by Ed Darack
On 14 May, ⅔’s advanced echelon (ADVON) arrived in Afghanistan; one hundred strong, the ADVON preceded the arrival of the battalion’s main element by just a few weeks. And as the newly on-deck Marines jumped into the faraway world of eastern Afghanistan, Cooling, MacMannis, and Donahue agreed that having Marines of ⅔ participate in Stars would help transition them from training to real-world combat operations in one clean sweep—and keep with MacMannis’ desire to maintain a consistent op tempo for the region during the turnover period. Furthermore, the Marines knew that during the spring thaw, fresh fighters would begin flowing into the region from Pakistan through the porous border, necessitating an even more vigilant presence. They would unleash Stars in early June of 2005, just as the main element of ⅔ would begin rolling into Afghanistan.
But in late May, the ongoing intel feed that drove the Stars concept and defined its specifics fell off the map—just disappeared. “The ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] in the Korangal is just unmatched, just amazing,” Drew Priddy told Tom Wood shortly after Wood’s arrival. “As soon as a single Marine enters the valley—or even passes by its mouth—every bad guy knows what’s going on, all the way up to the highest reaches of the Korangal. And then they just scatter, just vanish, probably back into Pakistan—and the intel hits die.” Tom quickly grasped the operational situation in the region once he was in-country, being thoroughly briefed by Priddy on the most effective methods of developing missions. Stars was out as a formal operation, but the quick-thinking and determined operations officer resolved to formulate a new mission—⅔’s first battalion-level op—that would use the Stars shell as a foundation. The battalion just needed specific intel on the whos, the wheres, and the whens to snap the plan into shape and merge the Marines of ⅔ into the fluid, uninterrupted op cycle Cooling and 3/3 had established and that MacMannis looked to have ⅔ seamlessly maintain.
That job fell squarely on Westerfield’s shoulders. Having absorbed the intel that 3/3 had been feeding him in the months prior to ⅔’s arrival, the boyishly enthusiastic intel officer knew that determining even the most basic targeting attribute—the who—had proven to be more complex than any that the United States had ever faced. The enemy throughout Afghanistan—in particular in the Pech, Korangal, and surrounding valleys—couldn’t be defined in monolithic terms like the Nazis, or the Imperial Japanese, or even Saddam Hussein’s forces. Westerfield knew the enemy of the region not as broad-based and cohesive, but as an amorphous patchwork of “bad guys”—leftover Taliban, Taliban aspirants, al-Qaeda foreign fighters, a multitude of flavors of independent Islamic extremists (primarily foreign, but some domestic), and even some semiorganized criminals. All, however, shared two common threads: pursuit of regional instability for their own gain, and extremist Islamic beliefs—beliefs, Westerfield understood, that the bad guys could use to manipulate the deeply pious local populace in such places as the Korangal, coercing villagers to join their ranks, or at the very least, provide a base of support for their insurgent and terrorist efforts. But to know this enemy required that Westerfield not just glean everything relevant from classified intel reports, but see that intel through the lens of Afghanistan’s history, in particular, through those historical elements most relevant to ⅔’s fight: the Soviet-Afghan War and its aftermath, which shaped contemporary Afghanistan and the enemy that American forces would face head-on during the invasion of 2001 and subsequent years.
Destitute, depopulated in many places—crushed throughout—Afghanistan could hardly be called a country by the time the last Soviet military convoy rumbled across the Amu Darya. The greatest losers of the war, of course, weren’t the Soviets, but the Afghan people, many of whom weren’t even living in Afghanistan anymore, but in squalid refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan’s mosaic of humanity had been shattered, not just by the inhumane Soviets, but after the war by those factions that had beaten the Russian Bear into retreat. Ever-more-extreme waves of influence ebbed, flowed, and sometimes crashed upon the region as the country spiraled into civil war—and Westerfield knew that these external forces influenced the Kunar perhaps more than any other part of Afghanistan, because of the province’s location along the Pakistani border near Peshawar—an influence that sustained the insurgent stronghold of the Korangal and surrounding valleys that the Marines faced.
The ISI had waged a masterpiece of a shadow war in the 1980s, coordinating the seven mujahideen parties to achieve the strategic short-term aims of Pakistan, the Saudi Arabian government, and the United States without allowing restive party leaders and their power-hungry commanders on the ground to tear at one another’s throat (not too much, at least). But as tight a lasso as the ISI held around the mujahideen, the Pakistanis didn’t command a total monopoly on the anti-Soviet efforts in Afghanistan. “Freelancers,” hailing primarily from Saudi Arabia, but also from Kuwait and other Arab states, set up shop in Peshawar, looking to influence the region through an array of mechanisms, from recruiting mujahideen aspirants and training them to fight the Red Bear, to funding hard-line Salafist madrassas. Well financed, either by their families or by benefactors in their home countries, those at the helms of these groups commanded small numbers of foot soldiers, many of whom had been prisoners in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and were conveniently released early to fight (and die) for the jihad in Afghanistan—a place about which many of these ex-prisoners and general miscreants knew nothing, even its location on a world map. Afghan Arab leaders easily manipulated those of the lower ranks, who were often impoverished and uneducated (save for their extremist indoctrination), emotionally leveraging their ignorance—a standard and very effective practice for terror and insurgent ringleaders.
The most notable of these Peshawar-based “Afghan Arab” groups, the Maktab al-Khidmat al Mujahidin al-Arab, or MAK (frequently referenced as the Afghan Services Bureau), had been spawned by the teachings of the Salafist Muslim Brotherhood. Two personalities who would rise to the forefront of global extremist infamy would join MAK, which was founded by a Palestinian Islamic theorist named Abdullah Azzam: Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. But MAK played only a relatively minor role in the Soviet-Afghan War; they trained just a handful of fighters and built a few cave networks and small medical centers. It was their financing (with bin Laden’s money) of logistical efforts for mujahideen inside Afghanistan that proved to be their greatest contribution to the Soviet defeat. After the November 1989 car bomb murder of Azzam in Peshawar, bin Laden and Zawahiri guided the MAK to hyperextremist—apocalyptic—levels as the leaders of the secretive organization the world would come to know as al-Qaeda, “the Base,” a name that has been traced to the final line of the group’s seminal treatise, penned by Azzam in 1987.
With the goal of securing hard-line Salafist ideological allegiance in return for their aid, other Arab groups supported the critical logistical efforts for mujahideen in Afghanistan. While money and supplies poured into the ISI from the U.S. and Saudi governments, the transport of weapons, food, fuel, and other supplies to the mujahideen from the Pakistani border presented the ISI with monumental—and prohibitively expensive—hurdles, often exhausting their monthly expenditures. Wealthy Arab supporters of the jihad bolstered the effort, with aid given not to the ISI to funnel to the fighters, but to the party bosses in Peshawar and sometimes directly to their commanders in Afghanistan to pay for mule and horse trains to carry the vital cargo of munitions and other supplies down the final, critical logistical pathways. The majority of this help, however, went to the two most fundamentalist parties, those of Gulbadin Hekmatyar (HIG) and Mohammad Khalis’s Hezb-e-Islami-Khalis (HIK). Because HIK, which took the lion’s share of this funding, dominated the organized resistance movement in the Kunar and Pech River Valley regions for most of the war, this area experienced a strong inflow of extremist Salafist ideology.
Wealthy Arabs also financed the development and maintenance of strict fundamentalist madrassas in and around Peshawar. Chief among the
se in importance for the Kunar province were the so-called Panjpiri madrassas of the town of Panjpir in the Swabi district of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. The Panjpiri madrassas, principally the infamous Darul Quran Panjpir Madrassa, disseminated the hardest line of Salafist ideology. And they had many, many fresh faces to whom to preach: Swabi held claim to one of Pakistan’s largest Afghan refugee camps; many who fled the Kunar province, particularly after indiscriminate Soviet carpet-bombing campaigns throughout the Kunar and Pech valleys in the mid-eighties, came to this camp, then returned to the Kunar after the war. Refugee camps throughout Afghanistan would prove vital components to the jihad against the Soviets, for the nurturing and recruitment of new mujahideen, as well as for providing safe havens for the fighters’ families while the mujahideen battled the Communists.
Hekmatyar, too, would influence eastern Afghanistan’s refugees, encouraging them to join HIG and his associated Lashkar-e Isar (Army of Sacrifice), not just by co-opting those in any of the hundreds of established refugee camps, but by creating his own. Just over one hundred road miles from Asadabad, the earthen-walled Shamshatoo Refugee Camp, about twelve miles southeast of Peshawar, would turn out thousands of fundamentalist fighters since the Pakistani government gave “Engineer Hekmatyar” the dusty swath of earth in 1979. With mosques, madrassas, medical facilities—even its own newspaper—the Shamshatoo camp, according to U.S. intel officers, was an important insurgent and terrorist base of operation for fighters moving into and out of eastern Afghanistan well into 2005.
In the early 1980s, the Arab influence pushed even farther into Afghanistan, spreading north of Kunar into Nuristan, through a man named Mawlawi Afzal, the Panjpiri-educated leader of Dawlat-I Inqilabi-yi Islamiyi Nuristan (Islamic Revolutionary State of Nuristan), a party that may have also influenced the people of the Korangal, Pech, and Kunar valleys. Another disciple of the Panjpiri madrassas, Jamil al-Rahman, broke away from Hekmatayar’s HIG in 1985 and formed yet another ultrafundamentalist Salafist group, the Jama’at-e Da’wa, in the heart of the Kunar. Attracting both money and fighters directly from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, this party achieved, by some accounts, greater power in the Kunar than even HIK during some stretches of the Soviet-Afghan War.
Vicious factional warring and withering disunity defined Afghanistan after the departure of the Soviet military; party leaders’ and individual commanders’ lustful quest for glory and regional dominance trumped any proclivity they may have held for peaceful Islamic unity. While no true victors emerged from the innumerable clashes during this period, the Afghan people, now virtually overlooked by the rest of the world, maintained their status of mass victimization at the hands of brutal war. Those who returned to Afghanistan from the refugee camps found razed villages, tainted water sources, and faced the dismal prospects of an ineffective central government in Kabul (often under siege), incapable of reining in the venal warlords who ravaged much of the country. But in the mid-nineties, a virtually invisible and stunningly unlikely factor would effect the reshaping of the country once again; Afghanistan would experience yet another tumultuous change.
Accounting for roughly 65 percent of its gross domestic product, cotton—and the textiles produced from the crop—is the most important of Pakistan’s domestically produced commodities. In 1993 and 1994, however, swarms of tiny white flies descended upon the prime cotton-growing areas in the Sindh and Punjab provinces, carrying with them the microscopic baggage of the leaf curl virus. Production plunged by over a third from its 1992 peak during the ensuing plague. With an economic crisis exploding before her eyes, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto dispatched her husband, Asif Zardari, to the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan to broker a deal to buy raw cotton to bridge Pakistan’s supply gap. The deal was finalized in short order, but the commodity had to be transported—through the warlord-plagued, anfractuous Afghan province of Herat, where bandits associated with Hekmatyar’s HIG hijacked the first of the convoys. Pakistan, once again viewing Afghanistan through the conceptual lens of “strategic depth,” realized that they needed a convoy protection force, and they needed that force immediately.
Pakistani officials sought to enlist the help of a former mujahideen fighter and student of the writings of Abdullah Azzam, an ethnic Pashtun named Mohammad Omar—Mullah Mohammad Omar, who had made recent overtures to the Pakistani government to grant him aid in building a national-level Afghan party that he claimed would quell all intra-Afghan fighting (easing the draining refugee problem in Pakistan by allowing the Afghans to move back to their homes). His fervor for strict national control of the populace and his location along the transit corridor between Turkmenistan and Pakistan cast the one-eyed Omar as the perfect candidate around which to build a force that would ensure the safe passage of the vital cotton crop. The Bhutto regime and the ISI supported him with arms, money, training, and most importantly, the procurement of personnel: talibs (students) of extremist Pakistani madrassas. These students weren’t intellectual aspirants, however; they were disaffected, hopeless, and angry youths drawn into viciously anti-Western institutes of indoctrination that preached violence against any of those who strayed from their extremist ideologies—even other Muslims. But . . . they excelled at keeping the highway open for road trains of Pakistani cotton lorries; Pakistan got its cotton and Mullah Omar got his army of “students.” In the wake of swarms of diminutive flies, the Taliban burgeoned into a regional force of reckoning.
Harshly enforcing the most draconian interpretations of Islamic law, the ruthless Taliban, many of whom claimed that they had organized to fight the rampant brutality of warlords against civilians, themselves raped women, children, and even men, plundered villages, and placed a vise grip on Afghan society. Pakistan, once again exerting influence over Afghanistan, continued to fund and aid the Taliban through much of the nineties, drawing on the execrable group and their hangers-on as they needed. Of course, just as they denied aiding the mujahideen in the 1980s, the Pakistanis staunchly maintained that they had no connection to the Taliban in the 1990s. In 1996, another base of funding and support for the Taliban arrived, this time on a large private jet landing at the dusty town of Jalalabad: Osama bin Laden and his extensive entourage. Exchanging money for protection (very large sums of the money he’d inherited from his father’s construction conglomerate), the Saudi Arabian nihilist had grown increasingly bold and determined in his new brand of shadowy international terror, financing a number of terrorist training camps in eastern Afghanistan including many in the Kunar province, where he, by some reports, gained familial ties through marriage—and where by some accounts, he ordered the 9/11 attacks.
While effective against other internal armed factions and warlords, the Taliban didn’t stand a chance against the U.S. forces who invaded Afghanistan as a swift response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Within weeks, U.S. forces and their indigenous Afghan allies crushed the Taliban, decimating the group even faster than they had risen under Pakistan’s nurture. And while bands of fighters aligned with the ideals of Mullah Omar would reassemble and call themselves Taliban, the movement was for the most part completely decimated by December of 2001, as most of their leadership and many of their underlings had been killed or captured and their bases of support had vanished.
The decades of violent, wrenching upheaval had left an intricate and perplexing “enemyscape” throughout the Kunar province. On two large marker boards in his office at ⅔’s Combat Operations Center (COC) at Jalalabad Airfield, Scott Westerfield listed the broad mishmash of extremist groups that the Marines of ⅔ would face: al-Qaeda terrorists from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, western China, Egypt, Chechnya, and beyond; surviving and aspiring “Taliban” fighters; members of HIG and other Islamist groups based along the border region; and local timber smugglers and small-time criminal gangs occasionally aiding and abetting the extremists out of opportunism as fighters-for-hire. In all, twenty-two distinct groups, collectively termed anticoalition militia, or ACM (coalit
ion referencing the union of Afghan forces and those of the United States and European and other nations), threatened stability throughout the Kunar and ⅔’s greater three-province area of operation. Further complicating the intel picture, information revealed that individual fighters and cell leaders might hold allegiances with not just one, but a multitude of extremist camps. To Westerfield, the “enemy” presented an enigma cloaked in the shadows of the Hindu Kush, and he resolved to unmask the most salient and dangerous of these cells.
⅔, known in-country as Task Force Koa (after a Hawaiian god of war), would work with a wide range of indigenous combatants and local support, many of whom had fought not just the Soviets, but the Taliban and other extremist groups. While some former Afghan mujahideen joined forces with contemporary extremist groups, a far greater number would align themselves with the new Afghan government. Known as “combined” operations (as opposed to “joint,” where different units of American forces work with one another), ⅔, like 3/3 before them, would conduct a number of missions side by side with Afghan National Army soldiers, Afghan National Police officers, Afghan Border Security agents, and the highly skilled and little-known Afghan Security Forces (ASF) personnel. The Marines would have Pashto interpreters attached to their units as well, whose intimate familiarity with local customs and supply chains would prove vital to ⅔ by identifying friend from known or potential foe—a key advantage in their fight against the mysterious enemy. Westerfield knew that he’d have to lean hard on these sources, but furthermore, he’d have to carefully integrate information streams derived from them with others at his disposal, learning along the way to determine trustworthy information from “noise.”
