One Hundred Victories (3 page)

The coalition seized control of Sangin, but the Taliban continued to mass and attack elsewhere, including in Helmand, Kandahar, and Uruzgan. So Mahaney went on the offensive again. He did not have the numbers to overwhelm these concentrations of Taliban fighters, but he did have good human intelligence from an Afghan network that had been developed over the past five years. “This was year six of the war,” Mahaney reflected. “By year six, World War II was over.” Successive special forces battalion commanders, relying on the same interpreters, had gotten to know Afghans all over the country. “We
could find out what was going on one hundred miles away by having someone call his cousin,” Mahaney said.

When the Taliban fighters felt they could attack with impunity, they would mass and thus present a good target. Mahaney used various deception tactics to encourage this. “We would draw them out to attack us, to make them think they were winning,” he said. By presenting a small force—a twelve-man team and some Afghans—he would encourage the Taliban fighters to come out of the villages to attack. Once they were out in the open, away from the civilians, Mahaney’s men would call in the aerial attack. At times, Mahaney would divert units to unexpected targets to catch the Taliban unawares. Or he would have units converge from different firebases. The Taliban, and even the special ops’ own Afghan partners, never knew who was going to show up where—or when.

Mullah Dadullah came to Helmand on May 12 to shore up his forces. A special mission unit had been sent by Lieutenant General Stanley A. McChrystal to help track Dadullah by tapping into the communications of his brother, who had been captured in Pakistan but later released. Upon learning that Mullah Dadullah was planning to reenter Afghanistan, the special mission unit passed the tip to British special operations units in Helmand. The British commandos killed Dadullah after a fierce four-hour battle—to prove it, the Kandahar governor displayed his body to the local media.
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Dadullah’s death did not, however, cause the violence to abate. His fighters regrouped and moved east into northern Kandahar and Uruzgan. Mahaney’s force continued to encounter large Taliban formations, even after unleashing air attacks against them and inflicting heavy casualties. The special operators fought through enemy defenses to retrieve the bodies of eight dead troops whose Chinook was shot down at the end of May by a man-portable missile near Kajaki. In another major battle in Herat’s Zerikow Valley, Mahaney counted 136 killed. The official battle damage assessment done by military intelligence later concluded that more than 200 were killed, including 4 senior Taliban leaders. Mahaney was amazed at how the Taliban continued to come out in droves, battle after battle.

President Karzai’s brother Qayum, a member of the Afghan parliament, came to see Mahaney. He was extremely concerned about the Taliban massing in northern Kandahar. They were taking over towns and, he believed, would soon conduct an assault on Kandahar City itself. The Kandahar governor, who had been wounded in an assassination attempt in late May, also appealed to Mahaney, asking him to break the Taliban’s grip on the highway that connected Kandahar City to Uruzgan, the province to the north. A small Dutch-led task force there was cut off and could only receive supplies by air. The Canadians were also keen to gain control of the highway—which the military called Route Bear—so they could finish reconstruction of the Dahla dam, which irrigated most of Kandahar and was a high-profile project. Security on Route Bear had been provided mostly by an unofficial highway police force run by Matiullah Khan, from the Karzais’ Popalzai subtribe. But in the face of the Taliban onslaught, his checkpoints were being overrun and his men killed. Six years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan was a patchwork of provinces barely held together.

Mahaney and Robert “Chris” Castelli, his company commander in Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan’s capital, drew up a plan and began to install field artillery sites and conduct reconnaissance. In late June they launched Operation Adalat (“Justice,” in Pashto) to break the Taliban’s hold on the Shah Wali Kot Valley and derail the planned offensive on Kandahar City. Castelli was the officer in charge on the ground, but, as in Sangin, they assembled a combined force to bottle up the enemy. It was highly unusual for special operators to lead an ad hoc armored task force, but that is what the circumstances required. The Canadians supplied 6 Leopard tanks, 13 light armored vehicles, and 13 support vehicles, along with about 200 troops. They also supplied 3 M-777 howitzers with 155 mm rocket-assisted artillery. Special operators were going to war with heavy metal against a dug-in Taliban force. All told, they had assembled a force of 1,200 for what would be, for many of them, the largest fight of their careers. Castelli’s intelligence indicated that up to 900 Taliban fighters were entrenched along this key artery and the surrounding mountains and valleys to facilitate their movement and
operations in a swath stretching from Helmand through Kandahar into Zabul and north into Uruzgan.
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There were only three exits from the valley. Castelli and his men would establish a blocking position to the north, and another team would block the second exit. A third force moving up from Kandahar, special forces and Canadian armor, would attack and push the Taliban into the blocking forces’ waiting fire. As the operation began, Castelli dropped artillery rounds in unpopulated areas to warn civilians and push them out of the planned engagement area. In the event, a mass exodus of women and children headed due south, directly into the path of the oncoming tanks. To ensure that the civilians evacuated to a safe area, Castelli sent Afghan soldiers and police into Shah Wali Kot’s district center.

With his four gun trucks, Castelli then assaulted uphill, directly into the Taliban’s well-defended mountain position. The American special operators and Afghan forces drove through the Taliban lines, firing their weapons furiously, and then turned to attack again, pinning in the insurgents. Facing the armored force on the south, which was pounding them with tank and artillery fire, the insurgents opted to flee east. Monitoring the radio traffic, Castelli heard the Taliban requesting motorcycles to evacuate their leaders. Castelli called for air support, but the Dutch aircraft could not identify the target and would not drop below their mandated ceiling to do so. “You are cleared hot to engage,” Castelli repeated. But they would not. Frustrated, Castelli asked them to clear the airspace above his battlefield. If they were not going to stop the fleeing Taliban, he needed someone who would. His SATCOM (satellite communications) exchange with the Dutch and his call for additional air support were heard by units around the country. A Black Hawk on a logistic resupply “milk run” diverted and came to his aid, hitting targets that the operators marked with their laser designators or by sight until Apache attack helicopters, armed with Hellfire missiles, arrived from Kandahar.

The battle lasted two days, and in the end, four hundred Taliban were killed. The official battle damage assessment count came in at more than five hundred. The coalition forces had killed two Taliban commanders;
a third had escaped on a motorcycle during the kerfuffle with the Dutch. All this they learned during the detailed searches of surrounding villages in the subsequent days. Matiullah Khan and his highway patrolmen had scooped up all the Taliban weaponry from caches they discovered. Castelli was mildly annoyed that he had to bargain with them to turn the weapons over, but working with MK’s force was worth the hassle. “They were the most reliable [Afghan] guys,” Castelli said—more reliable than the Afghan army—“and they were absolutely feared by the Taliban.” Castelli had been coming to Uruzgan since 2002; he had built the special operators’ original small firebases at Tarin Kowt and De Rawood.

Operation Adalat blunted the Taliban’s summer offensive. There was no mass attack on Kandahar City. Route Bear was reopened to Afghan and coalition traffic, and Uruzgan began receiving supplies. The route was never closed again.

That did not mean the Taliban was defeated. The diehard remnants moved further east to a target they thought they could overrun, Firebase Anaconda in eastern Uruzgan. It was the most vulnerable of the four firebases in Uruzgan, and perhaps of all the fifteen bases Mahaney’s men occupied. Almost every time his team members left the gate, they were in a firefight. Castelli took his sergeant major to visit and observe the base. The team’s tactics were textbook, and they had welded additional armor around their gun turrets and rear gunner positions. But “that base should never have been built,” Castelli concluded. The terrain the base was located on simply could not be properly defended. There were only two exits, one of which was through a narrow pass and a bridge. The outpost was surrounded by high ground and dry riverbeds, or
wadis
, which gave natural cover to approaching forces. The closest Afghan homes were barely one hundred meters away. When he was on patrol there, Castelli’s vehicle was hit by rifle fire or shrapnel nineteen times. He decided the base must be closed or moved.
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In early August, before he could carry through with this move, at least seventy-five Taliban fighters laid siege to Anaconda. They brazenly camped outside, lobbing their mortars into the compound.

Then, on August 8, to the astonishment of the soldiers inside, the Taliban attacked them head on. The insurgents believed the firebase contained only one special forces team and some Afghan troops, when in reality there were about thirty westerners, including Australians, and about fifty Afghan army and police troops, some of them fairly experienced. To Mahaney, this frontal assault in broad daylight suggested the insurgents were mad, or even drugged. But the Taliban had been probing and testing and attacking this vulnerable spot for weeks on end, and they thought it was now ripe for taking. Waves of bearded guerrillas rushed the outer checkpoints and the gates from three directions, firing AK-47s, grenade launchers, and mortars. The men inside unleashed a barrage of machine-gun fire and fired their own mortars while calling in the Apache helicopters based at Tarin Kowt. When the dust settled, more than twenty of the Taliban lay dead and the rest were scattered. Two Afghan girls who lived nearby were wounded, as were two Afghan soldiers.
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Mahaney reviewed the situation as his battalion prepared to leave in November 2007. During a 217-day tour, the battalion had been in 287 combat engagements with the Taliban. The official count of enemy killed in action by 1st Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group, was 3,407—more than the total for all the other units combined in Afghanistan in the same time period. The battalion had lost twelve men, and twenty-four others were wounded, including special operators and six embedded trainers attached to their units.
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The battalion had fought hard and smart and had achieved enormous battlefield successes. The operators had not just killed a lot of Taliban, but had also thrown themselves into information operations, setting up ten radio stations from which to broadcast programs to locals, distributing 2,000 radios, and forming Afghan army psyop (psychological operations) units. A flood of press releases countered Taliban claims, including attempts to smear Afghan allies. Mahaney had thoroughly investigated the claims against the Kandahar governor, Asadullah Khalid, and Matiullah Khan. “I don’t want to be working with any war criminals,” he said. He found no evidence for the accusations, but plenty of what he considered unsubstantiated claims
were nonetheless incorporated into United Nations and diplomatic reporting without any attempt to check, corroborate, or source them. Mahaney was particularly concerned to dig into alleged human rights abuses, including any torture, mistreatment, or killing outside of battlefield combat. He found no evidence for any of it that he considered solid. Corruption, however, was another matter.

Mahaney, forty-one, had spent most of the past six years in Afghanistan—nearly half of his career in special ops—and although he was leaving, he believed he was likely to be sent back once again. Over the next year at the NATO Defense College in Italy, he continued to think about the Afghan war. He felt something was missing. In the early years of the war, the word “counterinsurgency” had been all but banned. Then Mahaney recalled that “for years we talked about clear, hold, and build.
Hold?
We had never done it—and we weren’t going to do it without locals.”
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REEDER’S EPIPHANY

In the early days, special operations forces were consumed with hunting Taliban, and their use of local Afghans was largely expeditious to this purpose. As one special forces officer said, “we’d round up our indig [operator slang for their indigenous fighters] to go hit targets.” The special forces teams were arrayed all along the Afghan-Pakistan border in a series of firebases that were guarded by an Afghan militia force—or AMF, as it was called—and these militiamen also often went along on raids. In the view of many special forces, including John Mulholland, this approach had locked down the border pretty well and kept the Taliban on the run. The militia force had been formed in the first six months of the war when there was no Afghan army, and at that time there had been no one out in the bush except the special operations forces and the CIA. But as time went on, others began to look askance at the AMF, seeing it as an irregular force that did not have any connection to the nascent Afghan army.
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There was also little continuity in approach from one commander to the next. The colonel in charge of the Combined Joint Special
Operations Task Force–Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A) changed every seven months. In 2006–2007, Chris Haas and Ed Reeder swapped places twice. In terms of personality, Ed Reeder was a study in contrast with the taciturn Haas. Big as a bear, garrulous, but fiercely competitive, his nickname was Silverback. He had come to know the Afghans well on four tours, two in Kandahar in 2002 and 2003 as a battalion commander and two in 2006. Reeder had been an adviser in El Salvador in 1988, early in his career, as that small Central American nation was battling a Soviet-backed Marxist insurgency, and later participated in the first major US military operation since Vietnam, the invasion of Panama in 1989 to oust dictator Manuel Noriega.