Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  The meeting strained the Dagger negotiators’ patience. They would tell Gul Haidar the attack was “the day after tomorrow,” and that “tomorrow” was the prep day, and his reaction was, “Okay, I go tomorrow.” The issue of deciding who would be first into the valley also caused problems. Each warlord took the position, “Oh, I don’t want to be in front of him, because if he’s behind me, he’ll shoot me.” All the meeting participants were armed, and none of the Afghans ever let their trigger fingers move too far from their weapons. “This was the Wild, Wild West at its finest,” Rosengard said.

  WHILE the Rakkasans waited for the Afghans, other units belatedly arrived to offer assistance. Canadian troops were brought in, as were more 10th Mountain soldiers, these ones from 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment. But there was no fighting to match the intensity seen on March 2, 3, and 4. U.S. commanders seemed largely content to sit in their positions in the mountains and let fires kill as many enemy fighters as possible.

  Afghan forces finally swept into the Shahikot on March 12, accompanied by the Gardez triumvirate of Blaber, Spider, and Haas. The attack took the form of a pincer, with Gul Haidar’s column of rusting T-55 tanks advancing through the gap north of the Whale. Haas escorted the Northern Alliance commander and was impressed by the one-legged Afghan’s leadership style. Gul Haidar, with his eight-man personal security detail spread out ahead of him, insisted on doing his own “leader’s recon” of the route along which his tanks were about to drive. Hobbling on his peg leg, the Afghan commander proved equal to the challenge of the terrain, climbing onto the high ground to get a good view of the battlefield. Then, inexplicably, he sat down and started “bawling his eyes out,” Haas recalled. “Why are you crying, sir?” the bemused SF officer asked him. “Because General Massoud should be with me at this historic time,” Gul Haidar replied, turning to embrace Haas in a bear hug as he continued sobbing. “Hey, sir, we’ve got to get moving on,” Haas said.

  When they entered the pass, Gul Haidar gave the Americans an object lesson in leadership by example. After finding a handful of antitank mines half-buried in his tanks’ path, Gul Haidar called for rope and grappling hooks, with which his men traveled for just this purpose. As the Americans watched in horror, the Afghan commander and one of his aides hurled the grappling hooks at the mines, expertly catching their sides with the hooks. “No, no, no! You’re a general, you’re going to get yourself killed!” Haas yelled. Gul Haidar gave the American officer an almost condescending glance. “I know how to do this,” he said calmly before walking back behind a rock, the rope still in his hand, and yanking the first mine out of the road. Then he walked over to the mine, knelt down, unscrewed the bottom and pulled the fuse out, all as Haas continued to plead with him to stop. To cap his remarkable performance, Gul Haidar picked up the mine, walked over, and handed it to the American officer. “Here, no problem,” he said. The Afghan repeated the process four or five more times. “Then he calls his tanks forward,” Haas recalled, clearly impressed with what he had seen. “How many armor generals actually get out there and clear the mines for their tanks? Well, Gul Haidar did. Then he’s standing there like Patton, waving his tanks through. It was something to see.”

  Unfortunately, when Haidar’s tanks rolled into the valley, the first thing they did was fire at the Rakkasans on the mountainside. A T-55 crew put a main gun round right through a 2-187 Infantry pup tent. Fortunately for all concerned, no one was hurt and frantic radio calls soon corrected the mistake. “That’s exactly why we wanted to pull out of there, because we had not trained with these guys,” Larsen, the Rakkasan executive officer, said.

  Meanwhile, Blaber was rounding the southern end of the Whale in an SUV with Zia’s troops. This time the Afghans were given free reign to fight as they saw fit. It made a big difference. “They were on fire at this point because they were actually using their own tactics,” Blaber said. Everywhere the AFO commander looked, he saw friendly Afghans manning crew-served weapons on the high ground. “You just knew that whole valley was clear,” he said.

  This was it, the moment of official victory for the allied forces in Anaconda. It was something of an anticlimax. The battle had been all but over for a week. Rather than the original concept of Zia’s men confronting Al Qaida troops in the villages, the U.S. operators and Afghan militiamen drove through ghost towns on the valley floor. Using the grid references passed to him by his teams, Blaber went to several sites at which his operators had directed air strikes. The bombs had done their job. He photographed over thirty enemy corpses.

  Blaber and his men discovered five working artillery pieces (four 122mm howitzers and a 152mm howitzer) in the riverbeds, as well as an explosives laboratory. But what they didn’t find were people. There was no sign of life, and no sign of civilian death either—none of the corpses in the villages were those of women or children. “I didn’t even see a dead animal,” Blaber said. No one fired at them. The enemy was gone. But where?

  Many never made it out of the Shahikot alive. But just how many were killed is hard to nail down. Senior U.S. commanders described numbers of enemy dead as high as 800 publicly and over a thousand in private. However, they offered no evidence to back up their claims. “Ginger Pass,” the gorge just south of Takur Ghar, was a key logistics route into the valley for Al Qaida forces and hence one of the most heavily bombed parts of the Shahikot. Yet a walk through the gorge on March 18, the last day of the operation, yielded no tangible proof that anyone had been killed there. The sides of the pass were scorched brown and black by high explosives. Shards of shrapnel big enough to cut a man in two littered the ground. There was even an unexploded bomb in the waters of the creek that ran through the gorge. But there were no corpses, bloodstains, shallow graves, or body parts. Bodies were found in other parts of the Shahikot, but usually in ones and twos and threes, not dozens. Some of this can be explained by good guerrilla tactics—no irregular army leaves its dead in the field of battle if it can help it, precisely because removing the bodies confuses its enemies about how many they have killed. But it is hard to imagine 600 or 700 bodies being spirited out of the Shahikot without anyone noticing—even America’s imperfect eyes in the sky. (Interestingly, estimates of enemy dead in the Shahikot tended to rise the further the officer making the estimate was from the battle.) Some observers put the numbers as low as the double digits. But there are enough firsthand accounts of enemy fighters being killed—and enough bodies—to suggest this is too low. A better estimate—and one more in keeping with the number of bodies and body parts that were found, and the numbers mentioned in Al Qaida documents obtained by U.S. intelligence—is between 150 and 300. Given the size of the enemy force in the Shahikot—estimated by U.S. commanders in the first week of the operation as upwards of 1,000—one is forced to conclude that at least as many Al Qaida fighters escaped the Shahikot as died there.

  ON March 13 Blaber again drove south from Gardez to the Shahikot, this time to drop off India Team, who he wanted to track the fleeing enemy. Speedy again put his hunting skills to good work. Following footprints, trash, and discarded clothes, he soon picked up the trail, which traced the route that AFO had long suspected the enemy would take from the Shahikot: east through Ginger Pass or the next gorge down into the Upper Shahikot Valley. From there some enemy fighters moved east to Obastay. Others traveled south to Celam Kac, before following a track southeast through the mountains to the Neka Valley, about seventeen kilometers southeast of the Shahikot. The Afghan forces who were supposed to be watching these routes with U.S. Special Forces had apparently abandoned their positions. “There was no one to stop the Al Qaida from escaping Shahikot south, southeast, or southwest,” a special ops source said. From Neka, the guerrillas took old mujahideen routes into Pakistan, where they headed for Miram Shah, a wild town in the North West Frontier Province where Jalalluddin Haqqani had made his headquarters during the 1980s. Signs of distress India discovered along the way—a bloody hat here, a used bandage there—led AFO to refe
r to the route as “the trail of tears.”

  Over the next several weeks AFO and CIA personnel moved through the towns and villages on this route, talking to local leaders. “We really got a great forensic autopsy of what happened,” Blaber said. The warlords and tribal elders told the Americans that Al Qaida had been building up for months in the area, preparing a spring offensive. The locals said they were glad Al Qaida—” the Arabs”—had left, because they treated their hosts poorly.

  But “trail of tears” or no, the U.S. failure to fight a successful battle of encirclement in the Shahikot meant several hundred experienced Al Qaida fighters—Arabs, Uzbeks, and Chechens—escaped to Pakistan. Undoubtedly some senior enemy leaders were among them. Just how senior is a matter of conjecture.

  The only enemy leader known to have been killed in the Shahikot was Saif Rahman Mansour, an Afghan who led the Taliban force in the area. He may have been the banner-carrying leader killed by an air strike called in by Juliet on D-Day. By contrast, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan leader Tohir Yuldeshev was known to have slipped the United States’ clutches in the Shahikot. Over the next two years the couple of hundred Uzbeks he commanded who made it out formed the core of the Al Qaida force in the North West Frontier Province’s tribal areas. Yuldeshev became the day-to-day commander of Al Qaida’s skirmishes with Pakistani security forces.

  No intelligence surfaced that bin Laden had returned to the Shahikot since December. But there were persistent, although unconfirmed, reports that his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been in the Shahikot, and might have been wounded before making his escape. In this regard it is interesting to note that on March 6, an Australian SAS team covering the Arme Khwar stream about eight kilometers south of the Shahikot saw thirteen armed personnel moving through the area. The Aussies said the force consisted of an advanced element of four men, two to three men providing flank security on each side, and a main body of five men. In the center of the group walked a man with a cane who appeared older than the others. “All twelve security personnel wore black balaclavas,” said a report of the episode. The Australians called in an A-10 strike on the group, which split into two elements. The A-10 attacked, but, frustratingly, no allied forces were able to conduct any bomb damage assessment. There were unconfirmed reports Zawahiri suffered a head wound during this period. If so, he survived and was still releasing audiotapes rallying the faithful to Al Qaida’s cause in 2004.

  THE Pentagon declared Operation Anaconda over on March 18, but in reality it had been all but done for well over a week. The Rakkasans returned to Kandahar. But for AFO, there was to be no heading back to the relative luxury of Bagram or Kabul. The Delta operators were already hunting the enemy ever closer to the Pakistan border. Blaber was quietly agitating for cross-border missions. To him the Pakistan border already resembled the Cambodian border during Vietnam conflict—a barrier to U.S. troops behind which their enemies found succor.

  It was going to be a long war.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1.The description of the scene on the lead Chinook is based on interviews with the following soldiers: Baltazar; Blair; Edwards; Fichter; Harry; Koch; Marye; Mendenhall; Moore; Nielsen; Preysler; Thompson; and Wahl, as well as on Combat Camera footage and photographs taken by some of the soldiers. The description is also informed by my participation in a very similar air assault into the valley later the same day.

  IPB

  Chapter 1

  1.…the hotel…ugly. This description comes from the article “Losing the Peace?” by Michael Massing, The Nation, May 13, 2002.

  2.And so it was…Afghan cuisine. The description of the Ariana is drawn from interviews with numerous U.S. sources who visited the hotel in early 2002.

  3.On this frigid…S-H-A-H-I-K-H-O-T. The account of the meeting is drawn from an interview with a participant; a U.S. military source who attended other meetings in the same room helped with the description of the surroundings. The word Shahikot has several possible spellings. I was assured that John spelled it with three h’s, so I have spelled it that way here. However, in the rest of the book, it will be spelled Shahikot.

  Chapter 2

  1.Two weeks earlier…“Buster” Hagenbeck. Wille, Hagenbeck; Ziemba (from a presentation by Major Francesca Ziemba at the Fire Support Conference, October 3, 2002, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which I attended).

  2.A native…of taking command. CJTF Mountain “Operation Anaconda” Command Briefing; Hilferty.

  3.By late December…defeating the Taliban. Hagenbeck.

  4.He was by no means…spring offensive. Edwards; Task Force Dagger source; remarks by Robert Andrews at the Military Reporters and Editors annual meeting in Alexandria, Virginia, October 3, 2003. Andrews was acting assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict during the war in Afghanistan.

  5.When, against all expectations…by U.S. commanders. A senior U.S. officer with knowledge of the plan.

  6.So instead…December 1. Hagenbeck, Mikolashek, Gray, Edwards.

  7.When Franks…Hagenbeck’s fingers. Edwards, Hagenbeck.

  8.But he wasn’t about…to do something.” Hagenbeck.

  9.He knew there were still…puddles of resistance.” Edwards.

  10.Hagenbeck gathered his…to head up. Hagenbeck, Wille.

  11.Wille and Ziemba…rough plan. Wille.

  12.Their job was made…return to Fort Drum. Hagenbeck, Wille, Edwards.

  Chapter 3

  1.Within forty-eight hours…Colonel John Mulholland,…Hagenbeck.

  2.Under his command…only forty-nine days.The Mission, by Dana Priest, publ. by W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., p.143…Special Forces’ finest hour. Special Forces are not the same as special operations forces, a term which includes not only Special Forces (often called—but never by themselves—“Green Berets”) but also special operations aviation units, Rangers, Navy SEALs (the acronym stands for Sea, Air, and Land), Air Force special operators and other commando organizations.

  3.…Task Force K-Bar. A K-Bar is a knife particularly popular with sailors.

  4.According to Lieutenant Colonel Mark…eight weeks.” Rosengard.

  5.The TF Dagger leaders…in the north.” Rosengard.

  Chapter 4

  1.In late November…Tora Bora. Edwards.

  2.There were strong…also there… Task Force Dagger source.

  3.$5 million reward. On December 13, 2001, the State Department raised this reward, in place since October 1998, to $25 million. The announcement had been in the works for several weeks and had nothing to do with Tora Bora, according to Andy Laine, a spokesman for the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service.

  4.Dagger’s success…to the Pushtun heartland. Task Force Dagger source.

  5.From the very start…Afghanistan. Edwards.

  6.This approach…Rumsfeld. A Pentagon official who participated in videoteleconferences on this issue.

  7.“The message…our psyche.” Edwards.

  8.“We don’t want…field-grade officers in Afghanistan. Bello. I heard this line repeated numerous times during conversations with U.S. officers in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration version of the same notion was presented by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 26, 2002. The transcript can be found at: http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2002/s20020626-depsecdef2.html.

  9.120,000 troops…in the 1980s.Stumbling Bear—Soviet Military Performance in Afghanistan, by Scott R. McMichael (London: Brassey, 1991).

  10.Inside the Pentagon…for their service. White; Keane. The secretary of the Army is the top official in the Army. A civilian political appointee, the secretary’s primary job is to make sure the administration’s policies are implemented by the service. His boss is the secretary of defense. The chief of staff is the Army’s most senior officer, whose job, in concert with the secretary, is to plot the strategic direction of the Army in areas like doctrine, modernization, and perso
nnel policies, and to advise the president as one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The vice chief of staff is the chief’s second-in-command, and runs the Army on a day-by-day basis.

  11.But when Shinseki…White said. White.

  12.It didn’t help…the Army leadership. “A Different War—Is the Army Becoming Irrelevant?” by Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, July 1, 2002; “Pentagon Faces Transformation,” by Tom Bowman, The Baltimore Sun, March 13, 2001, p. 1A; “Wolfowitz: More Resources, Better Management Keys to Defense Transformation,” by Hunter Keeter, Defense Daily, August 9, 2001; “The ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ has an Enemy: Politics,” by Michael Catanzaro, The American Enterprise, October 1, 2001.

  13.The Pentagon’s—and, by…work on the ground. Edwards; senior officer involved in planning in the Pentagon; 10thMountain Division (Light Infantry)—Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan, Joint Center for Lessons Learned Final Report, 6 June 2003, Col. George Bilafer, team chief, p. 8; numerous other U.S. military sources.

  14.Thus the attack…tried to escape. Rosengard; Task Force 11 source.

  15.It seems incredible…flee outta there.” Edwards.

  16.A few days…bin Laden himself. U.S. special operations source.

  17.But even then…Franks].” Edwards.

  18.American surveillance…over the border. Bishop; Edwards.

  19.At least two…effort foundered. Bishop.