America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (38 page)

Even so, Mazar-e-Sharif seemingly offered concrete evidence that Enduring Freedom was now headed in the right direction. The forward momentum of the offensive continued on toward Kabul, with Taliban defenses outside the Afghan capital essentially giving way without a fight. Once again, Taliban fighters defected in large numbers. Others returned to their villages or fled toward the sanctuary of neighboring Pakistan. In less than a week, the Northern Alliance had seized Kabul itself. Almost immediately, small contingents of U.S. and allied forces arrived to take control of the former Soviet airbase at nearby Bagram.
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Attention now turned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual home and last remaining stronghold. Southwest of that city, beginning on November 25, U.S. Marines under the command of Brigadier General James Mattis occupied an abandoned airfield, soon to be known as Forward Operating Base Rhino. This marked the most substantial commitment of conventional U.S. ground forces.
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Almost imperceptibly at first, the occupation of Bagram and Rhino inaugurated a shift away from the light footprint and toward long-term presence.

Just days before, Franks had assigned army Lieutenant General Paul T. Mikolashek “to direct and synchronize land operations to destroy al Qaeda and prevent the reemergence of international terrorist activities” throughout Afghanistan.
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During his tenure in command, Mikolashek failed to fulfill his mandate, a judgment equally applicable to the eight other three- and four-star generals who succeeded him over the course of the next fifteen years. With Mikolashek situating his headquarters in far-off Kuwait, Major General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, commanding general of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, arrived in theater to set up a smaller forward command post. Although Hagenbeck found himself a division commander without a division to command, the apparatus of occupation was beginning to take shape.

By November 28, Northern Alliance forces, now augmented by local Pushtun militants, had laid siege to Kandahar, with both fixed-wing aircraft and Marine attack helicopters pummeling Taliban defenders. Hamid Karzai, the Pushtun exile that Washington was positioning to become Afghanistan’s new leader, negotiated a deal allowing the Taliban to evacuate. On December 9, escorted by U.S. special operations forces soldiers serving as his security detail, he made a triumphal entry into Kandahar.

Karzai stands in relation to the Afghanistan War as Ngo Dinh Diem stands in relation to the Vietnam War: His credentials as a nationalist untainted by corruption but with a Western orientation made him in Washington’s eyes a seemingly ideal partner. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration had sought to use President Diem as its agent in creating a Republic of Vietnam compatible with U.S. national security interests. In the 2000s, the Bush administration sought to use Karzai for similar purposes. Much to their subsequent consternation, U.S. military and civilian officials soon enough discovered, as they had four decades earlier with Diem, that Karzai had a mind of his own.

By now several anti-Taliban factions, too optimistically referred to as the Eastern Alliance, were advancing into the mountainous Tora Bora Valley, a short distance from the Pakistan border. This was the site of a huge cave complex believed to be the last refuge of Al Qaeda and perhaps Osama bin Laden himself. Although provided with extensive air support and reinforced by an elite U.S. hunter-killer team known as Task Force 11, the push into Tora Bora did not get very far.
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The Eastern Alliance lacked the numbers, cohesion, and energy needed to mount anything more than a desultory offensive. With General Franks disinclined to commit U.S. forces such as the Marines situated at Rhino to block escape routes, bin Laden along with a remnant of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters slipped into Pakistan unmolested.
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On December 18, Operation Enduring Freedom reached a pause that U.S. military officers along with civilian officials back in Washington mistook for victory. Twelve weeks of fighting had badly mauled the enemy without definitively defeating it. Al Qaeda and the Taliban had dispersed, but each retained an ability to reconstitute itself. Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar were still at large. Much unfinished business remained.

Franks himself believed otherwise. In Kabul on December 22, while attending ceremonies marking Karzai’s installation in power, the CENTCOM commander briefly toyed with the image of himself as a “proconsul” wearing “a purple-trimmed toga and a laurel wreath.” In his estimation, Operation Enduring Freedom had “destroyed an army the Soviets had failed to dislodge with more than a half million men.” Forces under his personal direction had “liberated twenty-five million people and unified the country.”
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This was balderdash, of course. Like Schwarzkopf at the conclusion of Desert Storm, Franks confused partial operational success with permanent mission accomplishment.

Ironically, despite all the emphasis on avoiding Soviet mistakes, Franks had managed to replicate their achievement. He had unleashed upon Afghans the forces of anarchy and seemed oblivious to what the restoration of order was now likely to require. To “stabilize the country,” he estimated that a contingent of some ten thousand U.S. troops “seemed about right.”
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Although that assessment soon proved wildly wrong, it illustrates his tenuous grasp of the actual situation. Notwithstanding the CENTCOM commander’s self-congratulatory mood, the Afghanistan War had not ended in mid-December 2001. It had only just begun.

At least some senior officials back in Washington seemed to know better. “In some ways,” Wolfowitz told an interviewer as Kandahar was about to fall, “the hardest job begins now,” emphasizing that “one of the worst mistakes one can make is to leave a half-defeated enemy on the battlefield.”
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A day later, he returned to the same point. Bush and Rumsfeld had issued clear instructions “to keep our eye on the ball, and the ball is still in Afghanistan, and there’s a lot of work to do there. It can be very distracting to try to do too many different things at once.”
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But this was for public consumption. Behind the scenes, eyes and attention were shifting to a different ball. Already on November 27, Rumsfeld had issued oral orders to Franks: Start gearing up CENTCOM to invade Iraq.
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As interpreted at the highest levels of the Bush administration, the real significance of Enduring Freedom was that it affirmed America’s unquestioned and unprecedented military supremacy. Here, Rumsfeld later wrote, “was a demonstration of the kind of defense transformation that the President envisioned—a mentality of eyes-wide-open situational awareness, can-do determination, and creative adaptability.”
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Rendered into plain English, Rumsfeld was saying that Afghanistan had rendered military orthodoxy obsolete. Big and slow were out. Lean and quick were in.

If anything, previous estimates of U.S. military capabilities now appeared to have been too modest. Wolfowitz characterized the achievements of U.S. forces in Afghanistan as “revolutionary” and “amazing.” By way of historical comparison, he cited the World War II Battle of Arnhem, a defeat attributed to planners overestimating Allied capabilities and fatally committing them to “a bridge too far.” Now, given “the potential that people on the ground can have for leveraging the capability of long-range air power,” Wolfowitz worried, military planners were likely to err in the other direction. Lacking sufficient boldness and imagination, they were prone to producing plans that were not “a bridge too far” but “several bridges too short.”
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For Wolfowitz and other like-minded officials in the national security establishment (and for hawks generally), Enduring Freedom had demolished any need for the United States to constrain its use of force. The risks appeared manageable, the costs modest, the prospective payoff great.

The journalist Charles Krauthammer made the point with typical directness and supreme assurance. “Afghanistan demonstrated that America has both the power and the will to fight, and that when it does, it prevails,” he wrote. “The demonstration effect of the Afghan war has already deeply changed the Near East. The area’s leaders understand that their future lies with us, not [bin Laden]. Accordingly, they are listening to us.”
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To get people’s attention, nothing worked better than throwing your weight around, an expectation animating the next phase of America’s War for the Greater Middle East.

This spirit permeated President Bush’s State of the Union Address delivered in January 2002. As the president made clear, his administration had already put Afghanistan in its rearview mirror. That prize was already bagged. “In four short months,” he crowed, U.S. troops had “captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.” Confident that more such successes lay just ahead, Bush flatly declared, “We are winning the war on terror.” Yes, more work remained to be done, but not in Afghanistan. Bush vowed to turn next on what he called an “axis of evil” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. For those regimes, but above all for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the day of reckoning was fast approaching.
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Unfortunately, Bush’s verdict on the Afghanistan War proved premature.

Without doubt, the unconventional warriors of TF Dagger had done everything asked of them and more. Also without doubt, the Enduring Freedom air campaign qualified as a marvel of planning and execution, exceeding in precision the feats of Desert Storm and its lesser companions of the previous decade. With more than thirty thousand sorties flown, no aircraft were lost to enemy action. According to Pentagon tabulations, 75 percent of munitions expended hit their intended target, an appreciable improvement over Desert Storm in 1991 and Allied Force in 1999. Given the quantity of ordnance expended—more than twenty-two thousand bombs and missiles—noncombatant casualties were also relatively few in number. Cutting-edge technologies such as laser designators to guide bombs to their targets and UAVs that loitered high above the battlefield to provide intelligence and even launched missiles at ground targets had testified to the U.S. military’s technological edge.
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Best of all, U.S. casualties had been negligible—enough to elicit pious expressions of condolence, not enough to provoke real concern. Of twelve American fatalities, only one—a CIA operative—resulted from enemy action; an errant bomb killed three military personnel; the remaining deaths were due to non-hostile causes.
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By any of the measures that the Pentagon relied on to assess performance, U.S. forces had shone.

Unfortunately, the measures were incomplete and to some degree beside the point. The initial stages of Enduring Freedom resembled the Tanker War of the 1980s, except on a larger scale. Given the advantages U.S. forces enjoyed in range and lethality, the enemy couldn’t even return effective fire.

Those advantages derived from the fact that the Taliban had foolishly chosen to fight as a quasi-conventional force defending fixed positions near major Afghan cities.
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Yet “defeat” freed the Taliban of any further requirement to fight conventionally. After the fall of Kandahar, they returned to their roots as a guerrilla force, thereby inaugurating a new phase of the Afghanistan War. In that new phase, destined to last years rather than weeks, the “revolutionary” and “amazing” U.S. capabilities on display during the autumn of 2001 proved less than salient.

As a consequence, the victory that President Bush and General Franks fancied they had won proved ephemeral. A protracted war ensued, waged in a country where the United States was without vital interests against an adversary that, however repellant, did not directly threaten U.S. national security. The war against the Taliban became an exercise in strategic irrelevance—as if in response to Southern secession, Abraham Lincoln had sent the Union Army to Brazil to liberate the black multitudes held in bondage there. Cleansing Brazil of practices deemed objectionable in American eyes would have posed a mighty challenge without offering much by way of rewards. So too with Afghanistan.

Events on the ground almost immediately hinted at the difficulties to come. In March 2002, U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan—numbering no more than two thousand at the time—undertook their first significant ground offensive. The shortcomings of this operation, known as Anaconda, laid bare the limitations of Rumsfeld’s lean-and-quick approach to changing the way they live.

The site chosen for this operation was the Shah-i-kot Valley, a rugged and inhospitable piece of terrain nestled alongside the Pakistan border south of Kabul. Intelligence reports suggested that Taliban or Al Qaeda kingpins—“high-value targets” or HVTs, in American military parlance—might have taken refuge there. As measured by body count or by cities freed from Taliban control, Enduring Freedom had racked up a series of impressive successes. As measured by HVTs permanently taken out of circulation, it had proven something of a bust. Anaconda was going to be a step toward fixing that.
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The commanders who authorized and planned Anaconda did not anticipate serious fighting. Rather than an actual battle, they envisioned something more like a grouse hunt. A group of several hundred amenable Afghan militants guided by American handlers would enter the Shah-i-kot to flush the enemy. Blocking forces pre-positioned to cover the valley’s several exits and occupied by U.S. infantrymen would then do the necessary killing and capturing. From start to finish, the operation would require no more than a couple of days.