One Hundred Victories (19 page)

The confusion that had occurred that night was not on the ground, where Mike’s team was fighting. It occurred among those responsible for transmitting advance notice of operations to the Pakistanis. This coordination was most certainly botched, but it is uncertain whether the sharing of that information would have forestalled or halted the Pakistani actions that night. The team had passed its mission concept of operations up the chain of command as required, and it had been approved. It had been sent to the Regional Command–East, the conventional two-star command in charge of sending the relevant information to the border coordination centers that had been established with the Pakistani government. In this case, the coordination center was located at the main conventional base near Asadabad, FOB Joyce. The normal protocol was for the US coordination officer there to share basic information with the Pakistani military liaison officer who was assigned there. A handful of these centers existed on the Afghan side of the border, established by mutual agreement. The Americans had also pressed for coordination centers on the Pakistan side of the border but had been rebuffed by Pakistan.

The border coordination centers served two purposes. One was to relay general information ahead of operations so that the Pakistanis would not be caught totally unawares. The other purpose was to sort out incidents once they occurred. The US military did not relay the specific coordinates of missions in advance, in order to protect them from deliberate or inadvertent compromise. This practice was justified by a long trail of previous incidents in which intended targets had vanished after intelligence was shared with the Pakistanis. Mike’s team had been party to just such an incident the previous month. They and the commandos had gone on a mission to Lalpur, a district in Nangahar along the Pakistani border, where there was a reported insurgent training camp. The Pakistanis had been informed of the pending operation twenty-four hours earlier. When Mike and his team arrived, the villagers told them that forty insurgents had left the village just hours before. The team found the second-largest cache of their tour there after Maya. Providing advance notice not only jeopardized the mission, Mike noted, but his men’s lives. “People don’t understand that it puts us in a lot of danger,” he said.

After Operation Sayaqa was launched, when the team came under fire, Wilson had called Regional Command–East to verify that there were no Pakistani border posts in the area of the engagement. The command had replied that there were no posts marked on its map and authorized Mike’s request for fire. Wilson only found out as the events unfolded that Regional Command–East had not passed the concept of operations the team had prepared, with the slide of information releasable to the Pakistani military, to the border coordination center, so nothing had been shared with Pakistan. Wilson had sent a back-channel copy of the slide to Joyce, but it had not been briefed to the Pakistanis.

When the team came under fire the second time during Operation Sayaqa, Wilson had tried to determine definitively whether Pakistani forces were involved. The situation became even more snarled at that point, however, because the US officer at the coordination center incorrectly loaded a map overlay into his computer, possibly because he was a reservist unfamiliar with the relatively new “command post of the future” software. That error led him to identify the wrong location to the Pakistani liaison officer, a spot fourteen kilometers north of the scene of the fighting. The Pakistani had confirmed that there were no Pakistani forces at that erroneous location, which heightened the confusion.

Wilson became dismayed, as the investigation unfolded, that the RC-East command did not clarify its own actions with regard to the CONOP and the border coordination. The official investigation’s final report was clear on this point, however.
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Wilson’s battalion had briefed the operation in a video teleconference, and the border coordination center at Joyce had asked RC-East’s border cell for more information but received no response. A tap dance was beginning that would go on for weeks and consume hundreds and hundreds of hours. Wilson’s decisions and the actions of Mike and his men that night were straightforward and entirely justifiable, as the investigation later confirmed. The men were under fire, pinned down, and in imminent danger of being wounded or killed. It did not matter who was shooting at them or why. The rules of engagement were clear. US forces under attack had the right to defend themselves.

What happened next was not just a product of the November 25–26 incident. It was part of a toxic climate of mistrust and bitterness that had reached epic proportions, driven by a series of events. Pakistan had been chafing under the greatly increased pace of US drone strikes that occurred during the Obama administration, often at politically inopportune times. The news media’s publication of diplomatic cables via Wikileaks had revealed just how deeply the United States mistrusted Pakistan. A CIA contractor had shot two Pakistanis in Lahore, and the raid six months earlier by SEAL Team Six deep into Pakistani territory to kill Osama bin Laden—with no advance notice—had deeply humiliated the Pakistani military. The escalating rhetoric over the course of the year was matched by a quadrupling of fire from Pakistan’s side of the border. The Pakistani government was itching for a fight, and Operation Sayaqa provided just the pretext it needed.

CHAPTER SIX

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THE BURDENS OF COMMAND

Kabul November 2011–January 2012

“WHO IS GOING TO TAKE THE BLAME?”

General John Allen, the four-star commander of ISAF, was in Pakistan the night of Operation Sayaqa. He was pleased with how well his meeting had gone that day with Pakistan’s military chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. US-Pakistani relations had been all but frozen since the Osama bin Laden raid, and yet the Pakistani general had embraced him at the end of their meeting and invited him to a retreat in the Pakistani countryside. The two men had even discussed how they might together “squeeze” the Haqqani insurgent network in North Waziristan—the insurgent faction most closely linked to Al Qaeda and responsible for a recent spate of bombings and US troop deaths. Such action by Pakistan would represent a fundamental shift. Its intelligence service had maintained close ties to the Haqqanis since the Soviet era, when the CIA had helped fund their anti-Soviet operations. Allen said nothing of the impending Operation Sayaqa—in fact, his staff had not informed him of it. He learned of it in the middle of the night when his aide awakened him with the news that twenty-four Pakistanis had been killed by US forces. He was ashen. “It was gone. All gone,” Allen said of his efforts to coax some cooperation from the Pakistanis.
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A few hours later, Allen arrived at his headquarters, where his top aides were huddled around a press release drafted by his senior public affairs officer, Rear Admiral Hal Pittman. Brigadier General Chris Haas, who had come back to Afghanistan in July as the CFSOCC-A special ops commander, was in the cramped conference room, along with the British deputy commanding general, Lieutenant General Adrian Bradshaw. Haas knew the press release would be carefully crafted, but he was a little mystified by the direction the meeting was taking.
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After Pittman presented his draft press release, Allen ordered him to delete the statement that Pakistan had fired on US troops and that no US ground forces had crossed the border. Apparently nothing would be said about Pakistani actions during the operation. Finally Bradshaw spoke up. “Aren’t we going to say anything about the Pakistani role?” he asked. Allen’s answer was swift and unequivocal: “We are going to be contrite. We are going to apologize. We are not going to talk about Pakistan.”

Haas’s chief of operations, Colonel Heinz Dinter, sat next to Haas, getting angrier by the minute. The special operations team was still on the ground in Maya, but Allen did not inquire as to their condition or whether they had taken casualties when attacked. He ordered exfiltration of the team farther away from the border even though it would increase their time on the ground and the chance that they would once again come under attack. The massive cache of weaponry the team had unearthed did not seem to have fazed Allen either. He was solely concerned with damage control, which Dinter viewed as placating the Pakistanis. “It was clear that his whole focus was strat comm [strategic communications],” Dinter said later. “Apologize, admit guilt. You owe it to the guys to get the facts first.”

The press release that Pittman issued a short while later was brief: it quoted Allen promising a thorough investigation and offering condolences to the families of Pakistan’s security forces, and it concluded with a pledge to improve security cooperation. It stuck in Dinter’s craw.
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Allen was placing a great deal of hope in the power of personal diplomacy to think he could sway the Pakistanis into turning on their longtime Haqqani clients. For decades Pakistan had relied heavily on armed proxies to attack its enemies and shore up its own defenses, primarily to prevent encirclement by its large and powerful neighbor India, which it regarded with fear and loathing bordering on paranoia. But his immediate goal was damage control. He offered the soft-​pedaled press release in an attempt to mollify the Pakistanis. Instead, after months of simmering anger, they pounced.

The implosion of US-Pakistan relations was swift. Claiming it had suffered an unprovoked attack, Pakistan finally played the cards it knew would hurt most: it closed its borders to all US military traffic and expelled CIA and military personnel from its Shamsi Airfield. Most of the special operators who had been advising Pakistani forces in a low-profile training mission had already been expelled earlier in the year, but unlike the training mission—which was a long-term effort that would ultimately benefit Pakistan—these two steps would hurt the United States far more than they would hurt Pakistan. Most supplies for US troops in Afghanistan were shipped through Pakistan, so shutting the border would threaten the viability of the entire Afghanistan mission—both ongoing operations and the massive exfiltration about to begin. The expulsion of personnel from Shamsi also narrowed options for launching drone attacks on the border area, limiting the launching pads to bases in Afghanistan. The closure of transportation routes was the most critical: Central Command had diversified its supply routes, but with the drawdown due to begin in the summer of 2012, the Pakistanis knew they had their erstwhile ally over a barrel. It was impossible to move tens of thousands of massive vehicles and other pieces of equipment, containers, and machinery out through the dodgy, mountainous routes of the north. Pakistan would inflict as much agony as possible and hold out for a formal apology, which it would then play to the world as an admission of wrongdoing.

The US investigation initiated by Central Command was limited to reviewing US actions. Brigadier General Stephen Clark came to Kabul and spent two weeks interviewing all who had been involved and reviewing surveillance footage of the operation and intelligence intercepts. The investigation was concluded and the recommendations briefed publicly in late December.
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The report made several recommendations to improve coordination, but it found no fault with the actions of the special operations forces. Given this, Haas was dumbfounded when Allen subsequently asked him, “Who is going to take the blame for this?” Haas replied evenly: “I’m the general in charge of the troops involved, so if you want to hold someone responsible, I am the one.” Allen formed a “tiger team” from his own staff to scour the details of the investigation once again. Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of ISAF Joint Command, was appalled at the attempt to find a scapegoat and intervened on Haas’s behalf. “We are not going to do this,” he said. Sacrificing an officer to placate the Pakistanis in an attempt to repair relations, reopen the border, and put CIA personnel back into Shamsi would have been a travesty. In the end, Allen had a counseling letter placed in Haas’s personnel file—not a career-ender but an unwarranted demerit. Haas hid his anger with a forced joke. “I think I’ll frame it and put it on my wall,” he said.

So this is what it felt like to be without top cover. Since he had arrived, Haas had bent over backward to support Allen’s campaign plan with special operations forces in whatever way requested. Haas felt the burdens of command keenly and knew the onus was on special operators to prove they could be good partners to the conventional forces. They had deservedly earned a bad rap early in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as the guys who came in the night, caused civilian casualties, and messed up relations with the government and the locals. “We are one of the tools in his arsenal,” Haas said. He thought he had established a good relationship with Allen, which was vital. Now that all special operations forces finally had a general—Haas—at the big table, it was imperative to get along. He delivered his updates at Allen’s daily briefing, and each Friday he attended what Allen called his “SOF Tribes” meeting together with the other two SOF commanders—the US officer in charge of the special mission task force and a British or Australian officer who traded command of the coalition SOF. Allen called this his “SOF Tribes” meeting because none of them knew what the others were doing, so he had to hear from all three.
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