The battle for Kandahar produced some tense moments, since the Southern Alliance Pashtuns did not rally in adequate numbers or possess the skills to fight the best warriors of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. While they had no love for “Afghan Arabs” or the most fanatical Taliban, many southern Afghans preferred cautious and armed neutrality. Nevertheless, two American Special Forces teams infiltrated into the region and organized the Southern Alliance into two groups to assault the city. Accompanied by a Special Forces team to coordinate movements and air strikes, Karzai’s small group attacked toward Khandahar from the north, while another anti-Taliban group, headed by Gul Sherzai, assaulted from the south. Undermanned, TF Dagger and their Afghan allies faced not only hardcore al-Qaeda and Taliban mujahideen but thousands of new jihadis who joined the war from Pakistan. On December 5, a misdirected air strike killed three Americans and wounded eight. Among the six dead and forty wounded Afghans was Hamid Karzai, named the next head of the Afghan government by an exile council in Bonn, Germany. The siege of Kandahar dragged on until December 7, when Taliban troops finally agreed to a surrender and an amnesty proposal, which they used to buy time, then broke out and escaped by the hundreds. The Marines captured Khandahar airport on December 13. In the meantime, another American-Afghan force had taken up the chase of bin Laden.
Even as parts of TF Dagger headed for Kandahar and finished off Konduz, CENTCOM focused on the bin Laden mission while at the same time increasing the American ground units inside Afghanistan. The units that streamed in to manage Bagram and two other airbases were not shooters but, rather, engineers, technicians, communicators, staffs, MPs, and electronic and ordnance specialists. With battles waging around them, four Army and two Marine battalions guarded the bases. Then allies began to arrive: a Royal Marine commando battalion and one Canadian infantry battalion. The separate CENTCOM Special Operations Command swelled with SEALS, Australian SAS, and more Special Forces teams. To sort out ENDURING FREEDOM, General Franks asked for help and received the Third Army headquarters (Lieutenant General Paul T. Mikolashek, USA) for deployment to Kuwait. He then named Mikolashek a Combined Forces Land Component Commander (CFLCC) but not commander of Special Operations Forces (SOF) or the air component. The former group, TF Bowie, included a small army of electronic intelligence experts and analysts. Just controlling Bagram alone proved too complex, so CENTCOM formed another center of decision, CFLCC (Forward), at K2 under Major General F.L. “Buster” Hagenbeck, commander of the 10th Mountain Division. None of this reorganization put more dependable troops in the field, in part because TF Dagger did not want them.
Amid all the sound and fury from Konduz to Kandahar, Afghan sources and special operations analysts concluded that Osama bin Laden and his entourage had gone to ground in the Tora Bora region of the White Mountains, some forty-five miles southwest of a former Taliban stronghold, Jalalabad. American air strikes began against an estimated 1,000 al-Qaeda regulars on November 28. Even with plenty of Special Forces/USAF fire controllers, the only unit General Franks would commit to assault Tora Bora was an indifferent Afghan force of 800 under a local warlord. For two weeks the SF spotters and all the target identifiers the USAF could find directed aerial ordnance onto Tora Bora’s defense complex. The Air Force used all its ordnance, from a one-ton precision-guided penetrator to a seven-ton BLU 82 air-fuel exploder that burned and smothered anyone within a hundred yards of the burst. Yet every reluctant Southern Alliance advance halted in the face of deadly mortar and machine-gun fire. Ground taken during the day changed hands at night. When resistance faded away by December 16, the SF-Afghan investigators estimated that they had killed perhaps 200–300 diehard fighters who had covered the escape of al-Qaeda’s leaders and 700–800 elite jihadis into Pakistan. Osama bin Laden had indeed been in the Tora Bora complex, and he boasted about his escape to his global admirers. No one had a better chance to kill or capture him for a decade. Critics wondered whether a Ranger battalion or airmobile battalion might have made a difference in the assault or blocking escape routes, a proposal vetoed by Franks.
Even as Alliance forces and their SOF advisers chased remnants of the Taliban and the operations in Tora Bora withered away, the American forces and their NATO allies shifted to Phase IV operations, meaning humanitarian relief and UN-NATO peacekeeping. The Americans maintained their force autonomy, but NATO contingents fell under British command as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which by March 2002 numbered 4,900 troops (one-third British) from eighteen nations. The numbers and nationalities made coalition cooperation a nightmare. Different rules-of-engagement did not help. Intertribal warfare now poisoned peacekeeping; USAF jets destroyed a convoy of Afghan elders (sixty-five dead) when a warlord said they were Taliban. They were not. One could sense victory but not peace. The senior Air Force officers counted sorties flown (17,000) and ordnance dropped (6,500 strike missions, 17,500 weapons used). The Navy’s carrier air had flown the most missions, but the Air Force had dropped the most bombs and rockets, and PGMs had been 65 percent of the total. These were statistics that Donald Rumsfeld loved to describe at press conferences. The humanitarian relief workers counted tons of food delivered and Afghans inoculated. The U.S. Army counted bridges and roads repaired. There were other, more worrisome statistics: Afghans killed by accident and prisoners misidentified and unscreened for too long.
The toxic mixture of intelligence interrogations and the criminal prosecutions of terrorists drove the Bush administration from its self-defined moral high ground in its handling of captured suspected terrorists. During the Afghanistan campaign, U.S. forces captured 5,000 Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. Most Afghans stayed in Afghanistan for screening. Non-Afghan fighters, representing thirty or more different countries, presented a special problem. Had they been treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention, they would have enjoyed legal protections assumed by the Detaining Power and would eventually have had to be returned to their native lands for disposition. Some native lands would have tried them for criminal acts; Australia actually did convict one returnee. Other countries did not want them or wanted them immediately for execution. Some countries wanted them back in order to release them and let them return to the war. That too happened. Moreover, a POW enjoys protection (enforced by International Red Cross inspectors) against extended interrogations that apply various forms of coercion (sleep and food deprivation) and torture. Yet American and foreign intelligence officers wanted to use coercive methods against al-Qaeda captives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the 9/11 planner) in order to roll up al-Qaeda’s complex international network.
After some imaginative legal interpretations by Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, the Bush administration announced that its captives were neither POWs nor criminals under American law since they were (with one exception) not American citizens and had not been captured on American soil. They did not belong to a national army. They were “detainees.” To make sure the detainees did not go to American soil, where they might fall under all kinds of legal protections, the administration established a prison camp at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba (GTMO), occupied under an expired lease agreement signed in 1903. At first a primitive tent camp, the GTMO facility evolved in 2002 into a camp that met IRC standards. Behind the scenes, however, CIA and military interrogators used coercive interrogation measures (approved in Washington) until news of these interrogations leaked in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. What emerged from the exposure of illegal practices at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and GTMO was the news that torture, including “waterboarding” or the use of threatened drowning, was also a common practice at secret interrogation centers run by the CIA in foreign countries. The “rendition” issue further eroded public support for the Global War on Terrorism.
The Bush administration tried to salvage something from the GTMO fiasco by claiming that it had extracted time-urgent information that foiled terrorist attacks, a claim challenged by FBI, NCIS, and Army CID agents at
Guantanamo. Since only a handful of detainees had such information and its usefulness quickly vanished, this argument impressed only true believers, led by Vice President Cheney. As the screening continued, the number of detainees shrank. Of the 780 “persons of interest” sent to GTMO, 415 had been repatriated to some other nation by 2007, and eighty more were scheduled for release. When the first detainee conviction for terrorist crimes by a military tribunal reached the Supreme Court—after lower courts ruled that U.S. military tribunals fell under Supreme Court jurisdiction, as they had after World War II—the Court in June 2006 ruled that the detainees (“enemy” or “non-enemy”) were combatants and could be tried for war crimes only by an international tribunal. Hounded by the Justice Department, Congress in October 2006 passed the Military Commission Act, which allowed the armed forces to try terrorists under international law but with extensive restrictions against the abuse of individual rights. Military lawyers determined they had twenty-four triable suspects, but two more cases were dismissed, and the prosecutions ended for awhile.
Amid all the Phase IV activities, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda elite remained at large somewhere in the mountains. If his hideaway was in Afghanistan, he could be attacked. The Special Forces of TF Dagger and a second special operations group built on the 3rd Special Forces Group, SEALS, and Commonwealth special forces (TF K-Bar) prowled the mountains with the Afghanis. They concluded that al-Qaeda had reestablished itself in a mountain complex (8,000 to 12,000 feet) south of Tora Bora in an area known as the Gardiz-Shah-e-Kot valley region. The number of al-Qaeda fighters in the region might run as high as 1,000. Whether or not Osama bin Laden and his headquarters had chosen this refuge was uncertain, but it was certainly the largest surviving al-Qaeda base in Afghanistan. In March 2002, American tactical forces launched Operation ANACONDA, a maximum effort most notable for the mismatch between the available troops and the demanding missions. Commanded by General Hagenbeck of the 10th Mountain Division, the core forces of TF Mountain were about 1,200 Afghans in four small battalions with Special Forces advisers, a group of 800 semi-autonomous Special Forces soldiers and SEALs, and a three-battalion U.S. Army light infantry brigade. Transport and gunship helicopters came from the 101st Aviation Regiment. The scarcity and character of the ground forces dictated a phased hammer-and-anvil operation in which air strikes would do most of the killing. The largest Afghan force would travel overland from the northeast and attack an enemy complex nestled against Tif Ghal Gar Mountain, which separated the lower and upper Shah-e-Kot valleys. The passes that linked the valleys would be blocked by three other Afghan units. The three U.S. Army battalions and Special Forces units would fly by helicopter to critical terrain where they could direct air strikes and fight any enemy units trying to move between the two valleys. The enemy would be formidable, armed with Soviet artillery, RPGs, machine guns, and small arms. The GIs had no artillery support and had inadequate contact with USAF strike aircraft. The mission itself was appropriate: to eliminate the most menacing Taliban groups still in Afghanistan. There was also a competing mission: Get the al-Qaeda leaders.
The mythical “Mr. Murphy” who uses his powers to frustrate human activities reigned supreme in ANACONDA. The eighteen-day struggle left TF Mountain in control of the battlefield with a tactical victory, March 1–19, 2002. General Franks called ANACONDA a great victory, although the local commanders knew it was more limited. The battle started badly when poor roads, an errant USAF air attack, and enemy mortar and machine-gun fire stopped the main Afghan assault force on the first day. The first American troop insertions came under immediate and accurate mortar and machine-gun fire and had to fight to hold their small mountain enclaves. Apache helicopters and bomber strikes prevented disaster, but logistical flights and medevacs became perilous, and succeeding troop lifts did not occur. More jihadis joined the battle, coiling in around the hilltop positions. Then night came, and the enemy withdrew to eat, drink, and sing about their own heroism around their fires. In the meantime, TF Mountain regrouped, concentrated its American units, and changed the plans so that the GIs would sweep the mountains and valleys with Special Forces calling air strikes from one craggy peak to another, moving by helicopter. The Special Forces still had a competing mission: to find and kill al-Qaeda’s leaders in the same zone as the U.S. infantry brigade.
“Murphy’s Law” intervened on D+2 when ground fire and thin air brought down one SF helo, and in the rescue operation under fire, a SEAL was left behind. More rescue operations tied up much of TF Mountain’s fire support, gave jihadis a focus of attack, and eventually cost the lives of seven servicemen and resulted in wounds for seven more. Sharp peaks, thin air, and RPGs created a small Mogadishu II. Not until March 6 did ANACONDA take sound tactical form, and by then the enemy survivors were over the hills and far away. The operation became much searching and little destroying, but at least the Shah-e-Kot region had been occupied and turned over to Afghan forces. TF Mountain and its air supporters estimated enemy losses at 700; subsequent analysis put the dead at far fewer. The stubborn, skilled enemy resistance made intelligence analysts believe that the area sheltered Osama bin Laden, but it did not. Instead, the Shah-e-Kot valley had been a rallying point for a defense force of dedicated Taliban, al-Qaeda Arabs, and expatriate Uzbek rebels, all eager to kill infidels.
Operation ANACONDA closed the liberation phase of ENDURING FREEDOM and opened the stabilization phase of the UN-NATO-United States intervention in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai soon became the president of the new Afghanistan; but, protected by foreign soldiers, he was more warlord than the next George Washington. Except for the regional experts who knew better, the Pentagon thought the latest war for Afghanistan had ended.
The remnants of al-Qaeda and the inner elite of the Taliban had crossed the indistinct border into official Pakistan, in reality the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a ten-thousand-square-mile borderlands and the home of four million Pashtun Afghans. The Pakistani government followed a “live and let live” policy with the Afghans, who had fled the Soviets and then fought them from the FATA sanctuaries. The Pakistani army, particularly the ISI, maintained good relations with the Afghans, especially a private army led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Taliban Pashtun warlord who hated Karzai and the Americans. Any attacks into the FATA by drones or Special Forces could cause a crisis with Pakistan.
Following Operation ANACONDA, CENTCOM refined the American command structure and operational concepts for stabilizing Afghanistan. In May 2002, General Franks established Combined Joint Task Force 180, formed around the 18th Airborne Corps and commanded by Lieutenant General Dan McNeil. Special Forces teams began to organize the first battalions of a nascent Afghan army at roughly the same time. This mission was eventually transferred to CJTF 180 headed by the 10th Mountain Division. Mirroring the Bush administration’s reluctance to engage in nation-building or peacekeeping, a “light footprint” became the basis for American commitment. Troop levels were kept low and oriented primarily toward combat and special operations. The light footprint allowed combat forces to raid and clear objectives, but not hold any ground for significant periods. Insufficient American forces and inadequate Afghan military and police forces enabled the Taliban and al-Qaeda to infiltrate back into Afghanistan from sanctuaries in Pakistan in succeeding years.
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, 2001–2003
For President George W. Bush, tutored by Vice President Cheney and the bellicose neoconservatives, there could be no “global war on terrorism” without a preventive war with Iraq. Had the administration wanted to select one nation to attack as a sponsor of state-supported terrorism, the CIA and State Department could have provided a long list of candidates. The list would have included Iran, Cuba, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and North Korea. The United States in 2001 did not face an immediate threat from any of these states, especially the worst case threat of weapons of mass destruction transferred to terrorists. Iraq was no different. Its sin was that it was governed by a despicable tyrant,
Saddam Hussein, whose sadism toward his own people rivaled that of Josef Stalin. Saddam Hussein had ordered the execution of thousands, including two sons-in-law, for treachery and disloyalty. His sons Uday and Qusay inherited their father’s taste for torture and debasement. His inner circle of ministers, advisers, and generals shared his megalomania or kept their places through sycophancy of the highest order. The regime had a well-earned reputation for duplicity, evasion, corruption, and contempt for international norms. It had killed Iranians, Kurds, and Shi’a Arabs with poison gas. It had launched missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia. On top of all of these offenses, Saddam Hussein had targeted the Bush family for attack and had ridiculed the president’s father as a weak, ineffectual leader and a tool of international Jewry.
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