Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (32 page)

On December 10, Army of Northern Virginia personnel intercepted a radio transmission that stated “Father [i.e., bin Laden] is trying to break through the siege line.” Promising as that was, later that day another intercept gave the U.S. force an eight-digit grid reference point for bin Laden's position, the most detailed information the United States had had on his location since the late 1990s, according to Greer. The Delta officer led a thirty-three-man, nine-vehicle team into the mountains to try to capitalize on it. But any hopes the operators had that Hazrat Ali's forces had surrounded bin Laden's position were dashed when the “allies” abandoned the battlefield to break their fast.
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At the same time, a three-man JSOC team called Jackal was in extreme danger, having ventured far behind Al Qaeda lines to call in a series of devastating air strikes before being spotted and taken under machine gun fire. All but five of their Afghan militiamen fled. Jackal's combat controller, nicknamed “the Admiral,” passed the code word for a team escaping and evading: “Warpath. Warpath. Warpath.”
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With night closing in, bin Laden “fading like a ghost,” and Jackal's whereabouts unknown (the team was out of radio contact), Greer faced a dilemma: pursue bin Laden or search for his missing team. He chose the latter, figuring “we'll have another shot at bin Laden.” Jackal finally made it to safety under their own steam that night, but the opportunity to kill bin Laden, if it had ever existed, was gone.
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The battle stalled. To the Americans' disgust, on December 12 one of the Afghan militia leaders took it upon himself to arrange a twenty-four-hour cease-fire to allow Al Qaeda to surrender. Of course, as the Americans soon surmised, the surrender was a hoax, but it gave whatever Al Qaeda remnants had yet to flee across the border to Pakistan vital breathing space before the bombing resumed.
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By December 14, Delta had pushed several thousand meters into Tora Bora over the course of seventy hours.
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Berntsen made another impassioned request to Dailey for more U.S. ground troops during a December 14 meeting in Kabul. The JSOC commander again refused, for fear of alienating the Afghan forces whose dubious allegiance the CIA was renting. Dailey's caution did not sit well with the CIA officer. “I don't give a damn about offending our allies!” he yelled at the general. “I only care about eliminating Al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden's head in a box!”
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With bad weather interfering with air support, Greer asked Dailey to send the Ranger mortar teams at Bagram to Tora Bora, so the U.S. forces would at least have some fire support available, but Dailey turned even that request down. (Meanwhile, Mulholland refused to let the A-team he'd sent down reenter the battlefield after they'd come out to refit, and then relieved the team leader into the bargain.)
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Sporadic fighting continued for another couple of days, but the battle for Tora Bora was essentially over. The international coalition opposing the Taliban had dropped more than 1,100 precision-guided munitions (otherwise known as “smart bombs”) and more than 500 “dumb” gravity bombs, managing to kill at least 220 Al Qaeda fighters and capture a further fifty-two in the process. (U.S. and British forces suffered no casualties.) Greer claimed the real numbers of enemy dead were “much higher,” but admitted “several hundred others probably managed to run from the field.” The bottom line, as he acknowledged, was that bin Laden, Zawahiri, and hundreds of their best fighters had gotten away.
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The U.S. military chain of command's extraordinary reluctance to commit the forces necessary for victory was a major factor in bin Laden's escape. The Al Qaeda chief's resourcefulness and knowledge of the mountains was doubtless another. But a couple of eyewitness reports offer the intriguing suggestion that bin Laden may have had outside help. At least one Delta operator observed Mi-17 helicopters—a model flown by Pakistan's armed forces—flying very close to the border at the Agam Valley pass, the single egress point from Tora Bora to Pakistan that didn't involve climbing to 14,000 feet. The helicopters appeared to be making a quick trip into Afghanistan. “They were in, they were out,” the operator said, adding that he suspected they were flying bin Laden to safety in Pakistan, but he had no way of proving that. However, Greer wrote that an Afghan fighter told a different Delta operator that he'd seen a helicopter he took to be Pakistani flying in fast and low to land in the Wazir Valley several days earlier. Both operators were sure the helicopters in question were not American.
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When A Squadron came out of Tora Bora, some operators were crowing about how many enemy fighters the air strikes they'd called in had killed up in the mountains, until Greg “Ironhead” Birch reminded them they hadn't killed the one man they'd been sent in to kill. Their mission, therefore, was a failure, he told them. The senior Delta officer on the battlefield agreed. Tora Bora “must be viewed as a military failure,” according to Greer. Nonetheless, he wrote, Dailey “relayed the necessity that we paint a picture of victory.”
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The failure prompted bitter recriminations from the operators. One said that relying on the Afghans as the main force at Tora Bora and on the Pakistanis to seal the border were “100 percent” mistakes. The “gutless” U.S. commanders' failure to seal the border was inexplicable to the operators, for whom preventing enemy “leakers” from an objective was standard operating procedure. “Not one American life could be risked to gain anything,” said an operator. “Not one guy could be hurt. They didn't want us going forward on the front line with the Afghan army. They wouldn't give us reinforcements.… Every day we were calling for people.… We should have dropped the entire 82nd to seal the border. Think about what that would have done to change the war.”

Another operator, who did not take part in the battle but was familiar with the area, said Greer's decision making was not above reproach and that the on-scene Delta commander should have established positions above the Agam Valley pass. “Anyone who looked at the map was like, ‘Get to this pass right here and we could be armed with Hostess Ho Hos and just fucking drop 'em from the rocks above and they can't get through that pass,” he said.

“The truth is [that] a little bit of risk will get you success,” said the first Delta operator. “No risk, no reward, and those guys chose the ‘no reward' route.”

The squandering of the opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda at Tora Bora was a strategic catastrophe for the U.S. military, one it would compound three months later.

 

14

“Patton's Three Principles of War”

After Tora Bora, A Squadron moved to Kandahar and thence, briefly, to Tarin Kowt, the capital of Uruzgan province in the south, in search of Mullah Omar.
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But in January, barely a month after the squadron had deployed, Dailey replaced it, not with Delta's C Squadron (whose operators were “borderline suicidal they weren't in the fight yet,” as an Army special ops source put it), but with Team 6's Red Team. Dailey's decision to use SEALs rather than Delta in a landlocked country raised eyebrows in JSOC and hackles in the Delta compound, but stemmed from the commander's view that the United States was now engaged in a global war that might last decades. Committing Delta to Afghanistan full-time would exhaust the unit within nine months, Dailey thought. He knew the Army special mission unit had the edge over Team 6 on land, but was sure the SEALs could handle the Afghanistan mission.

A name change accompanied the end-of-year unit rotation. Task Force Sword became Task Force 11, the first of many such changes intended to obscure JSOC's role in the wars of the new millennium.

There were also leadership changes at all levels. By early 2002, Dailey had returned to Pope Air Force Base and handed the Task Force 11 reins to his deputy commander, Air Force Brigadier General Gregory Trebon, a special ops pilot with vast experience in the air but none running manhunts or other tactically complex ground operations. Another key personnel switch saw Pete Blaber replace Scotty Miller as head of advance force operations in Afghanistan. A former commander of Delta's B Squadron, Blaber had extensive man-hunting experience in Colombia and the Balkans. Highly respected by both peers and subordinates, he was an independent thinker who often found himself in conflict with Dailey's cautious approach. Nonetheless, whether Dailey realized it or not, in making Blaber the AFO commander, he was giving the Delta officer a chance to put his unconventional approach to work in the real world.

Amid all the changes, Dailey kept one thing constant. Despite the fact that the United States now had access to any base in Afghanistan, the JSOC commander insisted his joint operations center remain on Masirah, 700 miles from the action.

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By the time Blaber arrived at Bagram in the first week of January, the trails of bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar had gone cold. U.S. leaders suspected Al Qaeda still had significant forces in the field. They just didn't know where. Blaber quickly reorganized his forty-five-man AFO element, dividing them into six teams—three in the south and three in the northeast—that he pushed out to safe houses in the hinterlands to combine with CIA and Special Forces personnel in “pilot teams.” Task Force 11 had divided its in-country forces between Bagram and Kandahar, but Blaber wasn't interested in staying at Bagram and instead established himself in the Ariana hotel, the new home of the CIA's Kabul station. It was there, at the end of January, that the deputy station chief told him that intelligence suggested Al Qaeda forces were massing about ten miles south of Gardez in eastern Afghanistan's Paktia province, in a place called the Shahikot Valley.

The conventional U.S. forces trickling into Afghanistan were also tracking the reports emanating from Paktia of an Al Qaeda buildup there. Together with the special operators, they began to plan an operation to destroy those forces. Central Command again insisted that Pashtun militia take the lead in the operation, but chastened by the failure at Tora Bora, Franks's headquarters this time permitted the inclusion of U.S. infantry in order to prevent Al Qaeda fighters from escaping. Those infantry forces consisted of a battalion each from 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne Divisions, which for the purposes of the operation to come were brought together under the 101st's 3rd Brigade. (The divisions' names were misleading: 10th Mountain was a regular light infantry unit and the 101st was a helicopter “air assault” division, rather than a paratroop formation.) Two A-teams from John Mulholland's Special Forces task force would train the Afghan militia. Major General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, the 10th Mountain commander, would be in charge of the operation. However, Hagenbeck had no official command and control authority over AFO or any other Task Force 11 elements.

Central Command allowed such an ad hoc approach to what would be the United States' biggest battle of the war up to that point for several reasons. First, after more than two months with no real combat to speak of in Afghanistan, some planners were skeptical of the intelligence that a large Al Qaeda force remained in the Shahikot. Second, CENTCOM continued to insist that local forces take the lead, even if that put the operation's overall success at risk. Third, Franks and Rumsfeld were already husbanding forces for the expected invasion of Iraq, which meant starving the Afghan war effort.

Through January and February staffers from all the task forces worked on the plan, the essence of which was that the Afghan militia would sweep into the valley from the southwest as the main effort, while U.S. infantry companies air-assaulted into the valley's northern and eastern edges to prevent Al Qaeda forces, presumed to be occupying villages on the valley floor, from escaping. They named the operation Anaconda.

In February, Blaber moved his base of operations to the Gardez safe house. From there, he would command one of the most daring special operations missions in JSOC's history.

At Gardez, he was reunited with Spider, whom the CIA had sent to manage the Agency's side of the operation, and with whom Blaber had worked in the Balkans. It was clear to Blaber, Spider, and the SF officers at Gardez that it would be necessary to put U.S. eyes on the target in the Shahikot in order to discover what secrets the valley held. Confident he could infiltrate reconnaissance teams into the Shahikot, Blaber brought over two such teams from Delta's B Squadron for just that purpose. But before Blaber sent anyone anywhere near the Shahikot, he insisted that they steep themselves in the area's military history and familiarize themselves as much as possible with the region by closely studying maps, reading recent intelligence reports, and talking to the local militia. Like Tora Bora, the Shahikot (“Place of Kings” in Pashto) had been a mujahideen stronghold in the 1980s. Blaber knew many lessons from that war would still hold true in 2002. A staunch opponent of the “stovepiping” of intelligence by which U.S. government agencies kept information from others by arguing that they didn't have a “need to know,” Blaber spoke instead of a “need to share,” and practiced what he preached. Putting his command post in Gardez ensured that he, Spider, and the Special Forces officers were all on the same page.

Before Blaber sent his teams into the Shahikot itself, he wanted to conduct a “proof of concept” reconnaissance mission to further define the art of the possible when it came to moving on foot through the mountains in the middle of the Afghan winter. (He was strongly opposed to helicopter infiltrations of reconnaissance teams, on the grounds they were too predictable and ran too high a risk of compromise.) Between February 20 and 26 Blaber sent the two Delta teams on what he called “environmental recons.” India Team, which included two B3 operators, a Team 6 SEAL, and an Army of Northern Virginia operative, approached the Shahikot from the south, trudging through driving wind and heavy snow to within 3,000 meters of the valley before turning back. Juliet Team, consisting of three B3 operators, a Team 6 SEAL, and a 24th Special Tactics Squadron combat controller, explored the valley's northern approaches in equally arduous conditions that would have stymied lesser operators. The environmental recons proved that the high altitude and bad weather actually gave the well-equipped AFO operators an advantage: the Al Qaeda forces did not expect Americans to brave the elements and penetrate their lines in such conditions, and had focused their surveillance on vehicular routes to the Shahikot.