The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Specialist Christopher Griffin. (Photo courtesy of Kerri Griffin Causley)

  Griffin was quiet and kept to himself. He smoked a lot and spent hours reading; before deploying to Iraq, he’d read the entire Quran from cover to cover. He seemed overwhelmed by the gift of the Leatherman, as if it were much more than just a hundred-dollar tool, as if he’d never received a gift before. The new commander was surprised to hear, later on, that the twenty-four-year-old had taken the time in the middle of this war zone to write his captain’s aunt and uncle a thank-you note for the modest gift.

  Colonel George briefed General Scaparrotti and the Afghan minister of the interior on the latest developments in his area of operations, and then he renewed his push to close down Combat Outposts Keating and Lowell. Most of the reasons McChrystal had given him for delaying these moves were no longer operative, save for his stated desire not to “get ahead of the president,” which also seemed moot. Scaparrotti approved the plan: the troops at Combat Outpost Keating could start packing up on October 4.

  On his first official day in charge, September 20, Portis had three tubs of ice cream flown in for his new troops to enjoy after the change-of-command ceremony: cookies-and-cream, mint chocolate chip, and pralines-and-cream. Later that day, he joined Colonel George and Lieutenant Colonel Brown at a banquet held at the base for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr; also in attendance were members of the Afghan National Police, the leaders of the ANA company stationed at Keating, and some village elders. There was a lot of friendly chatter as the men sat around a picnic table together.

  “How effective is Combat Outpost Keating?” George asked the ANA commander.

  “We’re very effective,” he said.

  To Portis, this was an example of what U.S. forces referred to as “Afghan math”—a certain disconnection from reality that Afghans tended to exhibit when asked to provide honest assessments.

  “How effective will Combat Outpost Keating be after we leave?” George asked.

  This time, there was no disconnect: the leader of the ANA laughed. “When you leave, we’ll leave,” he said.

  George explained that the United States wasn’t going to be in Kamdesh in perpetuity, which was why it was important, he said, that the locals be able to govern themselves and provide their own security. He didn’t intend to signal an imminent departure, but the locals had been watching the troops ship out sling-loads of nonessential equipment from the outpost. The conversation suggested to many of the men at the table—Americans and Afghans alike—that there was a timetable, one that was obviously already under way.

  At least one U.S. officer later recalled that he was stunned to hear George share this information; he felt sure it would be passed on to the enemy. “Anger, contempt, shock, disbelief—all emotions that ran though my mind in the following days,” the officer remembered. In his view, and the view of other members of Black Knight Troop, Colonel George had just told an untrustworthy group that the Americans were leaving soon.

  In his room at Fort Hood in Texas, Rick Victorino—the intel analyst from 6-4 Cav—frowned. He had left COP Keating four months before, but he couldn’t stop thinking about his time there, and he’d programmed a Google news alert to let him know whenever the word Nuristan appeared in a media story.

  On September 22, journalists at Bagram were informed that General McChrystal had given commanders the order to begin pulling their troops from remote bases—which would reportedly include Combat Outposts Keating and Lowell. The news immediately made its way to Victorino.

  Shit, they’re going to be attacked, Victorino thought to himself; they’re going to be overrun. He was sure that the information would be quickly rebroadcast by the Taliban to insurgents in the Kamdesh area.

  The next day at work, he talked about this development with Mazzocchi and Meshkin. They all agreed: things were about to get rough for the men of Black Knight Troop, 3-61 Cav.

  Portis received orders to prepare for a closure of Camp Keating; their last flight out would be on October 10. Just like that. They would have two weeks to tear the camp down. Portis called his team: “Here’s the mission,” he told them. “We’re leaving Combat Outpost Keating.”

  They all rolled their eyes as if to say, The new guy doesn’t understand how it works. They’d been told again and again that Camp Keating was going to be closed down, and nothing ever happened. But Portis impressed upon them that this time, it was real, and so they stayed up all night, planning the move down to the last detail. They decided they would need forty-five sorties, or trips, on Chinooks.

  Portis was excited but nervous. His nerves began to fray on Monday, September 28, when he received intelligence that fighters from the Taliban and HIG had held a shura in Upper Kamdesh to try “to resolve the conflict between the two groups in order to attack the COP.” A Taliban leader from the Waygal Valley had come to the shura to meet with HIG leaders. Two local officers with the Afghan National Police had also been present.

  Portis sought out the recently hired Afghan National Police chief, Shamsullah (whose predecessor had quit), and told him what he had heard. Shamsullah said that the officers had gone without his knowledge, and he promised to talk to them about it. He wouldn’t give Portis any details about the meeting, but he did confide that he’d heard from the locals that the outpost was closing. The level of detail the police chief had at his fingertips was stunning: at one point, he said he knew that Black Knight Troop was packing up nonessential gear “and that… we would run non-stop birds all night to backhaul and close Keating and Fritsche starting in ten days (09OCT) for a duration of several days,” Portis emailed Brown later that day.

  The captain was incredulous. How could Shamsullah know such specifics? Portis had not been particularly pleased when the brigade leadership suggested to the shura elders and the leaders of the ANA and Afghan police that Black Knight troops were headed for the exits, but at least that information had been vague. This was something else, and it worried him. Locally, the only ones aware of the plans were Portis’s lieutenants and the officers at Forward Operating Base Bostick; the operations centers at both posts were under lock and key. But planning about the closure of Camp Keating had gone all the way up the U.S. chain of command to Kabul; somewhere along the line, someone had said too much to the wrong person.

  “Do you think the Taliban and HIG have the same information?” Portis asked Shamsullah.

  “Everyone knows this,” said the chief.

  “Do you think we’re going to be attacked?” Portis asked.

  “Yes,” said Shamsullah. “Tomorrow.”

  Portis wasn’t quite sure how to process this; false warnings of an imminent attack, he knew, were common. He told the police chief that there wasn’t an approved plan yet for closing the camp. “We could be told to leave soon, or we could be told to leave after the winter,” he fibbed. “I’ll keep you informed as best I can, but currently our intentions are to winterize and fly out equipment that needs repairs.”

  The captain walked away from this discussion filled with anger and unease. Obviously, the Americans couldn’t leave a base that they were sharing with the ANA without letting the Afghan commander know they were leaving. But Shamsullah knew an unnerving amount of information about the Americans’ plans. Portis wondered if the police chief—who hailed from Mandigal, a hotbed of the local insurgency—might not be playing both sides, having his own survival foremost in his mind. Portis was planning on heading up to Observation Post Fritsche on Thursday, October 1, to check on some equipment—everything would need to be accounted for during withdrawal—and while there, he would meet with the Kamdesh shura to find out whatever he could about this report of a Taliban–HIG détente.

  In his email to Brown, Portis wrote that he was “concerned” that local Afghans and members of the Afghan National Police were sharing information about the evacuation of the local outposts, now being called Operation Mountain Descent. Portis’s advisory came at the same time as a report that “Bad” Abdu
l Rahman was preparing to take Barg-e-Matal back now that 1-32 Infantry troops had withdrawn. It was not uncommon to hear that local Taliban and HIG leaders were meeting, so Portis’s news didn’t cause anyone to hit the panic button. Since June, the squadron had also gotten numerous tips that more than a hundred fighters were about to attack one base or another, including COP Keating and FOB Bostick. Brown didn’t know how seriously to take what Portis had heard. He needed more proof that this threat was real before he could do anything; without more concrete information, he couldn’t credibly call in choppers to bring reinforcements. There was also the issue of the moon, which right now was at too bright a point in its illumination cycle to afford the helicopters the darkness they needed to be safe. And anyway, 3-61 Cav would be leaving the Kamdesh Village area within a couple of weeks.

  Portis briefed all of his officers and senior noncommissioned officers on what he’d learned, emphasizing the importance of operational security—meaning, keeping their mouths shut. “I don’t know how the fuck Shamsullah knows this, but he knows this,” he said.

  The troops who were primarily tasked with gathering information about potential threats to the outpost were intelligence collector Sergeant Robert Gilberto,79 intelligence analyst Sergeant Ryan Schulz, and, to a lesser extent, fire-support officer Lieutenant Cason Shrode.

  As an intelligence collector, Gilberto could speak with informants and pay sources, whereas Schulz, as an intelligence analyst, was forbidden to do either of those things. But for much of September, Gilberto was still at Barg-e-Matal, where he’d been assigned several months before, so COP Keating was without a clique of patiently assembled local informants. Fire-support officer Shrode had stepped in to try to fill the breach; since he was also involved in paying contractors for the few development projects that were still in progress, he had the authority to deal with locals and pay them.

  Earlier in the month, after hearing that the Taliban had held a meeting in a nearby village to discuss a potential future attack on the outpost, Schulz and Shrode had requested an unmanned Predator drone to help them keep an eye on events in their area. That request, however, was rejected by commanders at Regional Command East in Bagram, who prioritized demands on surveillance assets for other missions, particularly at Barg-e-Matal. Shrode and others discussed using the Raven UAV (short for “unmanned aerial vehicle”) they had on base. Weighing a mere five pounds and flown by remote control, the Raven looked almost like a toy airplane, though the whole system cost about a quarter of a million dollars, and the craft had a range of more than six miles. The Raven, though, was not especially effective in the powerful winds common to Nuristan’s mountain ranges; in this situation, the odds were that it would be blown off course and would have to be recovered by 3-61 Cav troops. Without a Predator, they were stuck.

  Toward the end of September, Gilberto returned to Combat Outpost Keating. Rumors of future enemy attacks were always coming in to the outpost, but now the intel collector noticed a definite uptick in such warnings. The nearby Afghan National Police station, for instance, received a letter from the local Taliban advising policemen to stay away from the station because an attack on Camp Keating was imminent.

  Gilberto shared the intelligence with Schulz and Portis, and they discussed the best next steps to take. One warning referred to an assault planned for dawn the next day, so Portis ordered Black Knight Troop to increase security; dawn broke, but nothing happened. It was terrifically difficult to know which tips to take seriously. Per protocol, Gilberto sent each draft intelligence report up to his team leader at Forward Operating Base Bostick, but for some reason, he didn’t see most of these reports included in the squadron’s daily intelligence summary.

  Likewise, information accumulated at the squadron and brigade levels never made its way down to Combat Outpost Keating. In retrospect, there were plenty of clues that the enemy had something serious in the works. On September 23, one source informed the Americans, insurgents from Kamdesh, Mirdesh, and other communities met in Mandigal. A different source said that half of the insurgents were from Nuristan and the other half from Pakistan, where they were associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the largest Islamist terrorist groups in South Asia. Yet another source told the Americans that “there are still issues between HIG and TB [Taliban] but for the purposes of attacking Keating they will work together.” One local testified that insurgents in Mandigal had 107-millimeter rockets and ten suicide bombers. Another said there were more than two hundred fighters planning on attacking Camp Keating. On Tuesday, September 29, “a large number of people” were reported to be gathering in Lower Kamdesh for an attack on Combat Outpost Keating and Observation Post Fritsche. A report from October 2 stated that thirty to thirty-five men then in Barg-e-Matal were “planning to attack COP Keating… and COP Lowell with in the week.” The assault force would be made up of locals with RPGs as well as “suicide attackers.”

  None of this information reached Gilberto and the others at the outpost because at the time, all of these truths were scattered among bushels of lies, gossip, nonsense, misunderstandings, and plans that were never carried out. At the higher levels, largely due to concerns about information oversaturation, such intelligence reports were not widely disseminated: since nobody had the time or the expertise to sift through the bycatch, blanket decisions had to be made that kept intelligence from reaching the field. Too much information can be as worthless as none—that was a lesson of 9/11, and it would soon be a lesson of Combat Outpost Keating as well.

  Faruq’s father, a sheep and goat herder in the community of Lowluk, had died when his son was eight. The boy’s maternal uncle took him under his wing and sent him to a local madrassa, where clerics who subscribed to fundamentalist Salafi Islam instructed him in the Quran and how to be a good Muslim. Many of these clerics had been trained in special camps that were funded with money from Saudi Arabia and at the very least tolerated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency and its military. Part of the camps’ purpose was to create holy warriors who would wage war against the Indians in Kashmir. But after the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, mullahs at Faruq’s mosque began preaching that the infidels had now arrived in their homeland to impose their beliefs on and divide the Afghan people. They were not to be trusted, Faruq was told: when they invaded your country, you were obligated to defend yourself and Islam, to help your Muslim brothers.

  In 2007, when he was eighteen, Faruq had traveled to the Waygal Valley, where he met Mullah Abdul Rahman Mustaghni, the local Taliban commander whom the 6-4 Cav had referred to as “Bad” Abdul Rahman. Rahman told Faruq that a Taliban fighter’s only job was to attack Americans, then to sleep, then to wake and attack Americans again. He operated under the command of the “shadow governor” of Nuristan, the Taliban leader Mullah Dost Mohammad.

  Faruq had been following Rahman for two years. Barg-e-Matal was their home base, but they traveled throughout the area. Every week, sometimes every day, they would fire at Americans, with rockets, with guns, with RPGs. Eventually, they were given more powerful weapons by their friends across the border in Pakistan, including heavy machine guns and mortars.

  Among Faruq’s fellow fighters was one from the local village of Pitigal. Ishranullah’s father had been killed years before, in a tribal dispute. At the age of ten, Ishranullah, like Faruq, was sent to a madrassa, this one across the border in Peshawar, a major transit zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There he became devout and learned about the “injustices” committed by foreigners. As a Taliban fighter, he also came to hate the Afghan National Army, believing its soldiers to be just as treacherous as the infidels, guilty of spilling the blood of other Muslims while claiming to believe in Allah.

  Faruq and Ishranullah were just two out of hundreds of local fighters in an insurgency that was gaining strength in Nuristan. They fought the Americans in Barg-e-Matal and fired upon them at Camp Keating and Observation Post Fritsche. Many came from Kamdesh Village and nearby settlements
such as Mandigal, Agasi, and Agro. They did what they were told. And in September 2009, their commanders and Nuristan’s Taliban “shadow governor, Dost Mohammed, began planning something truly catastrophic for the Americans, something that would put the Taliban in Nuristan on the map.

  By this point, President Obama and White House officials thought they had successfully wrested control of the Afghanistan debate from the men with the bars and stars—McChrystal, Mullen, and Petraeus. Come the end of September, the public and the media would focus on a series of meetings the president had with his “war council”—a large deliberative body made up of top national security advisers, military and civilian, who were to help guide Obama’s decision-making about what to do next in Afghanistan and Pakistan. McChrystal was a member of the team, beamed in from Kabul on secure video teleconference, but he was just one of many.

  On October 1, McChrystal spoke at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, about the options in Afghanistan. His written speech had been approved through all the proper channels. During the question-and-answer period, he made it clear that he favored sending more troops to that country and maintaining a long-term presence there. The general was asked if he would be happy if within two years, Afghanistan could be handled through a counterterrorist approach, with drone missile strikes and smaller Special Forces teams—which, everyone knew, was the approach favored by Vice President Biden and other top presidential advisers. “The short, glib answer is ‘No,’ ” McChrystal replied. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a shortsighted strategy.”