Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  WITH THE FALL of Kandahar, the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders abandoned all hope of holding Afghanistan’s cities and sought refuge in remote regions of Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. The fugitive of greatest concern to the Americans, Osama bin Laden, was reported to be retreating toward Tora Bora, one of the most imposing natural landmarks in a land renowned for the beauty of its rugged terrain. Abutting Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, Tora Bora was dominated by craggy mountains that soared to altitudes of 12,000 to 15,000 feet. In the late 1990s, Al Qaeda had built up Tora Bora as a training ground and hiding place, carving caves into its mountainsides from which to shoot approaching enemies. When the Taliban regime had begun to crumble, Al Qaeda fighters had started falling back on Tora Bora, stocking its caves with food, weapons, and ammunition. By early December 2001, between 500 and 3,000 enemy fighters were believed to be holed up in the region.

  For JSOC, Tora Bora presented a chance for redemption after several frustrating months. A few days after the 9/11 attack, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had asked JSOC’s parent organization, SOCOM, to lay plans for striking Al Qaeda leaders, based upon the mistaken impression that the SOCOM commander wielded authority over all special operations forces. When Rumsfeld learned that SOCOM did not have such authority, he set out to bestow it.

  Serving his second tour as secretary of defense—his first had been in the Ford Administration, twenty-five years earlier—Rumsfeld enjoyed wide latitude in imprinting his stamp on the Defense Department. George W. Bush was the type of chief executive who did not meddle in the day-to-day business of subordinates, and Rumsfeld’s age and experience accorded him additional leeway. Rumsfeld, moreover, had the energy, impatience, bluntness, and callous indifference to criticism required to pull an enormous bureaucratic sled. Yet even he found that weeks of pawing in the dirt often would not move the sled an inch, on account of the department’s bureaucratic sclerosis and the affinity of some of its generals for the status quo.

  Rumsfeld asked the SOCOM commander, General Charles R. Holland, to come up with a global counterterrorism campaign and request transfer of authority over deployed special operations forces from regional combatant commanders to SOCOM. Such an undertaking called for a general who was ready and willing to joust with the four-star generals who headed the regional commands and the armed services, as well as with Cabinet officials and ambassadors. Holland, a soft-spoken pilot with a preference for compromise over confrontation, had neither the temperamental predisposition nor the desire to wage a bureaucratic war. He did not directly refuse Rumsfeld’s offer of sweeping new powers over special operations forces, but instead continued to manage SOCOM as before while discreetly torpedoing a number of planning efforts aimed at giving new authorities to his command. “Holland was given the keys to the kingdom and he didn’t want to pick them up,” observed Stephen Cambone, an aide to Rumsfeld.

  Holland’s demurral led Rumsfeld to go directly to JSOC in pursuit of his global war on Al Qaeda. The JSOC commander at the time, Major General Dell Dailey, was more willing than Holland to take the keys to the kingdom, and his two-star rank gave him the advantage of raising fewer hackles with the rest of the military than the SOCOM commander. His personality and skills, however, clashed with those of the JSOC ground operators who made up most of JSOC’s blade edge. An Army aviator by trade, Dailey exercised caution and operated by the book, whereas the ground operators liked to take risks and adapt on the fly. When Delta operators advocated thinking outside the box, Dailey countered that those who had ventured outside the box of standard aviation procedures had caused aircraft to crash and people to die.

  During the planning for one of the first JSOC operations in Afghanistan, an assault on a fertilizer factory, a Delta planner had proposed parachuting in a small number of Delta operators to hit the target with maximum stealth and speed. Dailey preferred a less risky raiding model, in which hundreds of troops and dozens of helicopters took part in the operation. “What in the hell kind of bullshit is that?” Dailey yelled at the planner when he briefed the proposal to a group of officers.

  At Dailey’s behest, JSOC’s first operations in Afghanistan consisted of raids on an abandoned airstrip and an empty compound in Kandahar belonging to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Dailey invited CNN and other media outlets to record the operations on video and broadcast them to the world, in the belief that the raids would unnerve the enemy by demonstrating America’s ability to enter Taliban territory with impunity. The airstrip, moreover, was needed to facilitate future operations inside Afghanistan, and intelligence indicated that Omar might be paying a short visit to his compound.

  The allocation of much of JSOC’s time and manpower to these two operations appalled Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Pakistan, as well as much of Delta Force. A senior Delta officer scoffed: “Would the type of person who volunteers to sacrifice his own life in a suicide mission, just to get to a place where he can have his way with seventy-two virgins, really back down due to ‘moral distress’ inflicted by a CNN video clip of bombings on targets he knows are empty?” But a paucity of intelligence, from both the CIA and military intelligence organizations, left JSOC with few other targets onto which it could clamp its jaws.

  As the 5th Special Forces Group gained international acclaim for its support of the Northern Alliance, Dailey fretted that JSOC’s ground forces—Delta Force and SEAL Team Six—were being left by the wayside. He thus became more receptive to suggestions from his unit commanders to send small detachments into places where enemy personnel were still believed to be located. When Delta officers requested permission to advance on Tora Bora, Dailey gave the green light.

  Delta Force and the CIA began by sending four of their best men into Tora Bora to find and kill as many members of Al Qaeda as possible. In little time, the four men discovered large concentrations of Al Qaeda running around the mountains and the valley. Hiding in a rock crevice with sweeping views, they directed torrents of bombs onto enemy positions over a period of three days.

  One of the four men sent into Tora Bora, a CIA officer who had previously served in Delta Force, recommended inserting a Ranger battalion into Tora Bora to block escape routes. Gary Berntsen, the senior CIA officer in Afghanistan, concurred, submitting a request for eight hundred Rangers to CIA headquarters. “We need Rangers now!” Berntsen pleaded. “The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!!”

  When the request reached Hank Crumpton at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, he forwarded it to General Franks. The commanding general turned it down on the grounds that the combination of Afghans and small numbers of American personnel had worked so far and hence the formula needed no modification.

  On December 8, a fifty-man Delta Force unit led by Major Thomas Greer arrived in Tora Bora with orders to push into the enemy’s lair. Greer had the added responsibility of managing the “Eastern Alliance,” a loose-knit conglomeration of local Afghan militias with approximately 2,500 fighters. In the absence of a large US ground presence, these militias would bear most of the responsibility for searching and clearing territory in Tora Bora.

  The preponderance of men in the Eastern Alliance belonged to either Mohammed Zaman Ghun Shareef or Hazrat Ali. Neither man made for an especially appealing partner. Ali wanted the Americans to bomb the enemy into oblivion while his men waited in the surrounding area. As the bombs turned Tora Bora into a moonscape, Ali explained, his militia troops would kill the few Al Qaeda survivors who trickled out. “The Arabs will fight to the death,” Ali told Greer in justifying his caution. “I don’t want to sacrifice all my men to get them. Ten thousand fighters won’t be enough to get them out of the trenches.”

  After prolonged subjection to American badgering and enticements, Ali agreed to send some of his troops into Tora Bora. The Americans were dismayed, although not especially surprised, when they learned that Ali was proceeding in a manner quite different from what had been asked of him. Moving forward in the daylight hours, Ali
’s men fasted in observance of Ramadan, so that when night came, they were ravenous and could only focus on two things, eating and drinking. Because they did not carry military rations or other provisions into the combat zone, they left the ground taken during the day to move back to areas where they could obtain food and drink. The next morning, it was back to square one.

  Greer’s D-boys, meanwhile, pushed forward into the valley on foot by themselves. Manning concealed observation posts, they used thermal imaging devices to spot Al Qaeda positions for destruction by strike aircraft. Without large and capable ground forces, however, it was impossible to close off escape routes, scour cave complexes, or capture enough prisoners to triangulate Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

  Delta Force remained at Tora Bora to rain down destruction until the day when the enemy was no longer to be seen, which turned out to be December 19. According to US estimates, Al Qaeda suffered 1,100 casualties at Tora Bora, while 1,500 of the militants escaped with their lives. Although the Americans would not know it until much later, Bin Laden was among those who slipped out unhurt.

  At the end of January 2002, just as the Americans thought the war was coming to an end, US intelligence detected a concentration of Taliban and Al Qaeda personnel in the vicinity of the Shahikot Valley, another longtime extremist redoubt near the Pakistani border. According to intelligence analysts, an estimated 1,000 fighters had gathered in an area ten by ten kilometers. Inside this square lay the valley floor—at an elevation of 8,000 feet—and a hodgepodge of mountain peaks and ridges poking several thousand feet higher.

  The planning for an operation into the valley, code-named Anaconda, commenced at the headquarters of Major General Franklin Hagenbeck. In December 2001, Hagenbeck had entered Afghanistan as commander of both the 10th Mountain Division and Combined Joint Task Force Mountain, the latter constituting the new command element for all US ground forces in Afghanistan. Planners from the 5th Special Forces Group and JSOC joined Hagenbeck’s staff in organizing Operation Anaconda.

  For both General Franks and the special operators, Anaconda offered a welcome opportunity to make up for the Tora Bora disappointment and to disprove the claim, running rampant among US military officers in Afghanistan, that the United States would have caught Bin Laden at Tora Bora had it sent in conventional US ground forces. Rather than rely primarily on big American units to clear out the Shahikot Valley, Franks chose to double down on the combination of Afghan militias and American special operators. The valley floor was dotted with Afghan villages, which the Americans believed to be occupied by both civilians and members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and hence, Franks reasoned, the militiamen would be needed to distinguish the enemy combatants from the other Afghans. Six ODAs from the 5th Special Forces Group would run the Afghan militia units through a three-week training course and provide them with combat advisers for the operation. Franks did not have enough Afghan militiamen at his disposal to seal off potential escape routes, so, as something of a sop to the conventional forces, he gave the job of blocking the valley exits to a few thousand American regulars from the recently deployed 10th Mountain Division and 187th Infantry Regiment.

  Planning for Operation Anaconda took more than one month, the result of having too many participants in the planning room. Fortunately for the planners, the intended victims of the operation did not learn that they were in the crosshairs and remained in the valley. According to the final plan, the Afghan militiamen would serve as the operation’s “hammer,” driving through the villages on the valley floor from the west into an “anvil” of American soldiers occupying blocking positions on the trails through which the Taliban and Al Qaeda were expected to flee.

  Ahead of the hammer-and-anvil action, Delta Force and SEAL Team Six operators were to conduct reconnaissance of the valley under the guidance of a senior Delta officer, Lieutenant Colonel Pete Blaber. Like many special operators of his generation, Blaber had been drawn to special operations two decades earlier by the Eagle Claw catastrophe. He had first heard of the failed Iran hostage rescue when it flashed on a television screen at the student center of Southern Illinois University, where he was enrolled at the time. Glued to the news for the next several days, Blaber learned of the secret desert base, the aircraft crashes, and the participation of Delta Force. The bravery and sacrifices of the special operations task force caused Blaber to think about his own purpose in life, and in the process sparked an interest in military service. When Blaber told the local Army recruiter he wanted to become an officer in the US Army, he explained that he wanted to make sure that the United States never again bungled a critical mission, and that good men would never again die as the result of bad command decisions. Was he interested in the Army Medical Corps, the recruiter inquired? No, said Blaber, Delta Force.

  The operators under Blaber’s command in the Shahikot Valley belonged to what were called “Advance Force Operations” teams. Conceived before 9/11 as part of an expansion of Delta’s intelligence apparatus, Advance Force Operations encompassed small, covert operations in hostile countries in preparation for the next Panama or Somalia. After the fall of Kabul, General Franks had asked Delta to assign forty-five men to Advance Force Operations teams in Afghanistan for the purpose of locating the scattering Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders.

  Blaber had eagerly sold Combined Joint Task Force Mountain on the value of his teams, explaining how the conventional forces assigned to Operation Anaconda stood to benefit from JSOC’s world-class reconnaissance capabilities. Entering the valley on the ground in very small detachments, they would establish hidden observation posts from which to locate enemy fighters before and during the battle. Blaber did not keep General Dailey apprised of his plans, as he suspected that Dailey would find them objectionable, representing as they did a repudiation of the large set-piece raids that had become the hallmark of Dailey’s tenure at JSOC. Blaber’s suspicions were well founded. When Dailey belatedly learned of Blaber’s participation in Anaconda, he tried to remove Blaber’s teams from the operation. Blaber stonewalled long enough to keep his men in the game.

  On February 27, three days before the hammer was scheduled to strike the anvil, Blaber’s Advance Force Operations teams infiltrated into the valley. Juliet team, consisting of five Delta operators, entered the Shahikot from the north on ATVs with ultra-quiet mufflers. Mako 31, a team of five SEALs, followed behind Juliet to occupy a ridgeline with a commanding view of the valley. From the southwest, moving on foot, came the three men of India team—two Delta operators and a signals intelligence specialist from the secretive Defense Department intelligence agency known variously as Gray Fox, the Intelligence Support Activity, and the Army of Northern Virginia.

  Ascending the high ground undetected, the reconnaissance teams scanned the Shahikot with Schmidt-Cassegrain spotting scopes, instruments with lenses so potent that the viewer could discern whether an individual was carrying a Kalashnikov at a distance of seven kilometers. Observation of “the Whale,” a humpbacked ridgeline six kilometers wide by two kilometers across that bisected the valley, revealed a staggering array of enemy observation posts and concealed fighting positions. “The enemy is everywhere,” Juliet reported to Blaber by satellite radio. The reconnaissance teams transmitted the coordinates of the positions they saw for future air strikes.

  Most of these enemy positions had not been identified by the high-tech surveillance and communications intelligence assets with which the Americans had swept the valley in recent days. The Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters had taken care to make their foxholes, bunkers, and weapons invisible from the air, and had refrained from using electronic communications devices. Had it not been for the Advance Force Operations teams, US and Afghan forces would have had no idea that the enemy possessed significant combat power on the Whale or other high ground.

  In the predawn hours of March 2, the hammer force of four hundred Afghan militiamen drove into the valley in two columns, riding in a miscellany of thirty-seven trucks that included Jingas, Toyotas,
Mitsubishis, and a handful of Mercedes. Their Special Forces advisers had organized them into squads, platoons, and companies and assigned them accordingly into the procession of vehicles. Just as the convoy entered the valley, an AC-130 gunship, call sign Grim 31, spotted what appeared to be a hostile truck convoy heading toward them from the opposite direction.

  Chief Warrant Officer Stanley L. Harriman, a Special Forces adviser riding with the Afghans, was listening to the gunship’s reporting through his headset. The more he heard, the more the reported enemy vehicles sounded like those in his own convoy. Harriman hurriedly broadcast his coordinates to make sure that the aircraft had not mistaken friendly vehicles for the enemy.

  Grim 31 issued a set of coordinates for the vehicles it was watching. A check by headquarters staff determined those coordinates to be more than six kilometers from Harriman’s position. To be extra certain, the crew of Grim 31 shone a special light, invisible to the human eye, to illuminate the “glint” tape affixed to US vehicles for identification purposes. The beam detected no glint tape on the vehicles. Nor did Grim 31 see any of the orange and purple VS-17 panels that Americans were supposed to put on friendly vehicles as another means of identification from the air.

  The AC-130 was cleared to fire. Its stabilized 105mm howitzer spewed an artillery shell every six seconds, while the 25mm and 40mm cannons began a steady rat-a-tat of automatic fire. The gunners stayed with the vehicles as they drove off the road in their desperation to escape the deluge.

  “I’m taking incoming! I’m taking incoming!” Harriman hollered into his radio, while the driver of his truck swerved at forty miles per hour to evade large shellbursts that were chasing the vehicle. The explosions soon caught up with the truck. An artillery shell landed right next to the vehicle, spraying its side with shrapnel, including a racquetball-sized chunk that punctured the passenger side door and went through Harriman’s lower back. Other bits of metal penetrated Harriman’s legs, severed fingers, tore off an ear, and cut up his face. The truck’s driver was hit in the hand, stripping the flesh from his fingers down to the bone.