The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  While most of the region was quiet, some anti-American groups remained active, including the one led by the Gawardesh insurgent/gangster Haji Usman, whom 3-71 Cav had been targeting from Hill 2610 in June 2006 when his militia attacked, killing Patrick Lybert and Jared Monti. Usman and his gang would regularly bypass the legal border crossing into Pakistan, near Barikot, instead using a mountain pass and the Gawardesh Bridge to shuttle lumber and gems east and weapons and insurgents west, into Kunar and Nuristan Provinces. Usman regarded the bridge as the “Gate to Nuristan” and deemed it worth fighting in order for to keep his supply lines open. Camp Lybert had been built almost exclusively to guard this mountain pass and border crossing point.

  On January 25, 2008, a team of Green Berets led by Captain Robert Cusick was accompanying an Afghan Border Police and Afghan National Army security patrol near the bridge. Before the patrol passed Checkpoint Delta, a lookout spotted ten armed men crossing the Gawardesh Bridge and then entering a large house nearby. Cusick and the Afghans crossed the bridge themselves to get in position. A platoon from 1-91 Cav Headquarters Troop, now commanded by Captain John Williams, set up nearby. When some two dozen insurgents left the compound and began heading east, toward the Pakistan border, Williams and Cusick and their men opened up on the group. A-10 Warthogs fired their 30-millimeter cannons and sent bombs raining down from above. The insurgent force was cut to pieces in an instant.

  Cusick and the ANA platoon were moving forward to gather intelligence from the dead fighters when up to sixty other insurgents who’d been hiding on the hillside began firing at them. Williams and his troops returned fire, and the Warthogs resumed their bombing and 30-millimeter runs. Cusick was shot through his left lung; the bullet just missed his collarbone. At first he could still give orders, but soon he drifted into shock. Staff Sergeant Robby Miller took command, firing his SAW, throwing grenades, and telling his fellow Special Forces to “Bound back!” as he walked directly toward the enemy fire, giving his brothers in arms a chance to retreat and get Cusick to a medevac.

  It was the last time they saw Robby Miller alive. When a quick reaction force arrived on scene an hour later—to assist in extracting Cusick’s team and the Afghans and to recover Miller’s body—the fight was over.

  Despite the tragedy for the Special Forces, the battle produced evidence that the Americans were making progress in the region. Intelligence came in to 1-91 Cav indicating that during the fight, Usman’s forces had asked the district HIG commander, Mohammed Jan, to lend them some assistance in combating the Americans. Jan refused; ultimately, he would sign an agreement with the Hundred-Man Shura pledging to stop fighting. Subsequent reports indicated that Haji Usman was no longer welcome in Gawardesh or Bazgal, then later hinted that he was reaching out to Taliban elements in Pakistan. He was going to have to find support from a different group.

  A somewhat similar scenario played out with an insurgent leader named Shabbaz, from Lower Kamdesh, who had orchestrated the August attacks on Camp Keating, stolen money from contractors, and destroyed their work, burning buildings, shooting up micro-hydroelectric plants, and blowing up bridges. At times, it was unclear whether Shabbaz was really with HIG or whether he was just an opportunistic local criminal. Hutto instructed the elders to pass along a message to the troublemaker: “What is it you want to accomplish for the people of Nuristan?” But by the fall, it had become clear that any attempt at outreach would be futile, and the shura seemed incapable of getting rid of him on its own.

  That changed after the elders returned from their meeting in Kabul with President Karzai, during which they had presented him with a letter stating that the jihad was over and they were on the side of the government, peace, and stability. Karzai had in turn agreed to support the shura with funding and community police. By late February, the newly empowered elders had kicked Shabbaz and other insurgent leaders out of Kamdesh.41 Shabbaz found refuge in the mountains, where he would, however, be far more vulnerable and less easily able to stage attacks on the Americans.

  Special Forces are a rare breed of soldiers. The Army has no troops better trained, and none deadlier, than its Green Berets. They are usually deployed in small, tight-knit groups of a dozen or fewer men. Their strong bonds—which can date back years—often make for exceptional battlefield collaboration and solidarity. They also make the death of a team member an extremely emotional experience for his comrades. All combat losses are tragedies, but for these men, the tragedies are almost always profoundly familial.

  Extreme discipline is required of and by Special Forces troops, perhaps even more than is the case for other soldiers. The combination of power, lethality, and, in some ways, a lack of accountability—Special Forces generally don’t report to the regular chain of command in the location where they’re based—can create a volatile dynamic. It’s the captain’s job to keep testosterone in check and to mitigate any tension between his Special Forces and other, conventional troops. The men under Robert Cusick’s command had no captain to do those things for them during the last two months of their deployment.

  In March, the Green Berets at Forward Operating Base Naray concocted a plan that they called Operation Commando Vengeance. They soon thought better of their blunt nomenclature and changed its name to Operation Commando Justice. The mission’s purpose was to capture or kill Haji Usman, HIG district commander Mohammed Jan, and HIG leader Mullah Sadiq. The Special Forces were going to set up blocking positions and then conduct a “deep clear,” searching all the homes in Bazgal, Pitigal, and the surrounding area.

  Kolenda understood the anger—the impulse toward “commando vengeance”—that the Green Berets felt. Their captain had been wounded, and a brother in arms killed trying to protect him. Their acting on that rage, however, was another matter entirely. HIG fighters were now joining the good guys. Mullah Sadiq was a target for reconciliation, not assassination; his former student Mawlawi Abdul Rahman, the Kamdesh shura and Hundred-Man Shura leader, was fully on board. And Mohammed Jan had refused to help Haji Usman in the fight in which Miller was killed.

  Kolenda was convinced that Operation Commando Justice was all about retribution and blood lust. It seemed to be motivated not by a desire to go after real targets, but rather by an angry desire—a hunger, almost—to wreak havoc in two of the largest villages in Kamdesh District just because some of the insurgents involved in the January 21 firefight might have come from there. Indeed, the Special Forces didn’t appear to have any actionable intelligence indicating that any of the men on their “kill/capture” list were actually in Bazgal or Pitigal.

  Not surprisingly, the Special Forces troops saw things differently. Commando Justice wasn’t rooted in revenge, they insisted. In this particular area of operations, the Special Forces team believed, the United States needed a more kinetic approach. And while Commando Justice would be a higher-risk operation than some, it wasn’t as if, one of the Green Berets would later say, they were just going to go in and start dropping bombs, bulldozing houses, and killing people—unless, of course, they found a clear threat. Cusick was monitoring everything from his recovery room back at Fort Bragg, and he was completely supportive of the mission.

  Many of the Green Berets thought Kolenda and his men were comparatively soft and insufficiently willing to fight. Moreover, more than half of the dozen members of the Green Beret team had been stationed in the area during a previous rotation, and they felt they knew more about it than anyone from 1-91 Cav. Some resented the fact that Kolenda had never sat down with them to pick their brains or solicit their opinions about operations outside the base.

  Kolenda believed this operation would be worse than pointless: it could undo months’ worth of work with the Hundred-Man Shura and outreach to local elders. He suggested that the Special Forces instead go after two specific targets: a reported insurgent command-and-control facility between Pitigal and Bazgal and a supply point in the Pitigal Valley. If Haji Usman was still in Kamdesh District, he would likely be in one of those sp
ots. Well, the Special Forces said, we don’t answer to you. We’re just telling you that we’re doing this. Kolenda didn’t quite understand what Special Forces did, they decided; he seemed to think all they were about was kicking down doors and killing people. We do plenty of “hearts and minds” work, too, the Green Berets thought.

  This is a temper tantrum, Kolenda said to himself. He’d worked seamlessly with a previous Special Forces unit, but there were different dynamics in play with this group. Without Cusick there, these Special Forces troops seemed to Kolenda to be out of control. He called Preysler.

  “This is going to be a disaster,” he told the colonel. Recalling their darkest days of routine, large-scale fighting in Kamdesh District in July 2007, around the time when Tom Bostick and Ryan Fritsche were killed, Kolenda asked Preysler, “Do you remember how it was last summer? It will be like that times ten.” It would undo everything they had accomplished so far, he added.

  Other officers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade shared Kolenda’s concerns—about the lack of actionable intelligence, the lack of indicators suggesting the presence of an insurgent leader, the lack of sources on the ground to confirm or deny such a presence—and they reached out to the Special Forces as well. They all got the same answer: “We are informing you about what we are doing, not asking for your permission.”

  At Forward Operating Base Naray, a few days before Operation Commando Justice was scheduled to commence, the Hundred-Man Shura arrived for a meeting with an entourage of at least 130 men in tow, some of them questionable characters with known ties to local insurgent groups. The Green Berets on the base were stunned to see these sketchy locals being allowed to cross the wire unharassed. In protest, one Green Beret later tacked up a sign on a barracks walls reading “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

  Kolenda had also invited both Preysler and Governor Tamim Nuristani to the shura. A variety of issues were discussed. Kolenda was pushing for the establishment of an Afghan Border Police base at the Gawardesh Bridge, while the elders were insisting it wasn’t the right time—they were close to reaching an agreement with HIG commander Mohammed Jan, and they wanted that wrapped up before they complicated matters by sending the border police into his general area.

  Preysler took it all in. During breaks, Governor Nuristani and the ANA commander spoke with various elders. At lunch, the elders joined Hutto, the ANA troops, and the Afghan policemen for a feast of—what else?—goat, rice, and flatbread.

  “This is what I’m talking about,” Kolenda explained to Preysler. “This is all going to be destroyed. If the Special Forces go forward with their plan, this is all going to be undermined. They’ll all go back to the dark side.”

  Preysler agreed that Kolenda and Bulldog Troop had made significant headway, and that Operation Commando Justice would kick the hornet’s nest. But he himself had no authority to cancel the mission, so he picked up the phone and called Bagram, asking for Brigadier General Joseph Votel, deputy commanding general for operations for Combined Joint Task Force 82 and Regional Command East. Preysler briefed Votel about Operation Commando Justice and relayed Kolenda’s concerns. “We can’t do this mission,” the colonel told the general.

  Votel likewise had no power to call off a Special Forces operation, but he did control the helicopters that the Green Berets would need to carry it out. Word soon came to Kolenda that the birds had been sent on another mission, forcing Operation Commando Justice to be scrubbed.

  A few weeks later, the entire Special Forces team was relocated from Forward Operating Base Naray to Jalalabad. There were no tearful farewells.

  Hutto, Roller, and Newsom had taken steps to make Command Outpost Keating less dangerous, including moving the mortar pit from the center of the camp—where it was both too exposed and too easy to suppress—to the southwest corner. In its new spot, the pit hugged a wall, reducing the number of angles from which it could be targeted and requiring enemy fighters to get much closer if they wanted to attack it. But making even this sort of improvement was like adding an airbag to a Ford Pinto—the outpost itself was still located in an extraordinarily dangerous place.

  By now, Roller and Newsom had both spent some weeks up at Observation Post Fritsche, which seemed immeasurably less vulnerable than Camp Keating, whether the men were on patrol or in their bunks. Hutto talked with Kolenda about moving all of the U.S. troops at Keating to the observation post. The outpost wouldn’t be totally abandoned, he said: the ANA could keep a company there with the Afghan National Police, and maybe it could become a district center, a place for the government, the police, and even some merchants to set up shop.

  After several conversations along these lines, Kolenda asked Hutto and his lieutenants to study the matter and present him with some options. As was the wont of every modern Army officer, Roller resolved to turn his and Newsom’s thoughts into a PowerPoint presentation—in this case one that showed, in a hundred slides, how the U.S. troops could move up the mountain. The lieutenants’ reasoning was solid: Observation Post Fritsche was closer to the district’s population center as well as to the residents who were most supportive of the U.S. efforts. It was inherently safer. And they weren’t using the roads much anymore anyway.

  Kolenda listened to Roller’s presentation. Weighing against a move was the fact that it would limit access to surrounding hamlets such as Mandigal and Agasi. And it wouldn’t be easy: it would likely take at least two weeks to relocate everything from Camp Keating up to OP Fritsche using in-demand assets such as helicopters. That last part would be especially difficult—probably even impossible—because the United States didn’t have enough birds in country for the task; they were all in Iraq. Moreover, such an effort would in itself attract enemy attention. During any move, the Americans would be vulnerable.

  The lieutenant colonel was also skeptical that the Army could base 120 American troops up at Observation Post Fritsche. Any more than a single U.S. platoon, one ANA platoon, plus headquarters and fire support—sixty troops, maximum—would create significant problems, he believed. One lucky RPG or rocket detonating around too many people in a small area could have catastrophic consequences. Kolenda was looking for ways to reduce the troop presence in Kamdesh and to build up a different outpost in northern Kunar, so he didn’t dismiss altogether the notion of relocation, but he knew that the true test of 1-91 Cav’s counterinsurgency progress would come in March and April, when the fighting season resumed; any changes would be contingent upon the Americans’ further success on the ground. Kolenda and Hutto both understood that moving an outpost such as Keating would be best done in winter, when the whole operation would be far less vulnerable to a large-scale attack. So it was a no-go; Kolenda would not push to move the camp.

  If he had advocated for such a move, he would have had to push against two powerful forces deeply entrenched in military thinking and sentiment: perpetual motion and honor.

  The Army, like most modern bureaucracies, is hesitant to undo something once it’s been done. It’s just not how the machinery operates. An outpost has been built, money has been spent, energy has been exerted—why make all that effort for naught? The machinery is built to keep moving forward, not to be dismantled.

  Moreover, by this point, many men had fought and died for this terrain. Abandoning the outpost or Kamdesh District would, to some troops, feel like a betrayal. Elsewhere, some in the military had been questioning the wisdom of naming nonpermanent U.S. bases after fallen heroes. Strategic decisions, many officers argued, should not be influenced by mourning. And yet by now, in the region, bases had already been named for Joe Fenty, Jared Monti, Patrick Lybert, Ben Keating, and Ryan Fritsche. Just a few miles away from Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, a joint ISAF–ANA base bore Buddy Hughie’s surname. At Bagram, there was the Heathe Craig Joint Theater Hospital. And soon plans would come to fruition similarly to honor the memory of both Jacob Lowell and Tom Bostick. This practice took the military’s reluctance to undo and weighted it down with honor
, grief, and sacrifice.

  When he began meeting with Abdul Rahman and other Kamdesh elders the previous fall, Kolenda had been intrigued by the way they identified themselves as “good HIG” and insurgents as “bad HIG.” At a shura held in mid-May 2008 at Combat Outpost Keating, Kolenda and Hutto set up two white boards, one for Kolenda to write on in English and the other for an interpreter to write on in Pashto for the crowd. They drew three columns—one each for the people of Kamdesh, the Afghan government/U.S. forces, and “bad HIG”—and began discussing the groups’ various areas of agreement and disagreement. There was general agreement on almost every item, except that “bad HIG” wanted the United States out of Afghanistan immediately.

  By now, in the spring of 2008, it was clear that there were few, if any, bad HIG left. Jan had stopped fighting, and those from the lower ranks had been kicked out of their villages. When the elders, gathered together once again, were speaking about the progress that had been made, Abdul Rahman noted that the three powers in Kamdesh had changed: they were now the elders, the Afghan government/international coalition, and the Taliban.

  The Taliban, thought Kolenda. That’s interesting. While the United States and the Afghan government would often use the term “Taliban” as shorthand for any insurgent force, this was the first time he had heard the elders do the same. They knew the difference between “bad HIG” and the Taliban, and Rahman wouldn’t have used the word unless the actual Taliban now had a presence in the Landay-Sin Valley.

  Kolenda and the interpreter then drew a fourth column, for the Taliban. The elders suggested that the Taliban wanted to promote war and violence, prohibit education and development, and seize power for themselves.

  Newsom, Captain America himself, was pleased enough about the success of the Hundred-Man Shura, but he was also a big believer in getting his 3rd Platoon out patrolling the ridgelines. Between December 2007 and July 2008, on his initiative, the number of patrols grew. The ANA would go out during the day so villagers would see Afghan soldiers assuming responsibility for security, but then, once darkness fell, the U.S. troops would head for the mountain in six-man teams, policing with their night-vision goggles, keeping an eye out for any possible threat. The Americans weren’t fools.