by Sean Naylor
The shura troops came back with two locals who said no Al Qaida fighters were in their village. They invited the Americans for tea. Thomas and the others were not convinced. All their senses told them they were in a perilous situation. With the sun setting they decided to head back to Gardez before dark. As they drove back to the Zermat road, they couldn’t help but notice that the Gardez shura troops who had earlier claimed total ignorance of the Shahikot knew the route well enough to lead the convoy out in blacked-out conditions. Back at the safe house two of Zia’s senior lieutenants told Thomas that while in the Shahikot they had seen “Chechens” setting up DShK (pronounced “dishka”) 12.7mm heavy machine guns and other weapons on the high ground overlooking the route the Americans would have to take into Babulkhel. The “Chechens” shouted down to Zia’s fighters to “do their Muslim duty” by leading the Americans into what was clearly a trap. Zia’s men had no intention of betraying their American allies but were reluctant to tell Thomas of the episode while still in the valley. They thought that if the shura troops heard they might turn on the Americans.
Yet again Zia’s fighters had proven their worth. It wasn’t long before the Americans eased Kabir’s men out of the picture and placed Zia in overall charge of the little Afghan army they were assembling in Gardez.
9.
BY January 20 reports from Gardez, combined with Sweeney’s analysis, had persuaded Mulholland to make the Shahikot Dagger’s top priority. While Sweeney sat in the SCIF tracing ratlines south and east of Gardez, other planners worked to piece together other parts of the puzzle in Dagger’s Joint Operations Center (JOC).
Dagger’s JOC, like TF 11’s, consisted of a series of interconnected, white-walled, temperature-controlled nylon tents that hummed with nonstop staff activity interspersed with the scratchy insistence of radio chatter. The plethora of laptops made it resemble a high-tech stenographer’s pool. Racks of communications gear lined the walls, and the tables were strewn with maps and notebooks, as well as the coffee machines ubiquitous to all military operations centers. In a tent corner sat a couple of boxes filled with snacks from MREs—Meals, Ready to Eat, the U.S. military’s calorie-filled ration packs—that hungry staffers grazed on day and night.
Two of Rosengard’s key planners were SF warrant officers who had served on teams that had just returned to K2 from north of Gardez. One warrant was analyzing the Shahikot area to determine where Al Qaida might have training or logistics bases and how enemy fighters might travel between them. The other leaned over a planning table in a different tent, using his knowledge of key personalities in that part of Paktia to draw up a “people network” not only of likely Taliban or Al Qaida leaders or supporters, but also those figures who might become U.S. allies.
By now Mulholland, the Dagger commander, had decided the intelligence justified a major operation aimed at the Shahikot. Planning proceeded, but was still very compartmentalized. Much of the nuts-and-bolts work was confined to the tent Rosengard’s planning cell shared with CIA officers attached to Dagger. In addition to Mulholland, Air Force Colonel Frank Kisner (Mulholland’s deputy who also commanded the AC-130 gunships and MC-130s at K2), Rosengard, Sweeney, and the two warrants, only a few staffers with a “need to know” were aware something big was in the works.
AS Dagger’s planners and analysts pored over intel reports, maps, and satellite photos, they became increasingly familiar with the Shahikot, which had previously been to them just a vague area south of Gardez.
There were in fact two Shahikot valleys—an Upper Shahikot Valley and a Lower Shahikot Valley. The two valleys ran parallel on a line south southwest to north northeast, separated by a mountainous ridgeline over 9,000 feet high. The Upper Shahikot Valley, which lay to the east, was aptly named. It had a higher elevation, and the valley floor appeared on maps as a thin ribbon of land no more than a couple of hundred meters wide, hemmed in by craggy mountain peaks. No one appeared to live there. But the Lower Shahikot Valley—soon known as the Shahikot—was a different proposition. Depending on where you measured, the valley was about five miles (eight kilometers) long by two-and-a-half miles (four kilometers) wide. An arrowhead-shaped ridgeline jutted into the valley’s southern end, creating southwestern and southeastern entrances. This ridgeline became known as “the Finger.” The valley was bordered on the east by the ridgeline dividing it from the Upper Shahikot. At its southern end this ridgeline peaked at a mountain called Takur Ghar, which at 10,469 feet dominated the valley. An equally imposing terrain feature marked the valley’s western edge: a humpback ridgeline almost 9,000 feet high, over four miles long and almost a mile wide. This ridge was called Tergul Ghar (Ghar means “mountain” in Pushto), but its distinctive shape caused American planners to dub it “The Whale,” after a similar rocky mass at the Army’s National Training Center in California’s Mojave Desert.
Unlike its inhospitable eastern neighbor, the Lower Shahikot’s floor was reasonably suited to human habitation. It was flat enough to support subsistence farming, and several creeks ran through it. As a result, there were four villages in the valley, each with no more than a couple of hundred inhabitants. The farthest south was Marzak, located between Takur Ghar and the Finger. The tiny hamlet of Zerki Kale was just to the north of the Finger’s tip, about 1,000 meters southwest of Babulkhel. Serkhankhel, the largest village, sat squarely in the middle of the valley. The Shahikot’s main entrance lay to the southwest, between the southern end of the Whale and the western side of the Finger. Beyond lay Zermat, about nine miles to the west northwest, and Gardez, eighteen miles to the north. But there were other exits from the Shahikot, for those who wished to seek them: heading south, past Marzak, a determined traveler could climb through saddles and passes, or head east through the steep-sided gorge along the southern base of Takur Ghar. There were also several high passes through the eastern ridge into the Upper Shahikot, as well as an obvious route to the northwest around the Whale’s northern end. The most logical avenues of ingress and egress were those to the west around the Whale, but it was those that pointed south and east for which anyone headed to Pakistan in a hurry would likely opt.
After studying the intelligence, Rosengard’s planning cell concluded that the Shahikot held three types of people: Afghan civilians who had no stomach for a fight and would try to escape west out of the valley as soon as the shooting started; enemy leaders (no one knew how senior, but everyone at K2 and Bagram was hoping a genuine HVT was hiding in the Shahikot) who would also try to slip away, either by hiding among noncombatants or by heading toward Pakistan; and last, hard-core fighters, who might have no option but to stick around and cover their leaders’ escape before also trying to make their getaway. No firm estimate on the number of enemy fighters existed, but overhead imagery showed considerable traffic along a route running due east out of Serkhankhel through a pass in the eastern ridge. This trail—no more than a goat path—was assumed to be how the most senior enemy figures in the valley would choose to exit the Shahikot in case of attack. Rosengard decided the key to the operation lay in forcing the enemy to try to escape along that route. He called this “convincing the enemy to do what he already wants to do.”
Despite the evidence from Tora Bora that relying on Afghan allies was a high-risk strategy in the Pushtun provinces, Rosengard initially explored the possibility of an operation in the Shahikot geared entirely around friendly Afghan fighters—in the blizzard of acronyms that characterized the war in Afghanistan, these were known as Afghan military forces, or AMF—with the usual complement of Special Forces advisers. To Rosengard and other Dagger leaders, there were two overriding reasons why the AMF still represented the force of choice. First, reports from Gardez suggested that any Al Qaida forces in the Shahikot were intermingled with up to 1,000 Afghan civilians. These included the village residents as well as people brought in from nearby towns to work as the guerrillas’ “indentured servants.” When attacking the Shahikot, Dagger officers thought, it would be essential to have troops who
could quickly distinguish between local civilians on the one hand and the Arabs, Uzbeks, and other foreigners the Americans wanted to kill on the other. Rosengard et al. didn’t trust any Americans—not even their own Special Forces—to be able to make that distinction. The alternative, in the Dagger officers’ minds, was to risk a slaughter of civilians, with a negative strategic impact that would outweigh any benefits gained. Rosengard worried aloud about sending a U.S. conventional force into the Shahikot, seizing the objective, and then civilian survivors of the assault telling CNN: “These Americans came in and killed my sister and my brother and all these Afghans.”
The second reason the Dagger leaders thought it vital to use AMF for the attack was a desire to give the Afghans a feeling of “ownership” over the victory the Americans presumed would ensue. This harkened back to the U.S. desire to not appear as an occupying or invading force. “In the end we want the Afghans to feel ownership of having liberated their country, and having participated as a partner in [eradicating] the sanctuary” that Al Qaida had created for themselves, Rosengard said. Asked whether, in a country so fragmented along ethnic lines, the average Afghan grasped that concept, Rosengard thought for a moment before replying that Zia, at least, understood it.
10.
AT his Kuwait headquarters Mikolashek’s strategic thinking paralleled that of Mulholland and Rosengard. The general had been following intel reports since late December about Al Qaida regrouping in the Shahikot. Every day he would walk the 300 meters between the warehouse that was home to his headquarters and the CFLCC intelligence center, which was housed in a brick building inside another warehouse. There he would spend an hour or more picking the brains of analysts who were poring over raw intelligence from Afghanistan. A new human intelligence report would surface every couple of days indicating enemy activity in and around the valley. Marzak was the first village to crop up, followed a few days later by Serkhankhel. Mikolashek’s interest was piqued. This is bigger than a bread box, he thought.
As evidence mounted that Al Qaida forces were coalescing in the Shahikot, the generals running the war in Afghanistan considered their next move. To Mikolashek, eastern Afghanistan was the last part of the country allied forces did not control. Estimates of enemy strength in the Shahikot area varied wildly. For a long time the intel folks’ best guess was that fewer than 100 Al Qaida fighters were in and around the valley. That figure grew steadily, with estimates ranging from a couple of hundred to several thousand. Mikolashek and other U.S. leaders concluded that their next step in the war must be to bring a significant force to bear to crush the enemy in the Shahikot.
Based on intelligence he was receiving, Mikolashek assessed the enemy fighters gathering in the Shahikot to be members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU was a radical Islamist group that had spent the last decade fighting Uzbekistan’s authoritarian government from bases in neighboring Tajikistan. By September 11, the IMU had become the central Asian franchise of Al Qaida. Its fighters had gathered in strength in Afghanistan to defend bin Laden in his fight against the Americans. The IMU fighters in the Shahikot had been driven out of the Kunduz area in northern Afghanistan, and then had escaped again from Tora Bora, Mikolashek figured. Reluctant to enter Pakistan because their different ethnicity would make them stick out there, the Uzbeks were probably biding their time in the Shahikot before either attempting a return to Tajikistan, or launching a fresh assault on U.S. forces and the provisional government in Kabul, Mikolashek thought. He was determined to prevent them taking either course of action.
HAVING decided to act against Al Qaida in the Shahikot, senior U.S. commanders then had to decide when and how to attack, and with what forces. Despite the Tora Bora debacle, Franks and Mikolashek opted to stick with the formula that had brought them success against the Taliban: unconventional warfare plus airpower. “We followed our guiding principles,” Mikolashek said. “This [would] be an unconventional operation, and the main effort [would] be AMF forces.” The fact that intelligence indicated that the enemy in the Shahikot were not the Taliban’s farmers-cum-fighters, but hardened Al Qaida and IMU guerrillas, did nothing to change the generals’ minds.
If it was to be an unconventional operation, Mikolashek had to choose one of the two joint special ops task forces under his control—Dagger (Mulholland’s unconventional warfare task force) or K-Bar (Harward’s direct action and special reconnaissance task force)—to pull the attack together. It was not a difficult decision. Mulholland’s Special Forces teams had demonstrated time and again an ability to mold Afghan militias into effective combat units. The acknowledged masters of unconventional warfare in Afghanistan, they were already working on the challenge presented by the Shahikot. The disparate special ops units in K-Bar had not developed the same ties with Afghan forces that Dagger had. As special reconnaissance and direct action specialists, that was not their job. To Mikolashek, there was only one option: let Mulholland take this one and run with it.
Mulholland was already running with it, but he was also running into problems in the Pushtun heartland as he tried to replicate his successes with the Northern Alliance. Despite its name, the “Eastern Alliance” organized by Dagger teams in other Pushtun provinces was not a coherent organization, just a collection of unconnected militias, none of which hailed from the Gardez-Shahikot area. There was no “Eastern Alliance” available for the Shahikot mission. Dagger had been active in Paktia only since December, but even before it became clear the Shahikot would demand his attention, Mulholland had wanted a force in the province capable of conducting operations. There was no local anti-Taliban force in being, and recruiting and training one would take time. With higher commanders impatient for action, Mulholland decided to use the one force he had available: Texas 14’s Afghan fighters under Zia Lodin.
In Gardez, Glenn Thomas and his A-team was working hard to transform Zia’s troops into an effective combat force, but by early February it was clear they had a long way to go before they would be ready to take on Al Qaida. That wasn’t good news for Mikolashek. He wanted to attack the Shahikot as soon as possible and waited anxiously for Texas 14 to complete their preparations with Zia. “Trying to find, recruit, train, equip, and supply these guys took a lot longer than we would have wanted it to,” Mikolashek said. “If we would have had by early February a force in being, we probably would have gone in there [to the Shahikot] about that time.” But there was a “force in being” available to Mikolashek. By mid-January the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade had deployed to Kandahar to replace the Marines. Although the brigade had only one of its three infantry battalions in Kandahar, it had another guarding the airfield in Jacobabad, Pakistan, while 10th Mountain’s 1-87 Infantry was at K2. Thus U.S. commanders had three battalions of highly trained light infantry available to them in theater, had they wanted to use them instead of Zia’s forces as the main effort in the attack. But CENTCOM’s obsession with minimizing the role of U.S. conventional troops meant this option was never seriously considered.
However, CENTCOM, CFLCC, and Dagger had learned one important lesson from their embarrassment at Tora Bora: the need to block any escape route to Pakistan. The terrain around the Shahikot was more conducive than at Tora Bora to establishing blocking positions along the ratlines that ran toward Pakistan. The Americans were determined not to let their enemies escape again. “What we didn’t want…was the effect of not having a backstop,” Mikolashek said. “One of the things that we learned from Tora Bora was the need to have blocking positions.”
But who would man such positions? The answer seems obvious in hindsight: U.S. infantry. But to the generals, that wasn’t clear at the time. If the CIA and Mulholland’s A-teams could have recruited enough militiamen, Mikolashek probably would have “defaulted” to the Afghans-plus-Special Forces formula yet again. But even though Dagger was recruiting a company-sized Pushtun force in the Gardez area to bolster Zia’s tiny militia, there still weren’t enough AMF to conduct the classic hammer-and
-anvil operation the Dagger staff envisioned for the Shahikot. Meanwhile, officers up and down the chain of command continued to analyze the intelligence picture as it was pieced together like a jigsaw. With estimates of the enemy force mounting and no other troops to establish the desired blocking positions, Mulholland decided the operation in the Shahikot presented a good opportunity to use U.S. conventional forces in large-scale combat for the first time in Afghanistan. Mikolashek’s staff had come to the same conclusion independently. CENTCOM finally came on board in late January. At one of the innumerable video-teleconferences through which Franks and Mikolashek ran the war, CENTCOM issued orders to focus intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets on, and expedite operations in, the Khowst-Gardez area with a view to eliminating pockets of Al Qaida resistance. CENTCOM further directed that a combination of Afghan, SF, and conventional forces be used to conduct these operations. “That was the first time that CENTCOM acknowledged that we could use and should use conventional forces for offensive operations,” Edwards said.