Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  Dostum escorted the Green Berets inside a walled compound. Seated on carpets, the Americans sipped tea while the general explained the current situation and his battle plans on a map. Dostum’s “army,” the Americans learned, consisted of fewer than one hundred hardcore fighters. When he needed a larger force, he drew on a pool of 2,000 part-time militiamen.

  At the end of the meeting, Dostum said that half of the American team should join him for a trip westward to his command post, several hours away on horseback. They would be leaving in fifteen minutes. An invitation to a forward command post, no matter how short the notice, was something a Green Beret could not pass up.

  For Captain Nutsch and the five other Americans selected for the journey, Dostum’s lieutenants led forth six horses. Descendants of the steeds of Genghis Khan, the horses had short, thick legs, perfectly matched to Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain. The saddles were tiny by American standards, having been designed for Afghan men, who on average weighed about 140 pounds, whereas no one on Nutsch’s team tipped the scales at less than 200 pounds. The stirrups were so short that the taller Americans rode with their knees sticking up near their ears.

  ODA 595’s excursion to the front would be the first of many horseback rides for the Green Berets sent to assist the Northern Alliance. The horses plodded up and down mountain trails that narrowed to two feet in places, with 1,000-foot drops awaiting the rider whose horse put a hoof in the wrong place. Prolonged riding on the stout beasts chafed the legs of the Americans, in some cases drawing blood, and left them struggling to walk after they dismounted. When they reached a well-situated observation point, the Americans fetched their rucksacks from the pack mules and unloaded their laser acquisition markers, laptops, and other high-tech gear. “It’s as if the Jetsons had met the Flintstones,” one of the Special Forces soldiers quipped.

  The first six smart bombs directed by ODA 595 missed their intended targets, most of them by a mile or more. For troops who had been inserted for the express purpose of guiding precision munitions, nothing could have been more humiliating or discouraging. As the team members stewed in dejection, an English-speaking Afghan approached them to convey General Dostum’s reaction. Expecting to receive word of the warlord’s grave disappointment, the Americans were stunned to hear the Afghan report Dostum to be in a state of elation. “You made an aircraft appear and drop bombs,” the man said. “General Dostum is very happy.”

  Captain Nutsch believed that the main cause of the initial debacle was the team’s distance from the front lines. Dostum had forbidden the Americans from getting close to the fighting, for fear that an American would get killed and the US government would then pull everyone out, as it had done in Somalia after Operation Gothic Serpent. Captain Nutsch, endeavoring to drown out the whispers of Gothic Serpent’s ghosts with persistent cajoling about the value of accurate air strikes, eventually secured Dostum’s permission to move the team closer to the Taliban.

  As soon as the Special Forces came near the front lines, their bombs started hitting their intended targets with pinpoint precision. Tuning in to Taliban radio frequencies, Dostum followed Taliban discussions of the bombardments with the eagerness of a boy listening to a broadcast of his favorite sports team. The voices of the hitherto arrogant Taliban wavered with fear as huge explosions vaporized installations and fighting positions nearby. Dostum, astonishing the Americans once again, dialed up the opposing Taliban commanders on the phone to taunt them. “I have the Americans with me, and they have their death ray,” Dostum notified his adversaries. “Surrender or die!”

  On the same day that Nutsch’s ODA landed south of Mazar-i-Sharif, ODA 555 set down in the Panjshir Valley, home to the Northern Alliance warlord Fahim Khan, with whom Gary Schroen’s Jawbreaker team had been working for nearly a month. One of the Jawbreaker officers promptly briefed ODA 555 on the CIA’s plans for working with the Northern Alliance. Within twenty-four hours, the Special Forces team was at the dividing line between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, at Bagram, twenty-five miles north of Kabul.

  A Northern Alliance commander took ODA 555 up a dilapidated Soviet-era control tower at the Bagram air base, giving them a panoramic vista of the Shomali Plain. The Americans could see the Taliban trenches and bunkers that for years had served as the Taliban’s main defensive barrier against a Northern Alliance thrust across the plain to Kabul. Having ascended the tower on the assumption that they were receiving an introductory tour of the battlefield, the Americans were taken by surprise when the Afghan commander started pointing out specific Taliban artillery positions, assembly points, and command centers within plain sight. Grabbing their laser guiding equipment, the Americans began marking targets.

  Locating enemy positions, the Special Forces quickly learned, would be much easier than getting aircraft to bomb them. At this point in time, only sixty-five American aircraft were dropping bombs in all of Afghanistan, and they were spread thinly across a country the size of Texas. On the first day and for many thereafter, most of the pleas of ODA 555 for air strikes went unmet. A master sergeant on the team lamented that they had “more targets than a hound dog has fleas,” but they would “be lucky to get two or three aircraft to respond to our requests for strikes.” Fahim Khan and his militiamen began to lose confidence in the Americans for the lack of bombs. Radio intercepts revealed that Taliban commanders on the Shomali Plain were laughing about how weak and ineffective the Americans were.

  On November 1, the American bombing intensified in northern Afghanistan, but it was concentrated near Mazar-i-Sharif, in support of Dostum’s forces. Fahim Khan’s remonstrations to the Americans that they were showing favoritism to Dostum produced no change in the geographic distribution of bombs. On November 9, Dostum’s forces advanced the final forty kilometers on Mazar-i-Sharif at a gallop, striving to enter the city ahead of the forces of rival warlord Atta Mohammed Noor, some of whom were speeding toward Mazar-i-Sharif in Taliban vehicles that they had bought, stolen, or captured. Taliban leaders surrendered the city that day.

  The bombing of the Shomali Plain finally swung into gear on November 11. Precision bombs plastered Taliban buildings, tanks, artillery, and command bunkers, killing unsuspecting troops by piercing their vital organs or crushing them with overpressure. Within a matter of hours, American airpower had blown gaping holes in a defensive line that the Northern Alliance had been unable to penetrate for years. Fahim Khan’s forces surged into the holes right behind the strikes, with the bulk of the men and vehicles advancing on or near the highway leading to Kabul. Taliban commanders switched sides in droves under the combined weight of punishing air strikes, Northern Alliance assaults, and wads of $100 bills offered by the CIA.

  Most of the Taliban units that defected were under the command of native Afghans, for whom opportunistic shifting of allegiances was a storied cultural tradition. Units led by Arabs, Pakistanis, and Chechens, meanwhile, continued to do battle. Making a fighting retreat toward Kabul, the diehards intended to form a defensive ring around the capital city. But they had barely begun digging foxholes on the city’s outskirts when the onrushing Northern Alliance crashed through their positions as easily as the original front lines. On November 13, the Taliban leadership scurried out of a chaotic Kabul just before the arrival of cargo trucks crammed with Northern Alliance troops.

  ONE DAY AFTER the fall of Kabul, four Black Hawk helicopters flew Jason Amerine’s Special Forces team, ODA 574, to the town of Tarin Kowt in southern Afghanistan. Communications Sergeant Wes McGirr, who at twenty-five years of age was the youngest member of ODA 574, looked down from his Black Hawk in wonderment as it soared over lofty mountain peaks, thinking that he must be experiencing the same mixture of fear and exhilaration that the Jedburghs had felt when they flew across the English Channel into occupied France. “It’s dark, and I’ve got more gear than I can possibly run with,” McGirr thought. “Once we get dropped off, we’re on our own. God, this is awesome. This is a war and we’re live and we’ve got a
mmo and anything can happen from here on out.”

  Amerine’s mission was to support an Afghan opposition leader who had just returned from exile, Hamid Karzai. The CIA had infiltrated Karzai from Pakistan by air in the hope that he could take charge of a new national government, one capable of securing the country and preventing another outbreak of civil war once the Taliban were gone. Upon arrival at Tarin Kowt, Amerine’s team met a CIA contingent led by “Greg,” who reported to the CIA station chief in Pakistan, Robert L. Grenier.

  In contrast to the CIA officers working with SOF in northern Afghanistan, Greg did not let the special operators in on his broad strategic plans, leaving the special operators with the impression that no such plans existed and hence they themselves were calling the shots. Higher military headquarters had led the Green Berets to believe that the CIA agents were “tourists and cashiers,” present only to observe and hand out money while the Special Forces directed the destruction of the enemy. To special operators who liked to plan everything in exacting detail, the freewheeling ways of Greg’s team appeared amateurish; some members of ODA 574 joked that CIA stood for “Children in Action.” The special operators eventually learned that their CIA counterparts were much more than tourists and cashiers, and were making decisions on crucial political and military matters without informing them. Greg even had the clout to overturn tactical military decisions he found disagreeable—for instance, pulling Amerine’s troops away from terrain that he did not deem ideally suited to defense.

  Amerine and Greg competed for influence with the primary object of their mutual interest, Hamid Karzai. Born into a leading family of Afghanistan’s most prominent tribal confederation, Karzai had lived abroad for years, first as a university student in India and later as a political organizer of Afghan exiles in Pakistan. Unlike the warlords of the Northern Alliance, Karzai did not possess his own militia, and he did not have the military experience to form one from the local Afghans who were prepared to take up arms against the Taliban. The Special Forces, therefore, expected that they would need to help him recruit, organize, train, and lead a force. Amerine thought it would take at least six months to build this force and capture its first objective.

  The onrush of events nullified Amerine’s plan almost immediately. The unraveling of the Taliban in the north and the sudden appearance of Karzai incited an anti-Taliban uprising in Tarin Kowt, delivering the provincial capital into Karzai’s lap just a few days after the Special Forces arrived. In Kandahar, the Taliban’s central hub of power in southern Afghanistan, alarmed Taliban authorities resolved to snuff out Karzai and his local allies before they could move beyond Tarin Kowt. On November 17, a convoy of eighty Taliban vehicles departed Kandahar for Tarin Kowt, advancing in three columns. The Americans estimated that 1,000 Taliban fighters were packed into the vehicles.

  Amerine devised a plan to smash the vehicles and their passengers with American airpower before they could reach Tarin Kowt. The team set up an observation post on a ridge overlooking a valley through which the Taliban vehicles would have to pass. From this position, the Special Forces enjoyed unrestricted observation of a huge, open kill zone, seven miles across and four miles deep. The Air Force sent three F-18s to Tarin Kowt and put them on standby at an altitude of 30,000 feet.

  When the long convoy slithered into view, the Special Forces marked the vehicles at the front, and then Amerine asked the F-18s to commence firing. The first bomb landed a few hundred yards in front of the lead Taliban vehicle. The second hit the lead vehicle squarely, obliterating it. A cheer went up among the Americans. Then they noticed that they could no longer hear the voices of the Afghans who had driven them to the site. As soon as the first bomb had missed its target, the Afghans had run back to their trucks, convinced that the Americans had failed and the Taliban would imminently slay all in their path.

  Most of the drivers had started their engines and thrown the trucks in gear before the Americans could reach them. Amerine did not want to abandon the fantastic mountain aerie, but most of the American gear and ammunition was in those vehicles, so the Americans leapt into the beds of the departing pickups for the return ride to Tarin Kowt. Between bumps, the Americans attempted to coax the drivers into reversing course, but to no avail.

  By the time they were back at Tarin Kowt, Amerine’s patience and cultural sensitivity had been exhausted. Locating Karzai, he heatedly explained that the Afghan drivers had panicked and fled. While Karzai berated the Afghans, the Americans took the keys and drove the vehicles back toward the high ground. The Taliban had by now occupied the original observation post, so the Americans found another spot.

  In the end, the delay and repositioning were not enough to spare the Taliban convoy from destruction. Guided by Amerine’s team, US aircraft pulverized 45 vehicles over the course of the day. The remainder of the Taliban drivers turned back. After the battle, search parties found the corpses of 300 Taliban fighters in the kill zone.

  After the annihilation of the Taliban attack force outside Tarin Kowt, Karzai told Amerine that they should move quickly toward Kandahar. Amerine replied that they did not have enough troops to take a major city like Kandahar, which the Taliban still held in a vise-like grip.

  “I believe Kandahar will be surrendered to us,” Karzai replied. “We just need to get our army to the outskirts of the city so we can talk to the Taliban leadership face-to-face.”

  Amerine begged permission to administer two weeks of basic military training to Karzai’s newly created armed forces before they headed to Kandahar. Karzai reluctantly agreed. The Special Forces spent the remainder of the month training an “army” that one American officer described as “25 to 30 well-meaning friends, farmers, and shopkeepers.”

  At this juncture in the campaign, with additional ODAs entering Afghanistan in various places to work with the anti-Taliban forces, General Franks decided to send higher-ranking SOF officers to Afghanistan to manage the burgeoning enterprise and serve as liaisons with Northern Alliance leaders. Field-grade Special Forces officers arrived in theater to command the equivalents of battalion headquarters. According to Special Forces doctrine, these officers did not have authority over an ODA team’s operations. When the colonel overseeing ODA 574 showed up, he assured Amerine that he and his staff were there to “give you top cover” and “facilitate.” They would provide military advice to Karzai, not get into the team’s tactical affairs.

  On November 30, ODA 574 and its Afghan protégés drove slowly toward Kandahar in a small convoy. Toyota and Subaru trucks, overstuffed with well-wishers, cruised alongside to wave at Karzai and his entourage. One observer called it “a cross between the Baja, California, off-road races and scenes from the movie, ‘Mad Max.’” Large numbers of Pashtuns volunteered to join Karzai’s “army,” but their unruliness worried Karzai, who refused to induct most of them into his ranks.

  As the column neared Kandahar, the American Special Forces colonel who had previously promised to stay out of the ODA’s tactical business started to micromanage. He and his staff told Amerine which hills to take, and demanded to see Amerine’s plans before he took them. On December 5, the newcomers issued bombing orders to an Air Force tactical controller who was supposed to be taking his orders from Amerine and his subordinates. Watching the proceedings through binoculars, Amerine fumed as he saw the bombs fall on targets he did not think needed to be hit.

  The colonel’s air campaign lasted only a few minutes before catastrophe struck. Just after the tactical controller entered the coordinates for one of the colonel’s targets into the laser acquisition system, the batteries died. The controller replaced the batteries and turned the system back on, assuming that the coordinates entered previously would still be in the system. But on this particular piece of hardware, unlike some of the other models, a loss of power reset the targeting coordinates to the device’s location.

  The coordinates were transmitted to a B-52 bomber, which disgorged a 2,000-pound bomb, second in size only to the BLU-82 �
��Daisy Cutter” in the US Air Force’s bomb inventory. The munition landed precisely where it had been directed, the hilltop where the laser acquisition marker and all of ODA 574 were located.

  The blast killed three members of Amerine’s team and fifty-six Afghans. It wounded ODA 574’s other nine Green Berets, along with sixty-five Afghans and sixteen other Americans who had recently arrived in support. The Americans who had not been injured, whose number included the colonel, provided first aid to Amerine and the other surviving Green Berets, most of whom were soon evacuated to the US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Karzai, who had been inside a building looking at maps with Greg, was tossed in the air by a massive gush of hot air that tore through the structure’s rear wall, yet aside from a few cuts on his face he escaped injury.

  Although the errant bomb all but ruined Karzai’s army, the drive on Kandahar would continue, thanks to Gul Agha Sherzai, a warlord whose eight-hundred-man militia was receiving support from another Special Forces team. In the succeeding days, waves of air strikes swept the roads leading into Kandahar, clearing paths for Sherzai’s hundred-vehicle armada of Toyota pickups, Jinga transport trucks, and farm tractors. The going was tougher for Sherzai’s forces than for the militias of the north, for by early December the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters had devised tactics that reduced their vulnerability to American airpower. Hiding in bunkers or enclosed irrigation canals, they held their fire until hostile forces approached within one hundred meters or less, putting them too close for the use of US air support. Sherzai’s fighters had to root out the more stubborn enemy soldiers with grenades and knives.

  Sherzai’s militiamen reached Kandahar on December 7. As Karzai had foretold, Taliban leaders did not defend the city to the death, but instead met the advancing forces on the city’s outskirts and entered into surrender negotiations. Dragging out the surrender talks for several days, the Taliban negotiators bought time for Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders to flee the city.