Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  He knew that the teams had gone into Kunduz with the best of intentions: to drive the Taliban out of the city and avoid a long, drawn-out battle that would have cost far more civilian lives. In Iraq, cities were getting razed in the battle against Islamic State. That was the problem with wars: they were messy. The moment soldiers were asked to pick up a gun, bad things happened.

  He was used to transitioning between Afghanistan and the civilian world, but this time was harder. He didn’t feel ashamed of his service, but he knew that some people wanted him to be. He worried about the younger guys. Ben Vontz, the communications sergeant who had been talking to the AC-130 on the night of the strike, was still in shock. The teams thought that Special Forces was throwing Hutch under the bus.

  Hutch tried to reconcile himself to the path ahead, and to the idea of leaving Special Forces behind. Tasting death throughout his career in the military had forever altered his perception of life. Nothing matched the adrenaline rush of a firefight, a sentiment betrayed in his eyes, which lit up at the memory of combat. He channeled a lot of energy into managing his emotions. He called it “balancing the books.” The calculation involved processing and storing away all the terrible things he had seen and done, along with the good and those he had helped, based on an alchemical accounting he could never quite explain.

  What he could say was this: “There are no good or bad men in war.”

  For some time, Hutch had entertained the idea of working for an aid group after his commitment to the army was over. It was hard to imagine any organization agreeing to work with him. He considered how he must appear to outsiders in the civilian world: the Green Beret who had gone on a rampage in Kunduz, bombed a hospital full of doctors and patients, and got away with it. But it didn’t stop him from dreaming. He had to hope there would be another future if the military door closed. And he would always have his family.

  On yet another day of doing nothing at the office, Hutch received a call. He was ordered to report to the commanding general at ten a.m. He went to the general’s office and sat down in the chair opposite his desk, as instructed.

  The commander told him he’d been reinstated. “I have full confidence in you, and I believe you didn’t do anything wrong,” he said to Hutch. “I want you to appeal your relief, and I’ll give you full access to the investigation.”

  Hutch was stunned for a moment. The next words passed in a blur.

  “We had to be confident that civilians did die. You must cooperate with the lessons-learned investigation and be honest so that we can figure out how to avoid this in future. We owe it to ourselves, and everyone else, to take a long, hard look in the mirror,” the officer said.

  The investigators reviewing the case had discovered the error on the tracking system and had found the Afghan commandos where Hutch had said they were: under fire near the intelligence-agency prison. Hutch had been thrown a lifeline. He could still salvage his career in the army. If he could successfully appeal the decision to relieve him of command in Afghanistan and it was removed from his file, he could return to his occupation. At a minimum, he would be able to sit it out a few more years until he could collect his retirement. He owed it to Tina, who had given up her career for him. Hutch went home with the news.

  In April 2016, General Joseph Votel announced the final results of the investigation into the strike on the hospital in Kunduz. The military found that the strike was not a war crime but the result of a concatenation of human error, technical failures, and other factors. The US military paid $3,000 to each of the injured and $6,000 to the family of each person killed.

  Gen. Votel said that twelve of the sixteen personnel involved in the bombing of the hospital had been punished with removal from command, letters of reprimand, formal counseling, and extensive retraining. The list included a general officer, the AC-130 gunship aircrew, and the US Special Forces team on the ground. He did not provide further details. The names of those punished were never released, but Hutch was among the ones to receive a letter of reprimand, as did his battalion commander, Col. Johnston, and others.

  The severest punishments were reserved for the aircrew members, who were found to have made serious mistakes and were temporarily stripped of their certification to fly. Gen. Votel explained that the aircrew members would face recertification boards to determine whether they were eligible to be returned to flight status. They had not flown since the incident. The US military approved $5.7 million to reconstruct the hospital.

  Médecins Sans Frontières was outraged. The aid group responded that the punishments were too light in view of the destruction of a protected medical facility, and it called for an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. It also released a list of ten questions that remained outstanding. The first sought more information about why the physical description of the target for the AC-130 as provided by Afghan forces matched the hospital. That question remains unanswered.

  The aid group also asked to know who in the chain of command was ultimately responsible for the forty-two people killed in the hospital that night. That question, along with all the others, was never answered. The military’s findings offered scant consolation for the victims and the survivors of the bombing. The investigation report, at over three thousand pages long, was publicly released, but it was heavily redacted, and the full transcripts between the crew and the various forces on the ground were not released. The basic facts surrounding the strike were still unclear. The survivors continued life in a blur.

  Dr. Masood Nasim moved his family to Kabul. For the first two months, he found it hard to sleep, eat, or do anything at all. He almost felt like he had died in the strike. Many of the other survivors felt the same. The expatriate staff were evacuated and returned to their homes in faraway countries.

  Dr. Evangeline Cua, back in the Philippines, avoided talking with her family about what had happened at the hospital in Kunduz. She didn’t want them to worry. At first she stayed home, but finding it impossible to stop reliving the strike, she volunteered to teach at a medical school to keep busy. She had nightmares, and firecrackers set her off.

  She began to heal with the support of a friend who worked as a psychiatrist and helped her talk through what had happened. It was difficult at first. She also started writing. She lobbied to return to Afghanistan to see her colleagues again. Six months after the strike, when Médecins Sans Frontières offered her a position in Kabul, she accepted, feeling glad to be back among her friends.

  Dr. Cua spent a couple of months there and then went to Helmand. To others, that might have seemed crazy, but to her, it was all part of the healing process.

  CHAPTER 22

  Lobster and Canapés with the Taliban

  DOHA

  IN EARLY 2016, US diplomats considered conditions to be ripe for another shot at relaunching peace talks in Afghanistan. Ambassador Rick Olson had moved on to a new role as US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which put him in charge of the effort that had been torpedoed by the news of Mullah Omar’s death.

  Mullah Mansour, Omar’s successor, was dealing with a rift in his ranks1 and was generally seen to be open to talks. The Taliban’s political office in Doha, Qatar, agreed to meet with US officials; in a surprising development, they consented to the inclusion of a low-level Afghan government delegation. It was seen as a positive sign. The group had long insisted on talks with the US first and the Afghan government second.

  Preparations were held in the utmost secrecy to avoid leaks that might scuttle the opportunity before it had reached fruition. The Afghan government was unhappy despite the unexpected invitation to take a seat at the table. President Ghani objected to the United States sending high-level representatives, even though the Taliban’s political-office chief was expected to lead the delegation on the other side.

  The United States deferred to the Afghan president and agreed to send Ambassador Olson’s principal deputy, Laurel Miller; another staffer, Tamanna
Salikuddin; and the Afghanistan director at the National Security Council, Courtney Cooper. The State Department’s plan to send three women was met with opposition—not by the Afghans or the Taliban but by US intelligence agencies in Washington, who argued it might offend the Taliban or send the wrong message.

  Ambassador Olson’s view was that Western women in the region were treated like men anyway, so it didn’t matter. The State Department refused to change its delegation, and the dispute rose to the level of Susan Rice, the national security adviser. She decided to keep Cooper on board, and that settled the matter. On February 5, 2016, the three women, accompanied by two Afghan government officials, met the Taliban’s political chief, Sher Abbas Stanekzai, at a safe house in Doha. The Qataris provided logistics and security but did not attend.

  The somber, spectacled Stanekzai strode into the room and introduced himself to Miller with an outstretched hand, to the delegation’s surprise. Conservative Afghans did not shake hands with women. Evidently, he wanted to make a good first impression. Two other Taliban, including Haji Mohammad Zahid Ahmadzai, a former minister and close associate of Mullah Omar, accompanied him. Two more Afghans, Farhad Farhadullah and Akram Khpalwak, both members of the High Peace Council, were there too.

  Miller’s team had a list of issues to raise at the two-day meeting with the Taliban delegation, including the fate of a number of US hostages. The Taliban’s foremost concern was to discuss the withdrawal of US troops. The tone was cordial, and the gathering was seen as an icebreaker—the first chance in years for the three sides to sit down together and map out an agenda. The meeting was kept secret, and hasn’t yet been reported.

  Ambassador Olson, who missed out on the opportunity to attend the first meeting with the Taliban, found himself at the comparatively boring Quadrilateral Coordination Group in Islamabad, which was scheduled for the same day. The four-country process involving Afghanistan, Pakistan, China,2 and the United States aimed to kick-start negotiations with the Taliban by sending a unified message to the group from four major regional players.

  The United States hoped that the breakthrough would lead to the start of a formal peace process, but the Taliban refused to agree to another meeting that included the Afghan government. The Taliban continued to insist on starting talks with the United States first, before bringing Kabul into the equation. The Obama administration’s long-standing policy was that talks with the Taliban had to include the government to avoid undermining Kabul. Thus, the nascent process quickly ground to a halt.

  John Kerry, the secretary of state, skeptical about the chances of successfully reviving a peace process, remained more focused on preserving the shaky unity government in Kabul. The United States and the Taliban spoke on a call a month later but were unable to reach a compromise.

  Months into the effort without any obvious sign of progress, the CIA stumbled into an opportunity to kill or capture the Taliban’s new leader. Mullah Mansour surfaced in Dubai in May 2016, on a shopping trip ahead of his wedding in Quetta and possibly meeting with Gulf-area donors that financed the Taliban. In a dramatic sequence of events, the details of which haven’t been previously reported, the United States asked the United Arab Emirates to stop the Taliban leader from leaving the country and to arrest him.

  The South Asia director at the National Security Council, Peter Lavoy, supported the idea of dispatching Ambassador Olson to talk to Mullah Mansour in jail to pressure him to support the peace process once the UAE had arrested him. But the UAE failed to stop the Taliban leader; supposedly its agents chased after him just as his plane left the gate and was moving down the runway, like a scene from the movie Argo.

  Some in the US administration suspected that the UAE had missed the opportunity on purpose. Mullah Mansour landed in Iran, and the government continued to debate the right course of action over the weekend.

  The CIA prepared a Hellfire missile on the Pakistani side of the border, waiting for Mullah Mansour to cross into Baluchistan to go to his wedding. The area was supposed to be off limits to US strikes, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. When the Taliban leader entered Pakistan, the CIA fired, incinerating the Corolla he occupied and killing all its occupants. His passports were found in the wreckage, with stamps showing that he had traveled widely throughout the Gulf states, either with their leaders’ tacit permission or under their noses.

  The Obama administration claimed that the reason for the strike was that Mullah Mansour was an impediment to peace, but this wasn’t the whole story. The strike was a rare opportunity to kill the Taliban leader, who had been steadfast in his refusal to start talks with Kabul. With little sign of progress toward a formal peace process, the State Department could not argue against the strike. It wasn’t the first time the United States had conducted a kill operation inside Pakistan without warning the government. In 2011, US Navy Seals killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his safe house in Abbottabad.

  Pakistani leaders were irate. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan warned that the strike would have “serious implications” for relations and accused the US of violating international law. But some in the administration thought the strike in Pakistan had created a new strategic opportunity to raise the costs for Islamabad to continue to shelter the Taliban’s leadership in Pakistan.

  The initial play was to encourage Pakistan to push the Taliban’s leadership back into Afghanistan. If Pakistan proved uncooperative, Lavoy thought that further strikes against other Taliban leaders would step up pressure on Islamabad to stop sheltering the Taliban and support a political process to end the war. As long as the Taliban’s leaders felt safe and happy in Pakistan, he believed, they could wait out the contest indefinitely. He mused about a Godfather-like movie scenario in which the CIA took out the Taliban’s leaders one by one, calculating that even a single additional strike could have the desired effect.

  “It was a watershed event. Everyone in the region freaked the shit out,” Lavoy said afterward. “I mean, we had maximum pressure and influence. And ultimately, we were not able to utilize that for the effects we wanted to achieve.”

  At the National Security Council, others put forward strong arguments against a confrontation with Pakistan and raised legal questions about the idea. It was an election year, and ultimately the administration did not have the appetite to start a fight with Islamabad.

  “They didn’t want to rock the boat so much. They weren’t willing to be as bold,” Lavoy said. “The one-off ultimately didn’t have strategic effects. Multiple strikes would have had that effect and I think entirely changed the equation.”

  The Taliban announced a successor just four days after the strike: an obscure figure named Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada. He was a religious scholar from Panjwayi district in Kandahar, the same district that the Taliban’s founder, Mullah Omar, was from. Little was known about his past. He had risen through the Taliban’s ranks to become the chief of the military court in Kabul, where his task was to strictly enforce sharia law. A rare photograph showed him to be a stern, thin-lipped man with high cheekbones, a white turban, and a long, grizzled beard.

  Insiders viewed him as an obvious choice to mend the rifts that had broken out within the group. Mullah Omar’s eldest son, Mullah Yaqub, still in his twenties, was too young to take over. Mullah Haibatullah had a reputation for austerity, leading the type of ascetic life favored by Mullah Omar. He would never have been seen shopping in Dubai. A year later, the Taliban would report that his twenty-three-year-old son died while carrying out a suicide attack in Helmand, a sacrifice that resonated with the rank and file.

  Mullah Omar’s family supported Haibatullah, and Mullah Yaqub assumed the role of second deputy. Thus, the assassination ironically helped unify the Taliban after the split, and the insurgency quickly regrouped. Siraj Haqqani, the leader of the deadly Haqqani network, became the top military commander and launched an effective campaign across the country.

  The Taliban’s political office in Doha swiftly m
oved on as well. A second, secret meeting was held between US and Taliban officials in Doha a month later, in June 2016. This time, the top US envoy, Ambassador Olson, led the delegation. The killing of Mullah Mansour was barely mentioned. It was business as usual. The Taliban’s demands were unchanged: the United States had to agree to withdraw before they would enter into talks with the Afghan government.

  It took several months, until September 2016, for the groups to meet again. Critics of the process viewed the delay as evidence that the Taliban were stalling until President Obama left office. But the US negotiators were also slowed down by the need to coordinate closely with President Ghani, who, as part of the administration’s policy, had to be in lockstep all the way. The killing of Mullah Mansour appeared to have convinced the Afghan leader that US outreach would be helpful, on the basis that the Taliban’s position was weakened after the strike.

  A month later, the United States and Taliban met once more, in one of several conferences that were part of a secret process that took place in the final months of President Obama’s second term and has not been previously reported. The Qataris, true to Gulf style, served the delegates a luxurious selection of food that was typical of the five-star hotels and expensive restaurants in the region. Ambassador Olson observed that the Taliban had adapted to the menu, which included items like stuffed lobster and canapés.

  Although Kabul was not given a seat at the table, the Taliban did agree to meet with a senior Afghan government representative on the sidelines. On the same day as the US meeting in Doha, the Taliban’s political-office chief, Sher Abbas Stanekzai, met Afghanistan’s acting intelligence-agency chief, Masoom Stanekzai (no relation), who served as President Ghani’s point person for talks. It seemed to be a good sign.