The Only Thing Worth Dying For (11 page)

Situated in a high desert valley rimmed by mountains, the town’s only access to the outside world was a dirt track, barely a thread on the map. Karzai called this segment of the Kandahar Road an “appalling journey,” so treacherous to navigate in places that it took at least fifteen hours to drive the distance. A few other roads branched out from Tarin Kowt through mountain passes into even more remote districts. The town, which relied upon its few trade routes to supply the populace with the staples of life, had experienced a recent drought that greatly reduced the productivity of the little farmland was still irrigated from the receding waterways. All of this information contributed to the Green Berets’ basic plan to disassemble the Taliban in the south: The region was ideal as a base from which to start a guerrilla war to seize Kandahar.

The plan was to infiltrate near Tarin Kowt, raise a guerrilla fighting force big enough to close off the surrounding mountain passes, and put the town under siege; the Taliban defending it would ultimately surrender, and additional A-teams would be brought in. Under the direction of the Green Berets, Karzai’s guerrillas would then occupy Tarin Kowt and continue to grow Karzai’s army with recruits and volunteers from the citizenry.

This “Southern Alliance” of Pashtun clans, along with their Special Forces advisers, would branch out, seizing all the major features—roads, waterways, and mountain passes—in Uruzgan Province. Taliban-held and Taliban-sympathetic villages would either surrender or fall as Karzai’s movement continued south into Kandahar Province, where they expected the Taliban to make its final stand.

Once Karzai’s army reached Kandahar, there was a good chance that the Taliban leadership would want to negotiate a surrender with him, a fellow Pashtun. If Karzai’s campaign failed, there was almost no chance the Taliban would surrender to the Northern Alliance or the U.S. military, which the Taliban had vowed to fight to the death in the streets of Kandahar.

The success of the plan hinged on Karzai’s support base, and nobody present could say how big that would become. That he had required rescue meant whatever support he currently had was not enough. Since his “infiltration” a month earlier, Karzai’s following
had increased from three men on motorbikes to the fifty who were chased on foot into the mountains. Amerine and Thomas, ODA 594’s team leader, concluded privately that Karzai’s fledgling resistance did not require, nor was it worth risking, two ODAs, each capable of training and leading a force of three hundred.

The two captains approached Lieutenant Colonel Rosengard, who was standing in the safe house’s conference room with Casper, studying a large table map of southern Afghanistan. They told Rosengard that only one team was needed on the ground to see if Karzai had indeed raised a credible fighting force.

“I agree with sending fewer men,” said Rosengard, “but on that note, considering what little we know and how vague the situation on the ground is, I’m thinking this might even be a split-team mission—maybe five or six men.”

Amerine couldn’t argue: ODAs were designed to be broken down into “split teams” if the situation called for a leaner, faster unit.

“You’re thinking of going in with just six guys?” Casper said with what sounded like trepidation.

“Initially,” Amerine said. “That’s how we operate.”

Amerine had been told by higher command that for this war, the spooks were “tourists and cashiers,” there to observe and dole out cash. The CIA had no authority over the Army’s campaign, and Casper had made it clear that, though armed, he and his men were leaving the combat operations to the ODA.

“Well, it’s your fight,” Casper told Amerine.

That evening, as Rosengard was preparing to return to Kazakhstan with Captain Thomas, he told Amerine to make sure both of his split teams were fully operational. “The way things are stacking up,” he said, “another mission will emerge. Limit what you tell your guys when you break the news that you’re splitting the team. You don’t want to blow their chance for a mission and bench them as ASTs by telling them too much.”

Now Amerine had to decide which men would join him in Paki
stan and which would stay with JD, the leader of the other split team. Since Alex, with his extensive communications background, was already in Pakistan, Amerine would bring the junior commo sergeant, Wes, and leave Dan, the senior commo sergeant, with JD. Mag was an engineer, so the other engineer, Victor, would stay with JD. JD was a medic, which freed Ken to join Amerine. That left the weapons sergeants—Ronnie, Brent, and Mike—and Amerine could take only one more for his split team. Ronnie and JD were pretty tight, and Brent was the junior weapons sergeant, so Mike would come to Pakistan and Brent would stay with the more senior team members.

In Uzbekistan, Conrad told JD, “This has become a split-team mission. Amerine gave me a list of team members to send to Pakistan. They need to prepare immediately for a flight.”

Trying not to sound disappointed, JD passed along the order as emotionlessly as possible to the men. “Pack your bags,” he said to Ken, Mike, and Wes. “You have a plane to catch. The rest of you just sit tight.”

Mike started to pack immediately, the silence in the tent reminding him that those staying behind must have felt as if they’d just been kicked in the balls.

When the three men arrived in Pakistan just before midnight on November 6, the first thing Mike said after shaking Amerine’s hand was “The rest of the guys aren’t very happy, sir.”

“I know,” Amerine said with a shrug. It wasn’t his job to make his men happy; it was his job to complete the mission—and bring them home alive. “There is no such thing as a beloved captain in Special Forces,” his mentor Dennis Holloway had told him. “But you can take care of your men, lead from the front, and they’ll respect you for doing what’s right.”

At the Department of Defense press briefing on November 6, Secretary Rumsfeld announced that an Afghan named Hamid Karzai, who had been attempting to stir up a rebellion in southern Afghanistan, had been extracted from that country by the U.S. military and taken
to Pakistan. During the six years Karzai lived in exile, his warnings about his homeland had been buried in the foreign-update sections of the world’s newspapers. Now, when it was crucial that Karzai remain in the shadows, Rumsfeld had pushed him into the spotlight.

That same day, ABC’s Dan Harris reported the same information on the evening news broadcast, adding that Karzai was in Pakistan consulting with U.S. Special Forces.

ABC then played an audio clip of a telephone interview with Karzai, who was forced to “correct” Rumsfeld and Harris. “No,” he said, “I am in Afghanistan.”

The Americans working with Karzai in Pakistan understood the need for this deception. “Retreating” to another country would have been considered a terrible sign of weakness to the Pashtun, threatening the meager support Karzai had built over the past few weeks.

The news segment concluded with Harris saying that “there is a lot of confusion” at the Pentagon regarding Karzai’s current location. “There is no disagreement, however, about the importance of Karzai’s mission, called pivotal to the success of the war.”

In fact, there was plenty of disagreement as to Karzai’s importance.

On November 8, CIA Director George Tenet—who had been receiving daily updates from Casper—reported to Rumsfeld, Powell, and other principal White House advisers that Karzai’s tangible following was not as robust as they had originally thought. “We don’t have anything working in the south,” he said, “and we have nothing to put on the table.” 2

That same day, in Pakistan, Amerine’s split team was close to finalizing a plan for infiltrating the south. In the Air Force mess hall, Amerine sat down to eat breakfast with Mag, who pulled a
Wall Street Journal
editorial from newspapers piled at the end of the table.

“Check this out,” he said, handing the article to Amerine.

In the editorial, “The Tragedy of Abdul Haq: How the CIA Betrayed an Afghan Freedom-fighter,” Robert McFarlane—national
security adviser to President Reagan from 1983 to 1985—wrote a scathing account of CIA dysfunction and lack of foresight in Afghanistan, outlining what had happened to Abdul Haq: “Even the best force in the world will fail without solid intelligence. The CIA cannot provide it; it has utterly failed to do its job. But the military can. By working together, the Pashtun commanders and our special operations forces can win in Afghanistan.”
³

Amerine had been unaware of this parallel between Haq and Karzai, both of whom had asked the CIA for support and had been denied meaningful backing. Barraged by such negative press after Haq’s death, the CIA had gone to great lengths to rescue Karzai—the only anti-Taliban Pashtun attempting to stir up resistance in the south—when he’d called for assistance. Had Karzai been the first to call for help, Amerine and his men might be planning a mission with Haq now, and it would be Karzai’s name in the obituaries.

Back in the safe house, Karzai showed Amerine, Mag, and Alex a short list of villages he and the tribal leaders were considering as their base of operations; all of them were east of Tarin Kowt and hugged the Helmand River where it ran through a valley alongside formidable mountains.

“Almost two years ago,” Karzai said, “I met with Massoud
*
in the Hindu Kush mountains to discuss a southern rebellion against the Taliban. He advised me to find someplace in the south that would be like his Panjshir Valley in the north. This was one of the areas that Massoud agreed would be appropriate.”

“We’ll look at these carefully,” said Amerine. Having a plan that bore Massoud’s fingerprints was a good omen. It also increased his respect for Karzai: He had been planning this southern rebellion for far longer than Amerine had imagined.

Alex and Mag headed off to the operations center in the hangar to check out the locations on “Big Mama,” the Air Force’s powerful
computer system that turned high-resolution satellite imagery into three-dimensional maps, allowing them to “fly” the terrain within Afghanistan, not unlike a flight simulator.

“I think we’ve found our base,” Mag informed Amerine that afternoon when he stopped by Big Mama.

Sitting in front of the massive screen, Amerine zeroed in on the point where Helmand, Kandahar, and Uruzgan provinces meet. In the mountains just north of this intersection he swooped over the easily identifiable Kajaki Reservoir, a massive body of water created by the Kajaki Dam, built in 1953 by American engineers on the Helmand River for irrigation and hydroelectricity. He followed the river downstream eight miles to War Jan, a mountain town of approximately 1,500 Pashtun that was 3,600 feet above sea level and set in a deep, water-carved canyon that protected it on two sides. The canyon bottom was a fertile river valley wide enough for low-altitude air supply drops and helicopter landing zones. The most likely attack routes, along the river, were easily monitored and very defendable. And according to Karzai, the nearby villages were friendly to his cause. Amerine made sure there was a viable escape-and-evasion plan in case they needed to retreat from War Jan, then called Casper over from the safe house to show him the plan.

“Skipper,” said Casper, “that’s a big town to hold in the middle of Taliban country.”

“Not really,” replied Amerine. “Hamid is saying the people who live in the immediate vicinity are friendly to our cause. The terrain is compelling. It’s perfect.”

“I think we’re going to need more men. At least a platoon of Rangers.”

The comment reminded Amerine of Roy Scheider’s line in the movie
Jaws
: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” It also ran against the tenets of unconventional warfare.

“We don’t want a bigger footprint,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

Twenty-four hours later, Amerine checked the team’s secure e-mail account and learned from an intelligence report that in the north,
more than 4,000 Northern Alliance troops in concert with approximately thirty U.S. Special Forces soldiers had conducted a massive assault on the country’s fourth-largest city, Mazar-e-Sharif, home to 300,000 Uzbek and Tajik Afghans. They had run thousands of Taliban out of the city.

The next e-mail was from Mulholland’s staff at Task Force Dagger, who informed Amerine that the CIA team working with Karzai had requested a Ranger platoon to be added to the mission. “Request was denied,” read the message.

Why the hell is Casper pulling this shit?
thought Amerine.

The message continued: “However, the commander does not want your team to infiltrate unless Karzai can assure you he has at least 300 fighters.”

Amerine had been trained to make decisions based on his analysis of what was happening on the ground and, if need be, without consulting higher command. This Special Forces philosophy and the term “Operational Detachment” (fully operational even when detached from leadership) had been born of necessity during World War II, when teams were unable to communicate with their superiors.

In 2001, even with modern communication technology, most ODA captains felt that the spirit of this operational independence remained, although a gray area existed as to how far a captain could take it.

Special Forces captains have been known to bristle at orders handed down from higher command, not because of a problem with authority but because they know more about what is going on from the intelligence they have gathered themselves: the battlefields surveyed, the working relationships forged with indigenous fighters and leaders, and the instincts honed while immersed in a mission.

Amerine knew that Karzai did not have three hundred men, but having spent almost a week with him and his most loyal tribal leaders, he believed his claim that the Pashtun populace was behind him—but only if Karzai returned to Afghanistan with American soldiers. Karzai needed ODA 574 on the ground in order to rally support; Mulholland now required demonstrated support in order to green-light ODA 574’s infiltration. Though frustrating, this new order, Amerine assumed, was issued with the best of intentions: the safety of his team.