One Hundred Victories (2 page)

Next, Haas received a stark and lethal lesson in the fog of war as he led the main attack against the Al Qaeda remnants in Operation Anaconda in March 2002, when his teams trained and led Zia Lodin’s Pashtun force into what became a bloody battle. The battle, which took place following a three-week course of instruction to instill some basic discipline and infantry tactics into the motley band, was complicated by overturned trucks, a collapsed bridge, lack of promised US air support, and precisely ranged mortar, artillery, and machine-gun fire from Al Qaeda fighters dug into the mountains. Zia’s forces suffered a 14 percent casualty rate, including a friendly-fire attack from an AC-130 Spectre gunship that also killed US Army Chief Warrant Officer Stanley Harriman.

One loss particularly stung Haas and reinforced the treacherous nature of guerrilla politics. Just east of the Anaconda battleground lay the Khost-Gardez Pass—a key mountain pass to the eastern border region. It was guarded by a notorious Pashtun strongman named Pacha Khan Zadran. A young special forces soldier named Nate Chapman was killed by his militia, and Haas never forgot what one of Pacha Khan Zadran’s sons, who served as an interpreter for US forces, later told him: “You’ll have to kill a lot of men like my father before Afghanistan will change.”

Afghanistan was in the throes of a cultural and generational transition that would go on for many more years. Strongmen would continue to hold sway, and assassination would remain a common method of settling political disputes. Ethnic factions and Cold War–era alliances led by septuagenarians trumped many of the wishes and aspirations of younger, more educated Afghans. The twelve years after 2001 did see enormous progress—as well as a tremendous amount of ​killing—but the overall character of Afghan politics remained stubbornly feudal. The rule of the fist, the Tajik-Pashtun divide, and the grip of the few over the many would change only slowly, as the old men and the old ways passed from the scene. Pacha Khan Zadran became a member of the Afghan parliament, but he remained the strongman of the Khost-Gardez Pass.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

Special operations forces achieved an amazing feat, toppling the Taliban with about 350 operators, a handful of CIA operatives, and Afghan militias. They justly received kudos for this unalloyed success: they had had to improvise after 9/11, and overcome Afghanistan’s ferocious obstacles, including terrain, weather, and internecine political machinations. But the special operations forces also missed a huge opportunity in this period—and it was not the failure to catch bin Laden at Tora Bora. Once he had retreated to his mountain lair, it was highly unlikely he could have been found without reliable Afghan partners. No American troops knew their way through the labyrinthine mountain passes, and none were acclimated for trekking and engaging in battle at 14,000-foot altitudes.

The real opportunity missed was the chance for special operators, those first in, to define a game plan, a way ahead that would envision a conclusive endgame to the Afghan conflict. Time and again, the United States has mistaken the decapitation of a regime or a terrorist network as victory, a tactical triumph as the decisive point after which only mopping up remains. Especially in the case of Afghanistan, where the complex political and physical terrain created many possibilities for a rural insurgency—allowing it to survive, thrive, and come back to fight another day—the capture of the cities and the installation of the new government of Hamid Karzai did not constitute a sufficient conclusion to the problem.

Special operations forces were in the lead initially, but they did not capitalize on this moment to design a plan to put Afghanistan definitively on the road to stability. True, the diplomats of the United Nations, the United States, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were all meeting in Bonn to divvy up responsibilities for police, army, counternarcotics, and demobilization, as well as the political tasks of holding elections and writing a constitution. But the special operations forces, by dint of their intensive engagement with the gritty realities on the ground in those first six months, might have made a major contribution, not only on the security front, but to a framework that would provide stability for the 76 percent of Afghans who lived outside the cities. It was a failure that was eventually addressed, but only after eight years.

The biggest reason for the missed opportunity was an institutional one. Although US Central Command (CENTCOM) had handed special operations forces the lead after 9/11, special operators had no fully staffed, theater-level command ready to step up to the task. John F. Mulholland Jr., a colonel, came forward and performed admirably in an emergency situation. But his 5th Special Forces Group had never prepared, trained, or staffed itself to be a battlefield headquarters. A variety of other special operations commands were sent to Afghanistan, but none of them were up to the task, and none was given the overarching responsibility of coordinating all special operations, let alone the entire military effort. The ball then passed to the conventional forces, and special ops never got it back.

In the event, the conventional forces did no better. They were not at the time schooled in counterinsurgency, and they had no particular knowledge of South Asia. Furthermore, although NATO provided a welcome broad umbrella of political support for a coalition that grew to include forty-two countries, it led to a highly problematic bifurcated command structure for the war. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led international peacekeeping force, wanted little to do with combat, and a separate US command focused almost entirely on hunting terrorists on the eastern border with Pakistan. ISAF’s purview was initially limited to the capital and overseeing the coalition members’ nation-building duties as apportioned at Bonn. Neither command paid much attention to the south, which was the Pashtun heartland, the area that had been and would again become the Taliban’s home. As incredible as it may sound to students of military history, none of the constantly changing cast of commanders even bothered to write a campaign plan for Afghanistan until 2009.

Until 2009, the entire US military effort was overly focused on hunting down individuals considered to be problematic. This was a diversion from doctrine, in which counterguerrilla operations are merely a subset of activity, something to be nested within a wider approach that, depending on the circumstances, is termed “counterinsurgency,” “foreign internal defense,” or “stability operations.” They are all aimed at supporting the indigenous government and enhancing its ability to perform the basic functions of government. Because the essential fact of supporting the locals was forgotten, ideas of employing ever greater numbers of US troops gained traction. This flaw should have been noted by special operators, but the hard, cold reality was that they were unprepared to carry out this role except at the most tactical level. They were not employed correctly, and they did not have the opportunity—after that brief initial window—to employ themselves correctly.

Haas was aware of this deficit, and when he returned to the United States after his next deployment to Iraq, he wrote his master’s thesis at the US Army War College fleshing out a proposal for the creation of a special operations forces command structure able to plan and lead such campaigns. But there was no fix in place when he next returned to Afghanistan, in 2006. He came back as a colonel and commander of the 3rd Special Forces Group, which was thrust into a role for which they were still not ready. Whereas a colonel in charge of a conventional army brigade would be expected to plan and execute combat operations for 3,000 to 5,000 men in a province or state-sized area, the special forces groups were put in charge of the full range of special operations conducted across the entire territory of Afghanistan (an extremely rugged land of mountains and desert considerably larger than France, with one of the world’s poorest road systems). It was all they could do to manage the tactical and logistical tasks of fighting in a terrain as forbidding as this.

There was another factor, a more existential question of what special operators were for, that became increasingly cloudy over the decade in Afghanistan, and for that matter in the “global war on terror.” Were they meant to work with tribes and local forces, or were they meant only to hunt and kill? And were they clear enough in their own minds about how they should be used to win wars, or at least how they were to successfully hand them off to others? Many old-timers felt that special operations forces had lost their way at the very moment they burst into the limelight, becoming poster boys for counterterrorism. Haas, along with his comrade Edward M. Reeder Jr. and a black ops special operator, Austin Scott Miller, wrestled with this question as they became generals and returned to Afghanistan, entrusted with leading special operations teams minted after 9/11. It was up to them, as senior special operations generals of their generation, to discover what special operations forces were for and what they could really achieve. In the course of their arduous and fitful journey, they struggled to craft a strategy that would define not only special operations forces deployments for the years ahead, but the essence of US military force abroad in a new era—an era of leaner budgets and ballooning skepticism from all sides about mass military deployments in foreign adventures.

CHAPTER ONE

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HITTING TARGETS

KANDAHAR 2007
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KABUL 2010

ON THE HUNT

Pat Mahaney could not believe it. When he arrived in Afghanistan on his fifth tour, in March 2007, as the special operations battalion commander based in Kandahar, he found that the Taliban had made a spectacular comeback. A fearsome one-legged Taliban fighter named Mullah Dadullah Lang was leading the charge. Dadullah had championed the use of suicide bombers, previously almost unheard of in Afghanistan. He had recruited 141 Afghans who had blown themselves up in 2006.
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He had risen to become the senior military commander through the use of brutality, ordering assassinations and adopting bomb-making techniques from Arab Al Qaeda members holed up in Pakistan. He also adopted beheadings as one of his personal signatures, taking a page from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. He had ordered the decapitations of Afghan soldiers, and even of followers who disobeyed him. When an Italian reporter was taken hostage, it was Dadullah who ordered that his Afghan driver be beheaded. All of
these deeds he liberally publicized on Al Jazeera and through DVDs he had made in Quetta, Pakistan, his base.

By 2007 the Taliban had regained control of large areas of the south—Dadullah claimed twenty districts and a fighting force of 12,000 men.
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They had begun to shift from a guerrilla war to massing in large numbers to attack bases and towns, slowly drawing a noose around Kandahar City, the capital of Kandahar Province in the Pashtun south, from which the Taliban had ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Taliban roamed freely from Helmand, the province due west of Kandahar, across northern Kandahar and into Zabul Province.

Recognizing the deterioration, NATO decided to send a small Canadian task force to Kandahar in mid-2006 to supplement the small British footprint in Helmand. The emboldened Taliban had heavily mined the perimeters of the British outposts, and the Canadians were thrust suddenly into unfamiliar terrain and a hotter war than they were ready to fight. Mahaney led the only American force in the south—an undermanned battalion of three companies with eighty-two men apiece—one of which he sent to Herat, the westernmost province under his command. One battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division, the 1-508, was on call as a reserve force in case they got into trouble.

Mahaney could see that dramatic action was called for. A student of Sun Tzu, he realized that he would need to make up for his force’s small size with innovative tactics that would surprise the enemy. He cooked up a scheme with his staff and then sold it to the Canadians and the British, who made him the commander of the operation.

The reason for being in Afghanistan was never theoretical for Lieutenant Colonel Patrick J. Mahaney Jr. On the door of his tactical operations center at Kandahar Airfield, he had hung a photo of a New York firefighter at the World Trade Center. His father, a forty-one-year veteran of the city’s fire department, had been at the towers on 9/11. Mahaney lost six friends and a cousin that day. “We were not out for revenge,” he wrote in an email later. “It was about civilization versus barbarity.” Over four tours, he had developed ties to Afghans and became deeply committed to seeing the country succeed.
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Mahaney launched Operation Nish on April 4, 2007. The goal was
to wrest control of the town of Sangin, in Helmand, from the Taliban’s grip. It was the base from which the Taliban was launching attacks into neighboring provinces. Dadullah had easy access to it, traveling freely across the flat land of the Helmand-Pakistan border. Mahaney threw out standard military doctrine, which called for forces to travel in small units to avoid air and artillery attack. The Taliban had neither aircraft nor artillery beyond short-range mortars. He assembled all the available forces—Canadian troops, an Afghan army battalion from the north, Afghan police, and logistical support—in one long convoy that stretched for nearly five kilometers. The ISAF command in Kabul thought he was crazy, calling his convoy the “fireworm” as its headlights lit up the predawn sky. As it traveled through the streets of Kandahar City to get to Highway One west, the convoy was attacked by a handful of Taliban. The troops returned fire, killing three attackers, and proceeded west down Highway One into Helmand. There Mahaney did another unexpected thing: instead of turning north onto Highway 611, he turned the “fireworm” off the road, due east into the desert. He knew the Taliban would have seen their approach and heavily mined the road north to Sangin. His staff had studied the terrain and could move off-road quickly with little risk of ambush or accident. When the convoy was parallel to Sangin, it made a sharp encircling turn, and it flooded into the town exactly at noon, just as Mahaney had planned. His forces handily took the town without a single casualty. Infiltrating piecemeal up the highway would have surely cost them dead or wounded. The enemy was caught off guard by the flanking maneuver.