bar.

  Many, especially those in the Army, worried about Navy operators being thrust into extended land operations. But in the north the plan worked better than anyone had dared hope.

  WITH Mikolashek’s support, Task Force Dagger put unconventional warfare (UW) doctrine to work on a massive scale in Afghanistan, allying with the warlords who would become American surrogates or, in the language of UW, “G-chiefs” (the G stands for guerrilla). According to Lieutenant Colonel Mark Rosengard, Dagger’s operations officer, the key to understanding and implementing that doctrine was to reduce it to its bare essentials. For a UW operation to work, a potential G-chief must be able to answer “yes” to three simple questions, he said.

  “The first one is ‘Do we have a common goal today, recognizing tomorrow may be different?’ The second question is ‘Do you have a secure backyard?’” Rosengard said. Without a sanctuary in which Special Forces could meet with and organize indigenous troops, “we’ll only run away from the enemy all the time and never get anywhere.”

  The third question is even more basic: “Are you willing to kill somebody?”

  “With those three things, I can do business,” Rosengard said. “It’s no more complicated than that. Bragg [Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where Special Forces doctrine is written and taught] will make that a mile long and teach people a course for eight weeks.”

  In the Northern Alliance, Task Force Dagger found an organization whose leaders could answer with a resounding “yes” to each of the three questions. Despite the assassination of its charismatic leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, only two days before the September 11 attacks, the alliance remained a force in being, with its own “secure backyard” in northeastern Afghanistan. Once the A-teams got their feet on the ground and put their heads together with their chosen G-chiefs, the combination of American know-how and air power with Northern Alliance muscle proved unstoppable when opposed by the Taliban’s ragtag army.

  The Taliban’s collapse heralded an extraordinary success for Task Force Dagger, but it also posed new and difficult challenges. The Northern Alliance had proven worthy allies in the fight to topple the Taliban. But once that victory had been achieved, the alliance’s leaders were more interested in consolidating power for themselves in Kabul, or in fighting among themselves, than they were in crushing the Al Qaida forces that, along with the remnants of the Taliban army, had fled to the mountains that lined the border with Pakistan. This was to be expected. The Northern Alliance was dominated and led by fighters from the two largest ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks. The Taliban, on the other hand, was a movement that emerged from the Pushtun tribes concentrated along both sides of the border with Pakistan. The Pushtuns had traditionally controlled Afghanistan’s central government, and what the Northern Alliance leaders were really interested in was ejecting their hated Pushtun rivals from power, and then enjoying the fruits of victory. They had little incentive to risk their lives chasing Al Qaida’s highly motivated foreign fighters through the mountains.

  At this point American interests diverged from those of the Northern Alliance. U.S. commanders had little interest in rounding up the Taliban’s foot soldiers, most of whom had returned to their farms and villages or fled to Pakistan. But the Americans had every intention of killing or capturing the hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Al Qaida fighters now on the run in eastern Afghanistan, as well as Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and his immediate subordinates. Task Force Dagger was given permission to extend its unconventional warfare campaign into the Pushtun lands of southern and eastern Afghanistan. However, having allied themselves with the Northern Alliance, dominated by the Pushtuns’ historical enemies, the Americans had—perhaps unavoidably—set themselves a difficult task when it came to winning Pushtuns over to their cause. To make matters worse for the Americans, Al Qaida had also been a stronger presence in the eastern provinces than elsewhere in the country, buying friends and influence with cash.

  The TF Dagger leaders realized allies would not be as easy to find in eastern Afghanistan as they had been in the north. Working out of bases in Pakistan, Dagger teams cobbled together a few Pushtun tribal militias and tagged them the “Eastern Alliance,” as a counterweight to the Northern Alliance. For a time this approach seemed to be working. It was Dagger, with help from the CIA and other special ops units, which brought Pushtun leader Hamid Karzai into Afghanistan from obscurity and exile in Pakistan, then fought with him until the Taliban were vanquished and he could assume power as the United States’ handpicked head of state in Kabul. Other A-teams found Pushtun chiefs willing—for a price—to help them pursue Al Qaida in the mountains of northeast Afghanistan. But the Americans’ luck ran out at a place called Tora Bora.

  4.

  NESTLED in the White Mountains on the north edge of a finger of Pakistan that jutted fifty miles into eastern Afghanistan, Tora Bora was one of several complexes along that part of the border that had served as bases for the mujahideen during their war against the Soviets and had since been taken over by the Taliban or Al Qaida. The bases were in the Pushtun heartland, just across the border from Pakistan. This meant they coul
d be easily resupplied by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which in the past had supplied both men and materiel to the mujahideen and the Taliban. Most of these bases shared the same features: natural and man-made caves, bunkers, antiaircraft defenses, logistics depots, and convenient escape routes back into Pakistan.

  In late November intelligence reports indicated that a significant Al Qaida force was coalescing at Tora Bora. There were strong suggestions that bin Laden was also there, although firm intelligence on the movements of bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders was hard to come by. Bin Laden had lived among the Pushtuns for all but six of the last nineteen years. Many families in the region had benefited from his generosity. Like bin Laden, the Pushtun tribesmen were fiercely Islamic, but the Pushtuns also lived by a strict honor code that set great store by the sheltering of guests from their enemies. Few were willing to cooperate with the Americans. Fewer still could be fully trusted. Even with a $5 million reward on his head, bin Laden was safer among the Pushtuns than he was almost anywhere else on earth.

  Without good intelligence, the Americans faced a daunting challenge in assaulting Al Qaida’s mountain fastness in Tora Bora. They went with the modus operandi that had worked for them up to now: unconventional warfare. Dagger’s success around Kandahar with Karzai and his fellow Pushtun leader, Gul Agha Sherzai, had given the task force’s leaders confidence that they could take the momentum they had gained with the Northern Alliance and transfer it to the Pushtun heartland. They found a few local militia leaders they thought they could work with in the Tora Bora area and, with CIA officers handing out wads of greenbacks, set about using them to hunt bin Laden down.

  But the truth was it didn’t matter much whether or not the Dagger leaders or the generals at CFLCC headquarters in Kuwait thought unconventional warfare alone would be enough to destroy the Al Qaida forces at Tora Bora. They had no other option. From the very start of the war, CENTCOM had been extraordinarily reluctant to introduce conventional forces into Afghanistan. This approach reflected what Franks was being told by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “The message was strong from the national level down: ‘We are not going to repeat the mistakes of the Soviets. We are not going to go in with large conventional forces,’” recalled Major General Warren Edwards, who was Mikolashek’s deputy commanding general for operations at CFLCC. “This was so embedded in our decision-making process, in our psyche.”

  “We don’t want to make the same mistakes as the Russians, we don’t want to look like an invading force” became a mantra, an article of faith for U.S. officials from senior figures in the Bush administration to field grade officers in Afghanistan. This represented a very simplistic view of the Soviets’ defeat in Afghanistan, which owed as much to their attempt to impose an alien, morally bankrupt political system on the Afghan population using scorched-earth tactics as it did to the raw number of troops they put into the country. It also ignored the possibility of a middle ground somewhere between the 120,000 troops that the Soviets had in Afghanistan at the height of their war in the 1980s and the few hundred special operators that the United States had in Afghanistan. Even had the United States put two light divisions—say the 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain divisions—into Afghanistan, the numbers would not have exceeded 30,000, only a quarter of what the Soviets deployed.

  Inside the Pentagon the three figures at the head of the Army—Secretary of the Army Tom White, Chief of Staff General Eric “Ric” Shinseki, and Vice Chief of Staff General Jack Keane—argued for a larger role for their service. Afghanistan was a large, landlocked country, after all. It had no air force to speak of, and no navy. But when Shinseki, who represented the Army when the Joint Chiefs of Staff met to discuss strategy, pushed for a greater deployment of regular Army units to Afghanistan, he was repeatedly rebuffed by the defense secretary and the loyal coterie of political appointees who surrounded him in the Pentagon. “Ric was always for more conventional force than the guys down the hallway, and Rumsfeld in particular,” White said. It didn’t help the Army leaders’ cause that Shinseki’s relations with Rumsfeld had been strained since the early days of the defense secretary’s tenure. Rumsfeld arrived at the Pentagon in January 2001 determined to restructure the military so that it could more efficiently and effectively meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. In an ironic twist he called this process “transformation,” hijacking a term Shinseki had been using since October 1999 to describe his plans to modernize the Army. Rumsfeld spoke of transforming the entire military, but he had the Army foremost in his sights. The Army’s senior generals, he believed, were too wedded to their Cold War-era heavy armored and mechanized divisions and lacked the imagination necessary to break with the ways of the past in order to create the more flexible formations and doctrine Rumsfeld believed were the keys to success on future battlefields. In the months prior to September 11, the media had been full of stories suggesting that Rumsfeld was looking to do away with two of the Army’s ten active duty divisions and use the savings to fund the development of precision munitions, which he and his advisers viewed as the route to success in future conflicts. Although Rumsfeld’s rhetoric about transformation in many ways echoed Shinseki’s, the personality clash between the brash, arrogant defense secretary and the low-key chief of staff did much to create an atmosphere of mutual distrust between the office of the secretary of defense and the Army leadership. In this light, it is hardly surprising that Rumsfeld resisted the Army leaders’ suggestions to deploy more conventional forces to Afghanistan. As the combination of Special Forces and airpower helped sweep the Taliban from power, it appeared the Afghanistan campaign was validating Rumsfeld’s vision of twenty-first-century warfare.

  The Pentagon’s—and, by extension, CENTCOM’s—obsession with minimizing the presence of U.S. conventional troops in Afghanistan translated into an arbitrary cap on the number of U.S. personnel that Franks would allow on Afghan soil at any one time.

  THUS the attack on Al Qaida’s positions at Tora Bora that began November 30 followed the same pattern as previous operations: an assault by Afghan fighters, advised by Dagger A-teams, Delta Force operators, and CIA operatives, and supported by a massive aerial bombardment. For the first time the formula failed. The CIA and Dagger had recruited a local Pushtun militia led by a warlord named Hazrat Ali for the assault. But Ali and his troops did not share the Northern Alliance’s enmity for the Taliban’s foreign allies and prosecuted their attacks halfheartedly. Even had they been more highly motivated, the challenges of assaulting such inaccessible, heavily defended positions would almost certainly have proved beyond the capabilities of the hastily organized force.

  “That was the most formidable terrain that we fought in,” said Rosengard, Dagger’s operations officer. Valleys were no more than snow-filled defiles whose sheer rock walls soared skyward to become jagged peaks up to 15,000 feet high. “Given the availability of that cover and concealment [to the enemy], with the Afghans, and particularly with the Pushtun Afghans—the General Hazrat Ali guys—we did not have the fire and maneuver available to us to get in there and root guys out,” Rosengard said. “We just didn’t have the skill to overcome the combination of that enemy and that terrain.”

  The Dagger leaders assumed a portion of the Al Qaida force would fight to the death, but only to protect their comrades, including bin Laden and other senior leaders, as they tried to escape. This is exactly what happened. The Tora Bora base backed on to the porous Pakistan border, across which lay the Pushtun tribal areas of the Northwest Frontier Province, whose inhabitants were sympathetic to the Taliban and largely beyond the control of the central government in Islamabad. With no U.S. conventional forces to block their escape, hundreds of Al Qaida fighters slipped into Pakistan.

  It seems incredible in retrospect, but this turn of events had not been foreseen at CENTCOM or CFLCC. “There was some knowledge that this might be the last great stand, that bin Laden might be there, the senior leadership might be there,” said Ed
wards, Mikolashek’s deputy. “But the mindset was, we’re gonna push forward, we’re gonna strike ’em with air, we’re gonna kill ’em all up here in the valley. Not, they’re gonna flee outta there.” A few days into the fighting the Americans intercepted a radio communication out of Tora Bora from bin Laden himself. But even then, with the prospect of their highest-value target escaping with the core of his remaining force, U.S. commanders remained oblivious to the strategic disaster unfolding. “When Tora Bora started to bog down, I’m not sure anybody understood how many were escaping,” Edwards said.

  The American generals might not have realized how many foes were escaping, but after several days of inconclusive fighting around Tora Bora, they became frustrated with the operation’s slow pace. “The whole issue between CENTCOM and CFLCC and Dagger during Tora Bora was keeping up the momentum,” Edwards said. The Afghan allies would make an attempt at an attack, then go home and drink tea. “It wasn’t moving fast enough for the CinC [commander-in-chief, i.e., Franks].”

  American surveillance planes spotted scores of intense heat sources—interpreted as campfires—in the snowy heights. There were no settlements at that altitude. The perception at CFLCC was that these fires were keeping enemy fighters warm as they made their way to Pakistan. The generals in Kuwait recommended bombing the positions as soon as possible. But Franks and his staff did not see it like that. “They might be shepherds” was Central Command’s attitude, according to two officers who sat in on video-teleconferences in which the matter was discussed. At CFLCC that theory didn’t wash. The idea that scores of shepherds were tending their flocks in drifting snow at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter was implausible. But the higher headquarters prevailed and refused to target the hot spots because no one could prove that they were enemy campfires. Whoever set the fires—Al Qaida fighters or a midwinter gathering of shepherds—survived to make a safe passage over the border.