Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  At least two Dagger A-teams were sent across the border to help Pakistani troops whom the Americans wanted to block Al Qaida’s path. This was a vain hope. The Pakistani military was reluctant to stray into the Pushtun tribal areas that straddled the border, and the effort foundered. The Pakistanis intercepted about 300 Al Qaida troops, but roughly 1,000 escaped. Among those who got away, almost certainly, was Osama bin Laden. Franks would later say that he remained unconvinced that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress in June 2002 that Franks had believed that conducting the Tora Bora operation with U.S. conventional forces would have required “a massive, highly visible buildup” of troops that would have tipped off the Al Qaida forces, allowing them to flee. But among American officials familiar with the battle, Franks was in the minority. The prevailing opinion was that, despite the scores of enemy fighters killed by American bombs, Tora Bora represented a failure, a defeat for the Americans, and CENTCOM was to blame for not using conventional forces.

  For the first time the unconventional warfare approach had come up short. The point was lost on neither TF Dagger nor the higher-ups in CFLCC and CENTCOM. “Certainly [Tora Bora] has got to be quantified as a failure for not having drug out of there who everybody believed was there,” Rosengard said. “[That failure] drove home to much greater clarity the fact that we did indeed lack the fire and maneuver to do all things for all people in Afghanistan.” But to CFLCC’s planners, Tora Bora also underlined the consequences of CENTCOM’s bias against committing the conventional forces required to destroy the remaining Al Qaida elements in Afghanistan. “There was a constant—in our mind—disconnect between mission and assets allowed to be available to do the mission,” Edwards said. That disconnect would reassert itself ten weeks later in the Shahikot.

  5.

  IN the cold, muddy tent city at K2, the Tora Bora failure prompted long conversations among the senior Dagger officers as the unconventional warfare maestros reconsidered their approach to what remained of the war in Afghanistan. As the officers talked long into the dark Uzbek nights, one thick Boston accent rose loudly above the whine of C-17 engines and the roar of MC-130 Combat Talon turboprops from the nearby runways. The voice belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Mark Rosengard.

  Until October, Rosengard had been deputy commander of 10th Special Forces Group, which is headquartered at Fort Carson, Colorado, but specializes in operations in Europe. Then he received a call from Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg telling him to pack his bags—he was headed to K2 to serve as Dagger’s new operations officer. (A Special Forces group’s operations officer was usually a major, but when transformed into a joint special operations task force, the group was entitled to a lieutenant colonel in that position.) Even if he’d been a bland operator who preferred to stay in the background, Rosengard’s job as the officer in charge of coordinating Dagger’s current missions while planning future operations would have made him one of the most important of the fifty-plus augmentees who arrived at K2 to beef up Mulholland’s staff. But Rosengard wasn’t that type, and the inspiring force of his personality rendered his impact on the task force, and the coming operation, all the greater.

  Possessed of an exuberant self-confidence, the forty-four-year-old Rosengard had been seasoned by years spent operating in Bosnia, Kosovo, and northern Iraq. That experience, combined with his extraordinary energy and drive, meant he commanded instant respect among his subordinates in the “3 shop,” as an Army unit’s plans and operations directorate is known. Rosengard was “a fireball” who motivated his men to work eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, said Captain Tim Fletcher, who, as commander of 5th Group’s Headquarters and Headquarters Company, observed Rosengard at close quarters for several months.

  Rosengard’s ability to work long hours with no apparent diminishment in his judgment or equilibrium astonished his subordinates. Fueled by a constant intake of caffeine and nicotine, Rosengard would literally work until he dropped. “He wouldn’t sleep unless he basically just shut down,” said Fletcher. After being evacuated—against his will—to a U.S. military hospital in Incirlik, Turkey, suffering from chest pains that turned out to be nothing more serious than acid reflux, Rosengard quit his pack-a-day-of-Marlboro-Lights habit on January 1, impressing colleagues with his ability to do so without becoming short-tempered. But that was his only lifestyle concession. He only relaxed when reading letters from his wife and two children. Then he would slip into a comalike sleep. On those occasions his staff would let him doze through small crises or moments of decision, because he needed the rest, even though they knew their failure to rouse him would bring a rocket when he finally awoke.

  Rosengard was a man who found it easy to get along with others, and for whom subordinates would gladly work themselves into the ground. This was an invaluable trait for an officer who arrived as an unknown quantity in the pressurized atmosphere of Dagger’s headquarters. “He’s a phenomenal man that I’d work for again in a heartbeat,” Fletcher said. Rosengard quickly formed a good working relationship with Major Perry Clark, 5th Group’s operations officer who now worked for him. Clark knew the personalities in the headquarters and the operators on the teams. Rosengard brought experience.

  But there was also a flamboyant side to Rosengard, a former college hockey goalie whose black mustache was as thick as his vowels were broad. He gave briefings at high volume, accentuating his remarks by using a red laser aiming device attached to his 9mm Beretta pistol. His over-the-top, all-action style unsettled some soldiers, who had to suppress laughter when confronted with this vociferous, pistol-waving officer. But Rosengard never used his outspokenness to demean. If he was angry with someone, he let them know privately. “If you ever got pulled aside, and talked to nice and quietly, you knew you were in a world of hurt, because that’s when he was serious,” Fletcher said.

  American bombs were still falling on Tora Bora when Rosengard and his staff met December 8 to consider where next to focus Dagger’s energies. There were probably still some Taliban elements in the desert provinces south and west of the city of Kandahar city, but U.S. commanders considered these an insignificant threat. “We knew where we had a problem, where the sanctuary was, where there were people that would support [the enemy] we were going to get,” Rosengard said. That sanctuary was Paktia’s mountainous border with Pakistan. “The place where we had the littlest influence that had the most significance was Paktia province….We knew there was order of battle [there]that we had not yet encountered and had not accounted for in any way,” he said. Dagger’s planners concluded that “tactically, Paktia was the biggest deal left on the plate.”

  But as they were figuring out where they should next take the fight to their enemy, U.S. commanders were also rethinking their “all UW, all the time” approach. The war had changed course. They were now facing a different enemy than they had encountered—and conquered—using unconventional warfare. For the past two months Dagger’s Special Forces operators and CIA operatives had used the Northern Alliance to roll back an enemy that consisted largely of the Taliban’s peasant infantry. But by now the Taliban had been evicted from all major towns. Most Taliban fighters not killed or captured had returned to their farms and villages or crossed into Pakistan. Al Qaida, however, was another matter. Its fighters had no hometowns or villages in Afghanistan to which to return. The option of simply surrendering or switching sides, as many Taliban-affiliated militias had done when it was clear which way the war was headed, did not exist for Al Qaida. They were outsiders, foreigners from Uzbekistan and Chechnya, as well as Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. They could expect no quarter from the Northern Alliance and little from the Americans. Nor could they return to the homes they had left. Most were on the run from the authorities in their native countries, who preferred to export Islamic extremism rather than let it fester at home.

  What’s more, Al Qaida troops’ religious fervor made them highly motivated soldiers. During the war with the Norther
n Alliance, the Taliban’s 55th Brigade—composed entirely of Al Qaida fighters—was one of the Taliban order of battle’s most effective formations. Al Qaida fighters were also, almost by definition, vehemently anti-American. With their most senior leaders still at large, they would not consider themselves defeated. Some had made it into Pakistan from Tora Bora or elsewhere. There they might find refuge in the tribal areas. A few leaders, perhaps, could hide in plain sight in the sprawling metropolises of Rawalpindi, Lahore, or Karachi. But most Al Qaida fighters would remain close to their bases along the border. Many had traveled thousands of miles to learn the skills of jihad in Al Qaida’s Afghan training camps. Now the infidels had come to Afghanistan. The prospects for jihad could not be better. With no way home and the chance for victory or martyrdom before them, they could be expected to fight.

  The disappointing performance of Hazrat Ali’s forces at Tora Bora, where the Americans’ nominal allies accepted bribes to allow Al Qaida safe passage, combined with the knowledge that they now faced a more skilled and determined enemy, forced Dagger’s senior officers to reassess the wisdom of relying on local militias. Unconventional warfare was yielding diminishing returns. Perhaps it was time for a new approach.

  BY mid-December a new place name was appearing in reports being sent back to K2 about Al Qaida activity in eastern Afghanistan: Shahikot. When used by the Special Forces’ indigenous allies, it referred to an area south of Gardez, rather than to any particular valley. The focus on Paktia, where the Shahikot was, sent the Dagger folks searching for copies of two books Mulholland had arranged to have shipped to them before they left 5th Group’s home post of Fort Campbell, Kentucky: The Bear Went Over the Mountain and The Other Side of the Mountain. Translated and edited by Lester Grau, a retired U.S. Army officer who worked at the Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, The Bear Went Over the Mountain was a collection of tactical vignettes from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, written by Soviet officers. The Other Side of the Mountain, written by Grau with Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former mujahed, followed a similar format, only with a different set of vignettes seen this time from the perspective of mujahideen commanders. Both books featured detailed analyses of combat operations in eastern Afghanistan in general and Paktia in particular. When read together, they provided Dagger personnel valuable insight into how their enemies might operate in Paktia, and which tactics would work best against them.

  While most Dagger staff boned up on eastern Afghanistan’s recent military history and brainstormed on what to do next, one officer adopted a more scientific approach. Captain Brian Sweeney was attached to the Dagger staff from the Land Information Warfare Activity, an Army organization that specialized in tracking patterns of enemy activity in order to discern enemy networks and command and control nodes. Beginning in December, on his own initiative, Sweeney patiently correlated the information that Dagger and CIA teams were sending back from eastern Afghanistan with technical information on the location and movement of Al Qaida forces provided by spy planes and satellites. Sitting in Dagger’s secure, compartmented intelligence facility, or SCIF—a long tent, surrounded by razor wire, guarded by 10th Mountain troops and permeated by the smell of burnt coffee—Sweeney worked to paint a picture of Al Qaida’s network of safe houses, transportation nodes and escape routes out of Afghanistan, which he called “ratlines.” He identified three separate ratlines.

  Although working as an information operations specialist, Sweeney, described by a colleague as a tall, dark-haired, “James Bond-looking guy,” was also a Special Forces officer. This was a key attribute. As an SF officer, Sweeney “brought a Special Forces background and mindset to the analysis process that the technicians had not previously thought about,” Rosengard said. Dagger’s intelligence cell was dominated by Air Force personnel who had been brought in to aid 5th Group’s transformation to a joint special ops task force, but even the SF soldiers from 5th Group’s intel shop failed to put the pieces together as well as Sweeney. “It was brilliant,” Rosengard said.

  As the Shahikot assumed a higher profile in Dagger’s planning, the special ops staffers began feeding intelligence tidbits to their Mountain counterparts and K2 neighbors, allowing Wille and Ziemba to draw up their own plans for how to deal with the Al Qaida force said to be assembling south of Gardez. But despite the growing frequency of references to the region in intel reports, Dagger did not make the Shahikot its primary focus until mid-January. When it did, it was partly on the basis of information received from an A-team code-named Texas 14.

  6.

  THE convoy of mud-splattered pickup trucks that wound its way through the muddy, crowded streets of Gardez on January 4, 2002, was manned by a motley crew of Americans and Afghans, and led by an American who looked like an Afghan.

  The Americans were the SF soldiers of Texas 14, the call sign for ODA 594, an A-team from 5th Group’s 3rd Battalion, along with a couple of CIA operatives. The Afghans included the beginnings of a private Pushtun army that Texas 14 and the agency were starting to assemble. And the American who looked like an Afghan was Texas 14’s leader, Captain Glenn Thomas, an officer of Japanese descent whose black beard and longish black hair meant he could pass as a local for as long as he could go without speaking.

  Thomas and his men were tired, but still hungry for action. While other A-teams had distinguished themselves in actions around Kandahar, Kabul, and Mazar-i-Sharif, Texas 14 had spent most of the last two months in Afghanistan but had yet to find itself at the center of a major operation.

  In mid-December the team relocated to Logar province—south of Kabul, but north of Paktia—to work with a couple of small militia factions. Afghanistan’s ethnic boundaries merge in Logar, and few of the forces with which Texas 14 was working were Pushtuns. But on January 2 a group of thirty Pushtun fighters from Logar arrived on the team’s doorstep. Already vetted by the CIA, they were clearly of a higher caliber than the other Afghans Texas 14 was training. The A-team was particularly taken by the anti-Taliban firebrand who led this new group. The man’s name was Zia Lodin, and, unbeknownst to him, Americans he had never met would soon assign him a key role in the biggest battle of their war in Afghanistan.

  A scion of the Lodin tribe, whose patriarch had nominated him to lead the American-paid force, Zia was estimated to be in his thirties or early forties. At least six feet tall, he had dark brown hair, a short dark beard, and puffy cheeks. He did not have a fighter’s background. But to the men of Texas 14 and their bosses at K2, Zia had enormous potential. They immediately entrusted his men with their personal protection. Within a few days of being introduced to Zia, Thomas decided the charismatic Zia met all three rules of UW. Zia’s fierce animosity toward the Taliban and Al Qaida impressed Texas 14, as did his personal courage and other qualities the SF soldiers and CIA operatives associated with strong leadership. But the Dagger men were also drawn to Zia because he seemed to represent an enlightened sort of Afghan strongman, a rare commodity among their G-chiefs. “He was not interested in just doing what other people told him to do,” recalled Rosengard, Dagger’s operations officer. “He was a young man with his own vision, which didn’t include hanging women because they looked at him strangely one day, and it certainly didn’t include not sending his kids to school, and his vision probably didn’t include a society that allowed exportation of terrorism. He was a pretty idealistic young man. He was a young man of moxy.”

  When Mulholland ordered Thomas to push south into Paktia toward Gardez, Texas 14 decided to form their collective of little militia factions (now emboldened by CIA cash) into one warrior band, which they would use as armed reconnaissance during the move to Gardez. By the time Texas 14’s small convoy reached Gardez, their faith in Zia was solid. “Everything that he had said he would do, he did,” Rosengard said. “He was willing to go with us and take us places, and everything he told us turned out to be true.” With the help of the CIA’s open bags of cash, Texas 14 had found their G-chief.

  THE
town into which Texas 14’s little convoy was making its way had a feel of past grandeur gone to seed. A couple of the downtown streets were almost European-style boulevards, bisected by median strips and flanked by buildings whose paint had long since worn off. The town’s veneer of affluence had peeled away, but its population was booming and its barely paved roads were choked with people. In 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Gardez had a population of fewer than 10,000. By 2002 it had swelled tenfold. The increase could be mostly attributed to an influx of people who had fled to Pakistan as refugees during the Soviet war and returned—many with new families—in the 1990s. Like many of those refugees, when Texas 14 rolled into Gardez, their first order of business was to find themselves a home. The technical term for what the SF soldiers and their CIA counterparts were seeking was a “safe house.” But when the CIA found and rented the perfect place on the town’s eastern outskirts, that phrase did not do it justice. Typical of the compounds inhabited by families of means in Afghanistan, it was more of a fortress than a house. Protected on all sides by tapered mud-brick walls about 100 meters long, twenty-five feet high, six feet thick at the bottom, and about four feet thick at the top, the square, Alamo-like compound had an enormous dirt courtyard entered via a steel gate that, when opened, was wide enough to accommodate the Americans’ pickup trucks.

  The Americans moved into the compound. Their Afghan allies camped outside. To eliminate the threat of a drive-by shooting from the main road that ran east to west in front of the compound, Texas 14’s Afghans established check-points over a mile from the safe house in each direction. Normal traffic was blocked and had to take a long detour—a clear indication that, in terms of the local population, at least, the Americans were now operating in uncharted territory.