by Mark Moyar
The frequent missing of the mark compelled raiding parties to carry large sums of cash to compensate homeowners for demolished walls or trampled crops. Shots were not fired during most of the raids, and when they were, the Americans usually hit insurgent suspects and no one else, but reports and rumors of harm to innocent Afghans fueled widespread criticisms. President Karzai repeatedly deplored errant American raids in public to score points with his Afghan supporters and deflect American criticisms of his regime for corruption and other flaws.
Maintaining the same pace as in Iraq without comparable amounts of intelligence also compelled JSOC to aim a large share of its operations at the lowliest of enemy combatants and to go after enemy units rather than just individuals. In 2010, the 75th Ranger Regiment assigned some of its elements to Team Darby, named after Ranger founder William Darby, later renamed Team Merrill after Frank Merrill of Merrill’s Marauders. The team was to be employed against sizable hostile forces in areas where the enemy was strong in order to deprive the insurgents of sanctuaries and inflict casualties on diehard elements. One favored tactic was to enter a private compound in the middle of an insurgent stronghold and goad the enemy into attacking. Barging into civilian residences, the Rangers paid the owners cash for the damages that were certain to ensue and told them to get out with their families while they still could. To turn the compounds into what they affectionately called their Alamos, the Rangers knocked holes in the walls for firing ports and positioned claymore mines around the exterior.
The Rangers encountered no shortage of hostile men willing to do battle. “For a Ranger, it’s good and bad,” said a Team Merrill veteran. “This is the highlight of what a Ranger wants to do. He wants to get in these massive fights, kill as many people as he can kill, destroy as much as he can destroy, but at the same time, we start to take casualties.” Team Merrill was shut down in late 2011 because of the high number of Ranger casualties and doubts about the outfit’s strategic utility.
On several occasions in 2010, JSOC inadvertently killed innocent civilians during raids, provoking a stream of protests from President Karzai. JSOC acquiesced to new rules of engagement, according to which the strike forces had to announce their presence whenever they arrived at a compound and had to offer those inside the opportunity to surrender. JSOC operators complained that this procedure allowed the enemy time to destroy phones, computers, and other incriminating evidence.
Building upon collaborative relationships developed in Iraq, American special operations forces and conventional forces generally worked well together in Afghanistan. Special operations forces bequeathed intelligence, targeting data, and psychological warfare assets to the conventional forces, and in return received access to aircraft and surveillance platforms as well as information about the local population and government. Colonel William B. Ostlund, one of the few officers to command both special operations and conventional forces in Afghanistan, observed that bilateral operations involving both types of forces were consistently superior to unilateral operations by one or the other.
WHILE NEITHER GEORGE W. Bush nor Barack Obama wanted counterinsurgency to feature prominently in his presidency, both found themselves investing large amounts of national treasure in counterinsurgency, and hence both of their administrations would have to grapple with the question of how best to use the burgeoning special operations forces in this type of warfare. Bush developed a strong interest in his counterinsurgency wars, but left most of the details to subordinates. From the perspective of special operations, the critical subordinate was Donald Rumsfeld, whose preoccupation with surgical strikes guided the trajectory of special operations forces for most of Bush’s presidency. Obama had an interest in neither the generalities nor the particulars, but the use of special operations forces in surgical counterterrorism appealed to him as a means of showing the American people he could get tough with terrorists, and could do so at a relatively low cost.
Special operators entered the wars of the early twenty-first century viewing themselves as the nation’s premier counterinsurgency practitioners. The large scale of these wars, however, led the conventional forces to take on most of the counterinsurgency work, with the major exception of the Village Stability Operations program in Afghanistan. Animated by Rumsfeld’s belief that surgical counterterrorism could cripple insurgencies, SOF focused so heavily on precision strikes that they had to expand beyond high-level leaders to low-level leaders and eventually to insurgents of any kind. General Stanley McChrystal’s organizational genius and his exploitation of advances in information technology allowed SOF to locate and eliminate individual insurgents with a hitherto unfathomable frequency, first in Iraq, and then in Afghanistan. Whereas manhunting had been a core competency for JSOC, it represented a major departure for the Special Forces and other white SOF, of such proportions as to provoke concern about the diversion of these forces from their original core competencies.
The exponential growth of precision counterterrorism operations yielded an extraordinary number of tactical successes in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which contributed to strategic successes. But when the surgical strikes were the sole performer in the counterinsurgent show, they proved incapable of influencing strategic outcomes. Only when they were part of an ensemble, with members who could hold ground, was strategic victory attainable. Village Stability Operations and the Afghan Local Police could hold ground, and they did so in some important areas, but their forces were too small to hold ground on a strategic scale. Collaboration with holders of ground, therefore, usually meant collaboration with conventional NATO forces and the Afghan national security forces. The effectiveness of such partnerships was subject to the capabilities of the partners, which in the case of the Afghan forces were often underwhelming.
The counterinsurgencies of the early twenty-first century began with a souring of relations between special operations and conventional forces, as the special operators attempted to pursue surgical strikes without so much as notifying the conventional commanders into whose neighborhoods they were intruding. Rumsfeld’s announcement that SOCOM was no longer the perpetual handmaiden to the military’s regional commanders encouraged special operators to view themselves as more valuable than conventional forces, compounding suspicions among conventional force personnel that SOF exaggerated their own importance. Within a few years, the special and conventional operators came to see that surgical strikes and population-security operations could be mutually reinforcing, and hence collaboration surged. The practical necessity of relying on conventional forces in large counterinsurgency campaigns again called into question the concentration of talent in the Army Special Forces, and gave the Marines further reason to constrain the new special operations organization that they had been forced, at bureaucratic gunpoint, to create.
For all its difficulties, the first decade of the post-9/11 era was a period of spectacular growth for special operations forces, in terms of resources, authorities, and prestige. Only the Kennedy era rivaled it in any respect, and no period matched it in terms of the magnitude of new responsibilities assumed. The special operators entered the next decade on an upward trajectory that seemed to know no bounds. But, as in the case of the Kennedy boom, the steep ascent had set the conditions for a painful fall.
CHAPTER 10
OVERREACH
To residents of the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, the two helicopters that departed Jalalabad airfield at 11 p.m. the night of May 1, 2011, appeared no different from the thousands of others that had come and gone for the past decade. A careful investigation of the passenger rosters for these two Black Hawks would have been required to discern that the twenty-three US Navy SEALs did not all belong to one of the units that were launching raids every night, but instead came from a multitude of units, some of which were not currently deployed to Afghanistan. What was most unusual about the two helicopters were the special stealth technologies that had been applied to them, which included a coating that deflected radar as well as
engine modifications that reduced emissions of heat and noise.
Bearing east on a course paralleling the ancient Silk Road, the pilots flew the Black Hawks just a few feet above the treetops. Within fifteen minutes, they were inside Pakistani air space, climbing above the Spin Ghar mountains. US intelligence picked up no indication that the Pakistani military had detected the initial intrusion. No other signs of heightened alertness within Pakistan’s air defense systems emerged during the remaining seventy-five minutes of the flight.
The first Black Hawk to reach the mysterious compound in Abbottabad attempted to set down in the largest courtyard. During its descent, the air from its blades cascaded into the compound walls and produced an unexpected rebound of air current, tilting the helicopter sideways. The tail rotor clipped a wall and shattered into pieces, an unrecoverable injury that sent the helicopter keeling over on its side and tumbling into the dust.
In the White House Situation Room, where President Obama and other top officials were watching a live video feed, the crash triggered a flurry of gasps. For those old enough to remember Operation Eagle Claw, the parallels seemed inescapable. America had sent its best to rescue the hostages from Iran in April 1980, and yet a helicopter had crashed before the ground operation could even get started.
What could not be seen from the overhead video camera was the Nightstalker pilot’s handling of the helicopter as it plunged into the dust cloud. In contrast to the pilots who had been assigned to unfamiliar aircraft for Eagle Claw, the pilots chosen for this mission were career special operations airmen who knew their aircraft as well as they knew their wives, if not better. The pilot was able to keep the Black Hawk from flipping over as it fell to the earth and, most importantly, to catch the tail boom on a twelve-foot privacy wall, which prevented the rotors from slamming into the ground. This exceptional piece of flying spared the passengers from injury, and thus permitted the mission to continue as planned.
Neptune Spear, as the Abbottabad raid was code named, had buried one of the ghosts of Eagle Claw by getting its aircraft to their intended destination, and buried another by keeping all of its men alive. It was to inter more along the way. But if Eagle Claw’s failures would provide the impetus for future successes, the immediate triumph of Neptune Spear was to be the wellspring of later woes. Mesmerized by the ephemeral thrills of victory, politicians and special operators were to draw all the wrong lessons from the operation, precipitating a series of decisions that damaged America’s geopolitical standing and undermined its special operations forces.
THE TALL CONCRETE compound in Abbottabad had come to the attention of the CIA the previous summer, becoming the first solid lead on the terrorist mastermind in the nearly ten years that had passed since Tora Bora. The CIA’s post-2001 search for Osama bin Laden, colossal in its size and expense, had been fixated on villages and cave complexes in Pakistan’s remote tribal regions, when in actuality Bin Laden had moved into Pakistan’s urban areas after fleeing Afghanistan, switching locations repeatedly to keep his enemies off his scent. In the middle of 2005 he had settled down in the newly built Abbottabad compound, and he had lived there for more than five years before the Americans caught a whiff of him. The CIA ultimately found the Abbottabad hideout by pursuing Bin Laden’s primary courier, known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, whose identity had been disclosed by an Al Qaeda captive when the CIA subjected him to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of the Bush administration.
The compound stood just a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s military academy, fueling suspicions that Pakistan’s government had known of Bin Laden’s presence all along. Pakistani police and intelligence agencies kept close tabs on houses near military installations because, among other things, those installations had frequently been attacked by opponents of the government. According to extensive research by New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall, the Pakistani government’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency had a special desk responsible solely for protecting Bin Laden, the existence of which was known to a small number of senior Pakistani officials.
Residents of the neighborhood only occasionally saw the two tall brothers who ran Bin Laden’s compound, Arshad and Tariq Khan. None of the compound’s residents attended wedding celebrations or other community events. When some local boys hit a cricket ball over the compound’s wall, the brothers refused to let them inside to retrieve it. Arshad and Tariq burned all trash within the compound rather than leaving it outside for collection, lest it give snoopers any clues to the identities of the inhabitants.
Bin Laden’s counterintelligence measures were sufficiently strong that even after the CIA started focusing its best human and technical intelligence collection resources on the compound, it was unable to obtain definitive proof that he was inside. Most CIA analysts, indeed, believed it quite possible that the chief perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks was not there. Within the CIA, the evidence of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad was considered less compelling than the evidence available in 2003 showing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which, as it turned out, he did not possess.
In August 2010, word of the Abbottabad discovery reached Admiral William McRaven, the JSOC commander. A towering SEAL from San Antonio, Texas, McRaven had a consummate military bearing and spoke in a powerful baritone, reminiscent of that of television news anchor Tom Brokaw. McRaven was one of the few special operations officers who could be considered a scholar, and he was as much of a public scholar as a special operator could be. In 1995, he had published a well-received book on special operations, in which he derived theories from eight of the twentieth century’s most momentous raids. A leading proponent of the view that special operations forces were decisive strategic actors, McRaven published an article in 2004 arguing that special operations should be considered both “a unique form of warfare” and “a perfect grand strategy.”
McRaven recommended that his special operations forces sneak into Pakistan by helicopter for a raid on the Abbottabad compound. The raiding force would apprehend the occupants and determine whether Bin Laden was among them. If any of the occupants put up resistance and had to be killed, the Americans could find out whether they had bagged Bin Laden by collecting tissue samples and testing them against DNA culled from Bin Laden’s relatives. The other option that was floated, an air strike on the compound, would require thirty-two 2,000-pound bombs to destroy the compound and any tunnels and bunkers below it, killing large numbers of civilians in the surrounding neighborhood and precluding a definitive determination of Bin Laden’s presence.
McRaven assured the White House that JSOC could take down the compound with little difficulty. “This is a relatively straightforward raid from JSOC’s perspective,” McRaven said. “We do these ten, twelve, fourteen times a night. The thing that makes this complicated is it’s one hundred and fifty miles inside Pakistan, and logistically getting there, and then the politics of explaining the raid, is the complicating factor.”
McRaven’s arguments found favor with most of the senior national security leadership, including President Obama. The main skeptics, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden, warned that US ground forces could get caught in a fight with Pakistani forces, and that the Pakistani government was more likely to terminate cooperation with the US government on key activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan if the United States put troops on Pakistani soil than if it struck from the air.
Gates and Biden were unable to sway Obama. The White House gave the green light for a raid on the suspected hideout at the beginning of May.
AFTER THE FIRST Black Hawk crashed in Bin Laden’s courtyard, the pilot of the second helicopter opted to set down outside the compound’s walls. The SEALs filed out the doors of both aircraft, broke into small groups, and headed toward the buildings, as specified in a plan they had rehearsed interminably on a full-scale replica at Harvey Point, North Carolina. A few adult males opened fire on the SEALs, achieving nothing save for the exposure of their ow
n locations. The return fire of the SEALs, exceptional in its accuracy, killed all of the hostile shooters in seconds.
In one of the buildings from which the SEALs had taken fire, they came upon the grizzled figure of Osama bin Laden. The fifty-four-year-old terrorist was unarmed, two of his wives by his side. The SEALs shot him without hesitation, on the theory that all adult males in the building were to be considered hostile. A stray bullet wounded one of the wives, a twenty-nine-year old Yemeni who was Bin Laden’s fifth betrothed, and she shrieked at the SEALs in Arabic like a wounded banshee. Within twenty minutes, the compound and its occupants were under the complete control of the SEALs.
In the twenty remaining minutes, the SEALs filled sacks with computers, flash drives, compact discs, and documents. A medic inserted a needle into Bin Laden’s corpse to extract bone marrow for DNA testing. On board the downed Black Hawk, the pilot smashed the instrument panel with a hammer, while demolition experts placed C-4 charges on the avionics system, communications gear, engine, and rotor head. To shield the compound’s women and children from the blast, SEALs handcuffed them and herded them, kicking and screaming, to the opposite side of the compound. The Americans then rolled thermite grenades underneath the helicopter, igniting it like a matchhead, its fiery orange glow illuminating the erstwhile terrorist hideout for the citizens of Abbottabad to see. The SEALs loaded Osama bin Laden’s body and possessions onto helicopters and took off into the night, leaving behind the shackled wives and children to wail at their losses and await the arrival of Pakistani authorities.
Forensic experts at CIA and Defense Department laboratories promptly analyzed the bone marrow sample. The DNA signature matched that of one of Bin Laden’s sisters, whose body had been subpoenaed by the FBI a few years earlier after her death from brain cancer in a Boston hospital. The Americans took Bin Laden’s body to a ship and dumped it into the sea to prevent his remains from becoming holy relics for other radicals.
