Not a Good Day to Die (5 page)

The Pentagon’s—and, by extension, CENTCOM’s—obsession with minimizing the presence of U.S. conventional troops in Afghanistan translated into an arbitrary cap on the number of U.S. personnel that Franks would allow on Afghan soil at any one time.

THUS
the attack on Al Qaida’s positions at Tora Bora that began November 30 followed the same pattern as previous operations: an assault by Afghan fighters, advised by Dagger A-teams, Delta Force operators, and CIA operatives, and supported by a massive aerial bombardment. For the first time the formula failed. The CIA and Dagger had recruited a local Pushtun militia led by a warlord named Hazrat Ali for the assault. But Ali and his troops did not share the Northern Alliance’s enmity for the Taliban’s foreign allies and prosecuted their attacks halfheartedly. Even had they been more highly motivated, the challenges of assaulting such inaccessible, heavily defended positions would almost certainly have proved beyond the capabilities of the hastily organized force.

“That was the most formidable terrain that we fought in,” said Rosengard, Dagger’s operations officer. Valleys were no more than snow-filled defiles whose sheer rock walls soared skyward to become jagged peaks up to 15,000 feet high. “Given the availability of that cover and concealment [to the enemy], with the Afghans, and particularly with the Pushtun Afghans—the General Hazrat Ali guys—we did not have the fire and maneuver available to us to get in there and root guys out,” Rosengard said. “We just didn’t have the skill to overcome the combination of that enemy and that terrain.”

The Dagger leaders assumed a portion of the Al Qaida force would fight to the death, but only to protect their comrades, including bin Laden and other senior leaders, as they tried to escape. This is exactly what happened. The Tora Bora base backed on to the porous Pakistan border, across which lay the Pushtun tribal areas of the Northwest Frontier Province, whose inhabitants were sympathetic to the Taliban and largely beyond the control of the central government in Islamabad. With no U.S. conventional forces to block their escape, hundreds of Al Qaida fighters slipped into Pakistan.

It seems incredible in retrospect, but this turn of events had not been foreseen at CENTCOM or CFLCC. “There was some knowledge that this might be the last great stand, that bin Laden might be there, the senior leadership might be there,” said Edwards, Mikolashek’s deputy. “But the mindset was, we’re gonna push forward, we’re gonna strike ’em with air, we’re gonna kill ’em all up here in the valley. Not, they’re gonna flee outta there.” A few days into the fighting the Americans intercepted a radio communication out of Tora Bora from bin Laden himself. But even then, with the prospect of their highest-value target escaping with the core of his remaining force, U.S. commanders remained oblivious to the strategic disaster unfolding. “When Tora Bora started to bog down, I’m not sure anybody understood how many were escaping,” Edwards said.

The American generals might not have realized how many foes were escaping, but after several days of inconclusive fighting around Tora Bora, they became frustrated with the operation’s slow pace. “The whole issue between CENTCOM and CFLCC and Dagger during Tora Bora was keeping up the momentum,” Edwards said. The Afghan allies would make an attempt at an attack, then go home and drink tea. “It wasn’t moving fast enough for the CinC [commander-in-chief, i.e., Franks].”

American surveillance planes spotted scores of intense heat sources—interpreted as campfires—in the snowy heights. There were no settlements at that altitude. The perception at CFLCC was that these fires were keeping enemy fighters warm as they made their way to Pakistan. The generals in Kuwait recommended bombing the positions as soon as possible. But Franks and his staff did not see it like that. “They might be shepherds” was Central Command’s attitude, according to two officers who sat in on video-teleconferences in which the matter was discussed. At CFLCC that theory didn’t wash. The idea that scores of shepherds were tending their flocks in drifting snow at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter was implausible. But the higher headquarters prevailed and refused to target the hot spots because no one could prove that they were enemy campfires. Whoever set the fires—Al Qaida fighters or a midwinter gathering of shepherds—survived to make a safe passage over the border.

At least two Dagger A-teams were sent across the border to help Pakistani troops whom the Americans wanted to block Al Qaida’s path. This was a vain hope. The Pakistani military was reluctant to stray into the Pushtun tribal areas that straddled the border, and the effort foundered. The Pakistanis intercepted about 300 Al Qaida troops, but roughly 1,000 escaped. Among those who got away, almost certainly, was Osama bin Laden. Franks would later say that he remained unconvinced that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress in June 2002 that Franks had believed that conducting the Tora Bora operation with U.S. conventional forces would have required “a massive, highly visible buildup” of troops that would have tipped off the Al Qaida forces, allowing them to flee. But among American officials familiar with the battle, Franks was in the minority. The prevailing opinion was that, despite the scores of enemy fighters killed by American bombs, Tora Bora represented a failure, a defeat for the Americans, and CENTCOM was to blame for not using conventional forces.

For the first time the unconventional warfare approach had come up short. The point was lost on neither TF Dagger nor the higher-ups in CFLCC and CENTCOM. “Certainly [Tora Bora] has got to be quantified as a failure for not having drug out of there who everybody believed was there,” Rosengard said. “[That failure] drove home to much greater clarity the fact that we did indeed lack the fire and maneuver to do all things for all people in Afghanistan.” But to CFLCC’s planners, Tora Bora also underlined the consequences of CENTCOM’s bias against committing the conventional forces required to destroy the remaining Al Qaida elements in Afghanistan. “There was a constant—in our mind—disconnect between mission and assets allowed to be available to do the mission,” Edwards said. That disconnect would reassert itself ten weeks later in the Shahikot.

5.

IN the cold, muddy tent city at K2, the Tora Bora failure prompted long conversations among the senior Dagger officers as the unconventional warfare maestros reconsidered their approach to what remained of the war in Afghanistan. As the officers talked long into the dark Uzbek nights, one thick Boston accent rose loudly above the whine of C-17 engines and the roar of MC-130 Combat Talon turboprops from the nearby runways. The voice belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Mark Rosengard.

Until October, Rosengard had been deputy commander of 10
^th
Special Forces Group, which is headquartered at Fort Carson, Colorado, but specializes in operations in Europe. Then he received a call from Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg telling him to pack his bags—he was headed to K2 to serve as Dagger’s new operations officer. (A Special Forces group’s operations officer was usually a major, but when transformed into a joint special operations task force, the group was entitled to a lieutenant colonel in that position.) Even if he’d been a bland operator who preferred to stay in the background, Rosengard’s job as the officer in charge of coordinating Dagger’s current missions while planning future operations would have made him one of the most important of the fifty-plus augmentees who arrived at K2 to beef up Mulholland’s staff. But Rosengard wasn’t that type, and the inspiring force of his personality rendered his impact on the task force, and the coming operation, all the greater.

Possessed of an exuberant self-confidence, the forty-four-year-old Rosengard had been seasoned by years spent operating in Bosnia, Kosovo, and northern Iraq. That experience, combined with his extraordinary energy and drive, meant he commanded instant respect among his subordinates in the “3 shop,” as an Army unit’s plans and operations directorate is known. Rosengard was “a fireball” who motivated his men to work eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, said Captain Tim Fletcher, who, as commander of 5
^th
Group’s Headquarters and Headquarters Company, observed Rosengard at close quarters for several months.

Rosengard’s ability to work long hours with no apparent diminishment in his judgment or equilibrium astonished his subordinates. Fueled by a constant intake of caffeine and nicotine, Rosengard would literally work until he dropped. “He wouldn’t sleep unless he basically just shut down,” said Fletcher. After being evacuated—against his will—to a U.S. military hospital in Incirlik, Turkey, suffering from chest pains that turned out to be nothing more serious than acid reflux, Rosengard quit his pack-a-day-of-Marlboro-Lights habit on January 1, impressing colleagues with his ability to do so without becoming short-tempered. But that was his only lifestyle concession. He only relaxed when reading letters from his wife and two children. Then he would slip into a comalike sleep. On those occasions his staff would let him doze through small crises or moments of decision, because he needed the rest, even though they knew their failure to rouse him would bring a rocket when he finally awoke.

Rosengard was a man who found it easy to get along with others, and for whom subordinates would gladly work themselves into the ground. This was an invaluable trait for an officer who arrived as an unknown quantity in the pressurized atmosphere of Dagger’s headquarters. “He’s a phenomenal man that I’d work for again in a heartbeat,” Fletcher said. Rosengard quickly formed a good working relationship with Major Perry Clark, 5
^th
Group’s operations officer who now worked for him. Clark knew the personalities in the headquarters and the operators on the teams. Rosengard brought experience.

But there was also a flamboyant side to Rosengard, a former college hockey goalie whose black mustache was as thick as his vowels were broad. He gave briefings at high volume, accentuating his remarks by using a red laser aiming device attached to his 9mm Beretta pistol. His over-the-top, all-action style unsettled some soldiers, who had to suppress laughter when confronted with this vociferous, pistol-waving officer. But Rosengard never used his outspokenness to demean. If he was angry with someone, he let them know privately. “If you ever got pulled aside, and talked to nice and quietly, you knew you were in a world of hurt, because that’s when he was serious,” Fletcher said.

American bombs were still falling on Tora Bora when Rosengard and his staff met December 8 to consider where next to focus Dagger’s energies. There were probably still some Taliban elements in the desert provinces south and west of the city of Kandahar city, but U.S. commanders considered these an insignificant threat. “We knew where we had a problem, where the sanctuary was, where there were people that would support [the enemy] we were going to get,” Rosengard said. That sanctuary was Paktia’s mountainous border with Pakistan. “The place where we had the littlest influence that had the most significance was Paktia province….We knew there was order of battle [there]that we had not yet encountered and had not accounted for in any way,” he said. Dagger’s planners concluded that “tactically, Paktia was the biggest deal left on the plate.”

But as they were figuring out
where
they should next take the fight to their enemy, U.S. commanders were also rethinking their “all UW, all the time” approach. The war had changed course. They were now facing a different enemy than they had encountered—and conquered—using unconventional warfare. For the past two months Dagger’s Special Forces operators and CIA operatives had used the Northern Alliance to roll back an enemy that consisted largely of the Taliban’s peasant infantry. But by now the Taliban had been evicted from all major towns. Most Taliban fighters not killed or captured had returned to their farms and villages or crossed into Pakistan. Al Qaida, however, was another matter. Its fighters had no hometowns or villages in Afghanistan to which to return. The option of simply surrendering or switching sides, as many Taliban-affiliated militias had done when it was clear which way the war was headed, did not exist for Al Qaida. They were outsiders, foreigners from Uzbekistan and Chechnya, as well as Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. They could expect no quarter from the Northern Alliance and little from the Americans. Nor could they return to the homes they had left. Most were on the run from the authorities in their native countries, who preferred to export Islamic extremism rather than let it fester at home.

What’s more, Al Qaida troops’ religious fervor made them highly motivated soldiers. During the war with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s 55
^th
Brigade—composed entirely of Al Qaida fighters—was one of the Taliban order of battle’s most effective formations. Al Qaida fighters were also, almost by definition, vehemently anti-American. With their most senior leaders still at large, they would not consider themselves defeated. Some had made it into Pakistan from Tora Bora or elsewhere. There they might find refuge in the tribal areas. A few leaders, perhaps, could hide in plain sight in the sprawling metropolises of Rawalpindi, Lahore, or Karachi. But most Al Qaida fighters would remain close to their bases along the border. Many had traveled thousands of miles to learn the skills of jihad in Al Qaida’s Afghan training camps. Now the infidels had come to Afghanistan. The prospects for jihad could not be better. With no way home and the chance for victory or martyrdom before them, they could be expected to fight.

The disappointing performance of Hazrat Ali’s forces at Tora Bora, where the Americans’ nominal allies accepted bribes to allow Al Qaida safe passage, combined with the knowledge that they now faced a more skilled and determined enemy, forced Dagger’s senior officers to reassess the wisdom of relying on local militias. Unconventional warfare was yielding diminishing returns. Perhaps it was time for a new approach.