As Vultures Nest
WES BRYANT
In 2013, as a special operations JTAC, I could not have cared less what was happening in Iraq or Syria. We’d already pulled out of Iraq, and we weren’t even in Syria. Our world was Afghanistan—especially after the full withdrawal of conventional forces and the war becoming sole ownership of special operations.1
As for Syria with its internal conflict, it was a world away. I easily dismissed it as just another Middle Eastern country imploding, the norm in that part of the world. It didn’t necessarily mean people like me were going to be employed to do anything about it. My mind was on the mission at hand.
Later that year, representatives in Washington and senior military leaders like Major General Pittard would wrestle with the world-altering strategic decision of whether or not to launch military strikes on the Syrian regime. But as such events unfolded, men like me trudged away on the relentless Afghanistan front with few people back home even realizing we were still waging war there.
Small wonder I was at the peak of frustration. It was nearly twelve years since U.S. forces had pushed into Afghanistan to take vengeance for 9/11. We’d fully invaded and uprooted the Taliban government, yet failed to prevent the development of a formidable insurgency against pro-U.S. Afghan forces and the government that we’d helped emplace. In Afghanistan we were constantly taking ground, losing it, and then taking it again—an endless cycle to nowhere.
The ongoing failure in Afghanistan was a result of inconsistent and wavering strategies. Over the years we’d endured ongoing shifts in operational and tactical focus, ever-changing rules of engagement based on the political flavor of the day, and the fears and criticisms of public perception. Topping it off, we’d gone through countless changes in troop numbers, culminating in an ineffective and unnecessary troop surge that only preceded a monumental withdrawal. It all added to one big mess that was the war in Afghanistan.
Somewhere along the way, leadership came up with a name for the implementation of the new U.S. strategy against terrorism: “counterinsurgency” or COIN. “COIN” became a phrase vastly popular among military leaders once a doctrinal and operational manual was published on the subject. Joint Publication 3-24, Counterinsurgency, became the Department of Defense doctrinal manual for COIN. It defined insurgency as “the organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge political control of a region,” and counterinsurgency as “a comprehensive civilian and military effort designed to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root causes.”2
In over two hundred pages, the excellent manual detailed guidance for the implementation of COIN operations. In reality, though, COIN ended up amounting to little more than a fancy catchphrase because, to be successful in Afghanistan, we needed more than a doctrinal manual. We needed clear intent from Washington and the Pentagon via a well-coordinated and well-communicated strategy and precisely defined operational guidance. Down at the warfighter level, that was 100 percent nonexistent.
The Poppies of Nangarhar
Spring 2013
I was with a Special Forces team in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar Province securing a district named Khogyani—a historical hotbed of Taliban activity and sanctuary to the most “named objectives” in the region.
When the military or other agencies gained ample intelligence on a key enemy leader, coordinator, or facilitator, he would be put onto a classified kill/capture list. He’d then become an “objective.” That objective would be given a codename, and a primary mission of special operations was to hunt and capture or, in many cases, kill such named objectives.
Our camp sat atop a small hill just north of a modest village, with brilliant multi-colored fields of opium poppies surrounding us for miles. The village was the district center. A “district” in Afghanistan was similar to a U.S. county, its center typically the largest city in the district, containing the seat of local governance for the area. The district center was comprised mainly of qalat (mud hut) residences, with a smattering of masonry buildings that were mostly local government offices and police and military compounds.
A few kilometers south of the district center stood the snow-capped Spin Ghar mountain range, with rich white peaks reaching up to more than 15,000 feet. A range that divided Pakistan and Afghanistan, Spin Ghar was a stunningly beautiful backdrop to one of the most dangerous places in the world. To me, the mountains were noble and benevolent giants sitting majestically still—ever-reminding us that the human war we waged below was of little consequence in the large scope of things.
Those giants were not wholly untouched by our wars, though. The mountain range contained a region otherwise known as Tora Bora, the location of the first major fight of the Afghanistan War in winter of 2001 when our special operations units had tried to capture Osama bin Laden there and he escaped into Pakistan. I’d soon spend days freezing in its hills when my team responded to an Apache helicopter shot down and destroyed while on reconnaissance through the remote Taliban village havens.
My Special Forces team was busy. They’d taken two casualties in an ambush just weeks before I’d come in. The team wasn’t in any mood to pussyfoot around. We went on regular clearing operations to root out Taliban leadership and fighting networks in the region. We orchestrated “hits” against named objectives—pushing out at a moment’s notice on precision raids when we received real-time intelligence on their locations. We met with local leaders to elicit information and ensure the economic, political, and financial needs of the populace were met.
In war, offense truly is the best defense. Despite the American political climate at the time, we did whatever was necessary to secure our mission and stay safe in our small camp on the hill surrounded by Taliban. We executed night raids to keep pressure on local Taliban networks, while guidance from higher was that no forces were to conduct night raids without special approval. We held and interrogated captured fighters and facilitators to pull vital information from them, while senior leadership instructed our forces to turn prisoners over to Afghan officials. (All too often, prisoners would be released within weeks, even days, through connections within the Afghan government or because of undermanned and underfunded governmental structures—only to be right back out fighting us again.)
In exchange for safe haven of their opium poppy fields, we constantly elicited information from locals about Taliban locations and activity, while elsewhere in the country other U.S. special operations teams were facilitating massive poppy eradication efforts by the Afghan government. Opium poppies were the financial foundation for many of the locals, helping them feed their families, but most of the revenue made its way into the hands of the Taliban and eventually funded their operations against the Afghan government—and us. Letting the locals keep their poppies was a delicate balance, but we were keeping them on our side. Since there was a heavy presence of “shadow” governance in the region—the Taliban “government” working behind the scenes—keeping the locals on our side was key to uprooting it.
Our mission was constantly encumbered by the strangling policies instated by higher leadership. Even when teams like ours sidestepped the impeding guidance—as much as we could get away with—we were still dangerously handcuffed. We were regularly told our primary goal was to “win the hearts and minds of the people.” Although we all knew that was an important facet of the mission, it was only one small part—and yet it seemed to dominate the operational environment. The cautious mindset among senior military leadership led to restrictions on approval for certain types of missions, strict limits on the use of air-to-ground ordnances for close air support, and severe restrictions on approval criteria for airstrikes.
While we understood that the welfare and well-being of the Afghan people were extremely important, our policies in Afghanistan crossed a line that often led to the needless endangerment of troops on the ground. As a military, year after year we continued taking casualties from both direct fire and improvised bombs. Many of those enemy attacks were successful because most U.S. forces had been reduced to routine and predictable security and assistance patrols on the same routes to the same places, time and again. To top it off, U.S. personnel were constantly vulnerable to attacks by Taliban infiltrators within the very Afghan forces they embedded with. Referred to as green-on-blue attacks, they caused casualty after casualty within our ranks.
Because of all that, there was a strong belief among warfighters that higher leadership placed not just the lives—but the perceptions of the Afghan people above the welfare of U.S. warfighters. At the tactical and operational level, the morale was so bad it was a regular mantra pushed down from higher leadership to just “put the politics aside” and “concentrate on the mission.”
To many of us, we were no closer to handing over a stable country to the Afghan people in 2013 than we had been ten years prior. Needless to say, it was extremely difficult to put personal feelings aside when most of us felt like we were sacrificing everything for absolutely nothing.
Years later, in the summer of 2017, I would infill into Afghanistan as the senior Special Tactics JTAC for the Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan on my final combat deployment. I quickly found that, since I’d last been there, the U.S. had kept an oft non-committal footprint—concentrating more on the heavy fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Because of that, ISIS had crept its way into the very rugged terrain of eastern Afghanistan where I’d trudged four-years previous. They’d gained a strong foothold in a short amount of time and in the process reinvigorated a Taliban network that we’d spent a fruitless decade-plus waging war against. Now, we had to deal with the Taliban and ISIS.
Imagine my frustration.