The small J-2 Conference Room in the SCIF was chilly from the air-conditioning needed to cool the banks of electronics. It was 0900 on Sunday, October 7, 2001, less than one month since 9/11. The war would begin in three and a half hours.
I’d been at headquarters since before midnight, reviewing our final checks of targeting intelligence, the weather, and the status of the B-2s, which were already fifteen hours into their flight from Missouri. Toward dawn I began my calls, notifying our most important contacts in the region that hostilities were imminent. George Tenet was alerting CIA stations worldwide to the pending onset of kinetics.
At 0820, my last call was to King Abdullah of Jordan: “It will begin soon, Sir.”
“May God be with your forces, General,” the King said. “You fight a righteous battle.”
The Threat Con in the AOR had just gone to Delta. The Department of Defense weather satellite showed a clear evening over Afghanistan, with some blowing dust in the western desert near the Iranian border. Visibility was excellent in both Kabul and Kandahar. My long checklist was almost complete.
As I watched, the dark projector screen blinked into the image of Air Force Lt. General Chuck Wald at the Combined Air Operations Center at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. CENTCOM’s other component commanders were waiting on the loop in Bahrain, Kuwait, and on Masira Island off Oman. Secretary Rumsfeld and the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dick Myers, were observing from the Pentagon Operations Center, but would not participate directly. Dick had become the chairman only a week earlier, but as the former Vice Chairman was fully up to speed.
The red light appeared on the camera I was facing. “Good morning from Tampa,” I said. “Good afternoon, good evening, as the case applies.” I glanced at my notes. “We have a force of forty thousand men and women involved in this operation. There are three hundred and ninety-three aircraft and thirty-two ships. A total of thirty-one nations are involved. You have all received the Rules of Engagement. Command and Control is in place. I have the Execute Order from the Secretary. I’m going to go around the horn and ask you to confirm your state of readiness. Chuck, you’re up first.”
“General, good afternoon,” Air Component Commander Chuck Wald said. “I have the Execute Order. CSAR is in place. The B-2s are en route to their targets. Command and Control is green. No show-stoppers, Sir.”
“Any questions, Chuck?”
“None, Sir.”
The comm officer at the panel to my left did his magic and Vice Admiral Willie Moore, Naval Component Commander, appeared at his headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. “General,” he said with a grin, “I hoped you would say I’m getting better looking. I have my Execute Order. Command and Control is full up. We have no issues. We are at go….” I smiled at Willie’s joke, but admired his professionalism even more.
The round robin moved to Major General Dell Dailey, commanding Task Force Sword. Dell’s Special Mission Unit operators were prepared to deploy to the Kitty Hawk when the carrier neared Oman on Wednesday. These elite troops would be on station in the northern Arabian Sea within seven days completing final rehearsals for their operations.
“No issues,” Dell said.
Finally, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet came on the loop from Langley. “No issues, General.”
I faced the camera. “All right. I’m satisfied. Kinetics begin at 1230 hours East Coast time, 1630 Zulu, 2100 hours Afghanistan time. Any questions?” There were none. “Good. My final point is this: Use adult common sense. This is the beginning of tomorrow’s history. I want you to focus on two things: Accomplish the mission, and protect the force.”
As soon as I arrived back in my office, I took a call on the STU-III from General Dick Myers and Secretary Rumsfeld.
“Great job,” Dick said. “We’re here to support you.”
“General,” Donald Rumsfeld added. “The President said to extend to you his respect and best wishes. We’re going to finish what began on September 11.”
“God bless you, Mr. Secretary,” I said. The Secretary of Defense was about to become a Secretary of War. “God bless America.”
The words of my country’s unofficial motto resonated, and I sensed their profound meaning. There had been a rebirth of patriotism in America since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Teachers reported that even young children were asking questions, trying hard to understand the words of the Pledge of Allegiance: “one nation… indivisible….” A few days after 9/11, I’d been riding on Tampa’s Bayshore Boulevard when I saw a group of people on a corner, waving flags. Since then, the “Bayshore Patriots” had met on that corner each Friday.
My troops were going to war for a united country.
BACK IN MY OFFICE AS I WAITED FOR THE FIRST STRIKE REPORTS, I received a series of calls from my four-star colleagues, including several of the Service Chiefs with whom I had quarreled in the Tank. Their basic message was the same: “We’re here to help you.”
Willie Moore called from Bahrain. “The first TLAMs were launched at 1419 Zulu, General. There will be a forty-minute pulse with Time-on-Target as scheduled, 1630 Zulu.” I called Dick Myers to report that the Tomahawks had been launched successfully.
Jeff Haynes turned on the wide-screen television in the corner of the office. “The President’s speaking, Sir.”
I’d almost forgotten. “On my orders,” President Bush announced to the world, “the United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.”
He spoke directly to the members of the Armed Services, assuring them they had his “full confidence.”
Secretary Rumsfeld called. He and Dick Myers were about to face the media in the Pentagon press center. “Anything new I should know about?” he asked.
“The operation is proceeding normally, Mr. Secretary.”
“Fine, General. Be available, and be friendly.”
Rumsfeld was in good spirits, rightfully proud and confident. He’d convinced the Saudis to allow us to conduct the air war from the CAOC at Prince Sultan Air Base. And he had won over Uzbek President Islam Karimov. At their press conference in the presidential palace in Tashkent two days earlier, Karimov and Rumsfeld had announced that Uzbekistan would allow overflight of Coalition Humanitarian Assistance transports and open its airbases for “cargo planes” and search-and-rescue helicopters.
What went unmentioned in their press conference was the Uzbek President’s agreement to allow the staging of Special Operations forces at Uzbek bases. President Karimov had committed his support for the coalition effort, but he needed protection from internal criticism. So even as Karimov was making his joint public announcement with Rumsfeld about his country’s willingness to facilitate humanitarian support, Colonel John Mulholland’s Special Forces teams were well hidden in Uzbekistan, setting up Task Force Dagger at the K-2 air base, preparing for insertion into the camps of the Northern Alliance’s commanders. The boots of American soldiers would soon be on Afghan ground.
For years, America had tried to fight terrorism over-the-horizon, with cruise missiles. That approach represented one point on the continuum of conflict. Troops actually “in contact” with the enemy was another, far different point. The Taliban and al Qaeda would soon learn how well American soldiers fought.
At least I hoped it would be soon: Donald Rumsfeld had been aptly described as being “genetically impatient.”
After speaking with Rumsfeld, I went to the Joint Operations Center (JOC) in the SCIF, the broad-bandwidth heart of an Information Age headquarters. The thirty-two members of the dayshift were at their computers, crammed in elbow to elbow. The floor snaked with bundles of multicolored fiber-optic cable. On the far wall were four wide plasma screens. One displayed real-time overhead reconnaissance video of targets in Afghanistan. Another was a detailed tactical computer chart, pulsing with the digital blocks identifying the American and British surface ship and submarine TLAM shooters in the northern Arabian Sea, as well as the inbound missiles, Air Force heavy and tactical bombers, and Navy F/A-18 Hornet and F-14 Bobcat fighter-bombers off the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Carl Vinson.
“We have munitions on the ground, Sir,” Gene Renuart reported as I took my seat.
The Comm people could switch from CNN’s U.S. channels to CNN International, the BBC, Sky TV, and other English-language satellite stations, giving me strategic “situational awareness”: seeing the breaking news just as foreign leaders and average people around the world viewed it.
The scene was incredible. Ten years earlier, in my LAM Task Force office above the stone battlements of Fort Monroe, I had dreamed of such an Olympian view of the battlefield. Now I watched in real time as Predator UAVs transmitted night vision video of TLAMs and JDAMs silently blasting air defense radar sites and C2 buildings around Kabul and Kandahar. One of the display screens split into four segments. We were now observing video links from individual strike aircraft as their laser-guided GBU-12 500-pound bombs smashed into al Qaeda’s Tarnak Farms and Duranta training camps. Judging from the pickups and military trucks parked near the buildings, not all the terrorists had abandoned the camps.
Individual compounds around Jalalabad, as well as the cave complexes of Tora Bora, were taking a pounding from the B-52s. I thought back to the moonscape of bomb craters the B-52s had plowed up out near the Cambodian border so many years before. Then I pictured the unforgettable images of the World Trade Center towers collapsing. Crush the bastards, I thought.
An hour later, however, a Predator orbiting near Kandahar revealed the unpleasant news that three Taliban and al Qaeda targets had not been hit: a helicopter pad from which the Taliban flew their few airworthy Mi-8s; an airstrip long enough to handle twin-engine Soviet-era AN-26 turboprops; and a bunker complex. The J-2 and the CIA had identified these as potential “leadership” targets; two of them were potential escape routes, while the bunker was a possible hideout for terrorists who should now be dead. These targets had been on the strike list, which every relevant intelligence agency had vetted. But none of the three had been struck… and I wanted to know why.
Furious, I called Gene Renuart and Rifle DeLong aside. Keeping my voice even, I made my point. “Pass this on to Chuck Wald in the CAOC. ‘In the future pay attention to my priorities—priorities based on the needs of the joint team, not the desire of a single service.’” We had worked our collective asses off to make this strike a success. But at least three potential home-run balls had crossed the plate without a swing. I did not want a repeat performance of this problem.
“I’m on it, Sir,” Gene said, with no excuses or apologies— exactly what I would expect from an officer of his caliber.
Overall, however, the first wave of attacks was extremely effective. All but one of the Taliban’s air defense fire-control radars were destroyed, along with every missile launcher that had been identified in prestrike reconnaissance. Our TLAMs also hit the early warning radars protecting the borders. Afghanistan’s Integrated Air Defense System, never robust yet still threatening, had been crippled.
Fighter-bombers were now “loitering” in prearranged holding patterns, waiting for the UAVs to locate emerging targets. Aerial refueling tankers were able to fly tracks within Afghan airspace, allowing the strike aircraft to gas up without returning to the carriers or the bases in the Middle East. The heavy bombers would continue to strike al Qaeda targets around the clock.
We had crippled the enemy’s air defenses, but they still had the power to threaten our helicopters with hundreds of ZSU-23 mm automatic cannons and shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles—man portable air defense systems (MANPADS). Most of the Taliban and al Qaeda MANPADS were the old, short-range Soviet-built SA-7s, which could be “spoofed” by dispensing flares that confused the heat-seeking warheads. But you couldn’t spoof a string of 23 mm rounds fired down from a cave overlooking a high pass in the Hindu Kush.
Despite this threat, I knew John Mulholland’s Special Forces were cranking up for insertion into northern Afghanistan. The sooner we had the teams’ combat air controllers designating Taliban and al Qaeda targets for the bombers, the quicker Northern Alliance troops could climb out of their World War I–style trenches and advance on the enemy. The campaign hinged on linking Special Forces, Northern Alliance units, and air power. We needed to move quickly. It was already fall in the mountains of Afghanistan, and winter was coming fast.
The plan involved considerable risk. But it was not a reckless gamble.
It’s a military axiom that no plan survives initial contact with the enemy. We had made contact; now we needed to exploit our advantage, as the President had said, “without pause.”
I was back in my office when Jeff Haynes came in. “General, they need you in the SCIF. Predator’s got a target.”
I went directly to Room 235 in the SCIF—the Fusion Cell, our video link to Predator UAVs flying over Afghanistan. The connection ran from CENTCOM to a van parked near the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, and then by satellite to the UAVs. From that van the Predators’ “pilots” flew the drone aircraft—and what they saw through the video link, I was watching in the Fusion Cell.
It was a bright fall afternoon in Tampa, but late on a clear, star-lit night near Kandahar. The UAV was in a slow, banking orbit, watching a convoy of three vehicles and a motorcycle as it sped out of a mud-walled compound toward the city. The lead vehicle was a Toyota Land Cruiser, the second a dusty white dual-cab pickup, trailed by another pickup with armed men crammed into the open cargo bed.
“The convoy profile fits Taliban leadership, Sir,” Brigadier General Jeff Kimmons told me as I sat down before the video screen.
I felt a familiar rush of adrenalin, similar to what I’d known flying as an aerial observer on the pink teams so many years before. This time I wasn’t strapped into an OH-6 down at the paddy level, but watching through the Predator’s infrared video eye over a satellite downlink. And this wasn’t just another routine reconnaissance mission flown by a harmless drone. This Predator was armed with two Hellfire laser-guided missiles.
The armed Predator was a sensitive CIA covert action program that had been operating for several months from a secret base in Central Asia, hunting Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda associates in Afghanistan. This was the operation I had discussed with Richard Clarke. The weapon had been great in theory, but lacking in practicality—until tonight.
As Donald Rumsfeld had arranged with George Tenet, CENTCOM had operational control over CIA activities in the theater of war, including the armed Predator. But my lines of authority in the Agency had not yet been fully tested.
The grainy image shimmered, then clicked into sharper focus.
“Can we get a tighter close-up?” I asked the drone operator at Langley.
“I’ll try, Sir,” the young voice answered.
For several minutes the pilot maneuvered the Predator, keeping it west of the convoy, several thousand feet above the potholed blacktop road.
A duty officer from the CIA Operations Directorate was in the van at Langley. “General,” the officer said. “This target has all the characteristics of a leadership convoy. You have armed lead and trail vehicles. And the pickup in the middle is a dual cab. That could be Mullah Omar’s personal vehicle.”
I watched the small convoy moving steadily southwest toward the city lights of Kandahar. If we could hit it now, in this open desert, there would be no risk of collateral damage. If the convoy stopped, we’d have a .9 probability of kill—only a 10 percent risk of missing the target. But if we fired at moving vehicles, the kill probability was only .3 probability—a 70 percent risk of failure.
CENTCOM’s senior Judge Advocate General (JAG), Navy Captain Shelly Young, stood by my chair. She was the lawyer who would keep me square with the Rules of Engagement and the Law of Land Warfare, should I decide to shoot. And Shelly was not your typical on one hand—on the other hand attorney.
Shelly studied the convoy. “Valid target,” she said.
“Gene,” I told Operations Director Renuart, “check with the CAOC to see if we can build a kill box for the F-14s or F-18s to strike the convoy a few miles closer to Kandahar.” The “kill box” was the imaginary 200-by-400 meter rectangle into which bombs were to be delivered. I visualized the moving-target range I’d built at Fort Hood years earlier. Destroying that convoy would require precise timing and delivery of ordnance by aircraft flying at 20,000 feet. A very tough time-distance calculation, but a much higher probability of kill than I’d have using the Predator’s Hellfire against moving vehicles.
Ten minutes passed. Then another ten. The CAOC couldn’t build a kill box quickly enough. We had missed a chance.
I watched the plasma screen. Led by the motorcycle, the convoy sped through the empty streets of Kandahar, past housing compounds of mud-block walls surrounding open courtyards. The vehicles stopped near the city’s center, a district of two- and three-story buildings interspersed with more walled compounds. The Predator orbited, unseen at a safe altitude, its video eye locked onto the vehicles. A digital clock at the corner of the screen read 1505 Hours Eastern Time. It was 0435 in Kandahar, two hours until dawn.
“Give me an exact fuel status on the UAV,” I ordered the operator.
“Sir, we’re good for two hours, ten minutes before Bingo fuel and RTB.” Bingo fuel was the minimum needed to return to base safely.
“Hold station,” I ordered.
Several people from the convoy ran into a compound on the right side of a street. “How long to orient the Predator and take a Hellfire shot?” I asked.
“Valid target for Hellfire,” Shelly added as we waited for the answer.
“Lining up for a shot,” the operator at Langley said. “About five minutes until launch.”
The men who had run into the compound returned to their vehicles, carrying several large containers.
“MANPADS,” I muttered, spotting the shoulder-fired missile cases. “What’s the status of the Hellfire?” I asked Langley.
“Lining up now….”
Too late. The vehicles sped out of town, away from Kandahar’s lights.
“Goddamn it.” Still no shot.
No matter. If we could keep the Predator flying, this convoy would stop again. Fifteen minutes passed; twenty-five; forty. The vehicles were headed away from the city at high speed. Then, suddenly, they stopped—in the courtyard of a mosque, a large, domed building surrounded by mud huts and several two- and three-story structures, upscale homes by Afghan standards.
“Line-up the Predator to launch a Hellfire,” I said. “Take out the dual-cab.”
“No issues…valid target,” Shelly Young said.
Vehicle doors opened; the occupants jumped out and moved rapidly toward the mosque. “Quickly, quickly,” I instructed Langley.
People emerged from the mosque and greeted the men leaving the vehicles. After shaking hands, the men from inside placed their hands on their hearts—a clear sign of deference. “This is a leadership target,” I said as the entire group entered the building. As I watched I remembered my final conversation with President Bush. We had discussed unintended damage to civilians—“collatoral damage”— and the President had reminded me that the enemy was al Qaeda and the Taliban, not the Afghan people. “And this is not about religion,” he’d said. “If you see bin Laden go into a mosque, wait until he comes out to kill him.” Wait till they come out, I thought.
“How much station time left on the Predator?”
“Less than an hour, Sir,” the operator said.
“Can you take out one of the sedans parked near the wall? Maybe that will persuade the people to leave the mosque and give us a shot at the principals.”
About five minutes later, a dark sedan disintegrated in a fireball. The men who’d been guarding the vehicles ran in every direction. None of them looked up. They had no idea what had hit them.
As two Navy F/A-18 Hornets circled above Kandahar, armed with laser-guided GBU-12 500-pound bombs, I watched intently as the people on the ground ran from the mosque and scurried into the remaining vehicles. As well-armed security guards dashed to catch up, the cars and trucks sped away and raced along the gravel road to the northeast. They stopped about half a mile away, in front of a large, multistory house behind a fortress-like wall.
“Have the jets identify the compound and get ready to drop,” I ordered the CAOC in Saudi Arabia. “I’m going to clear this with the Secretary as a high collateral damage target.”
Shelly Young concurred.
The Fusion Cell was getting crowded. Jeff Kimmons was in the corner, talking to CIA; according to their analysis, the leadership principals and guards were in the buildings inside the compound.
I walked down the hall to my office, got on the STU III, and explained the situation to Secretary Rumsfeld.
“I’ll call the President immediately, General, and call you back. If the targets come out of the house before I get back to you, kill them.” Within five minutes, President Bush had approved the target for immediate strike.
As I rushed into the Fusion Cell, a CIA officer at Langley was on the secure speaker phone with Kimmons. “Don’t shoot,” he told Jeff. “We think this building is a mosque.”
I clenched my fists and swore silently. There was no dome, no minaret like the other structure. “It doesn’t look like a mosque to me,” I said.
“You’re still good, Sir,” Shelly Young advised.
“Some of the people have left the building, but some are still inside,” Jeff Kimmons said.
“Have the pilots execute the drop,” I ordered Chuck Wald in the CAOC, seven thousand miles away.
As the Predator banked away to avoid the incoming bombers, the compound disappeared in a cloud of dust and smoke. Sixty seconds later, we received the pilot reports: the target had been completely destroyed.
Within an hour, Dick Myers called on the STU-III. “Tom,” he said, “John Jumper has been watching the Predator scene at Air Force Ops here in the Pentagon and he tells me that the principals had left the house before the bombs went in. He knows this is your business, says he’s just trying to be helpful.”
A Title X cook stirs the broth. What the hell was happening to the chain of command?
General Gary Luck—my old boss from Desert Storm and Korea, now retired and a Senior Mentor with Joint Forces Command—had come to Tampa to advise me and absorb the Lessons Learned from this new kind of war. He had been standing silently in the corner of the Fusion Cell when Myers delivered the message from Jumper, watching and listening. When I looked up he shook his head, sharing my frustration.
In combat, there had to be one line of authority. But in this goat rope there had been CENTCOM, the Pentagon, the White House, the CIA… and the gratuitous advice of a Service Chief. I expected that someone in Washington would leak some version of this story to the press within a week. I would not be disappointed.
After thanking the Secretary for his quick reaction and the President’s, I called Dick Myers.
“Dick, we’re gonna have to unscrew the Service contributions to this fight. I respect what Johnny Jumper’s folks think they saw on the downlinks of a CIA Predator. And we’ll work our way through the frustration and friction of this joint, interagency equation. But we’ll need not only unity of command, but also unity of effort. I’ll provide the command, you work on the Service Chiefs to get the unity of effort.”
“I hear you, Tom.” Dick was clearly frustrated, too.
“We need Jumper to focus on the Air Force contribution,” I said. “Hit the directed targets, with the right munitions, on the directed timelines. I’ll work the Agency Predator, target selection, and execution. And the Secretary and I will sort out timings and authorities. I’d appreciate it if you would remove the fucking Predator downlink from the Building. My name is not Westmoreland, and I’m not going to go along with Washington giving tactics and targets to our kids in the cockpits and on the ground in Afghanistan.”
Dick continued to listen patiently. “I agree, and I’ll help. This is your fight, Tom.”
I then met with Gene Renuart and Jeff Kimmons. “Not a bad beginning, guys. The fight is on, and I’m proud of your professionalism.”
They waited, knowing I had more on my mind.
“Having said that,” I continued, “I want you to have an immediate huddle with the Air Component folks and the CIA. Lots of lessons to be learned here. Deconflict the Predator airspace issue, determine realistic strike timelines for both the armed drone and our jets, and identify any ‘personality’ issues that I need to resolve. We’re going to fight a joint fight… and we’re going to start right now.”
In other words, the air, land, naval, and special ops components were going to act as a true team.
Later, the CENTCOM staff would refer to the period between that Sunday evening in Tampa and October 18 as “the Ten Days from Hell.” Clausewitz’s fog and friction were descending on the Command.
THROUGHOUT THOSE EARLY DAYS, THE SLOW PACE OF OUR operations was a source of constant frustration.
Our problem did not stem from a single, easily resolved source. There were predicaments inside dilemmas. As a result, we were unable to insert Colonel John Mulholland’s Special Forces teams into northern Afghanistan as quickly as either Secretary Rumsfeld or I wanted—an understatement of historical proportions.
Rumsfeld’s chronic impatience had never been so obvious. At this point in the operation I had two scheduled phone calls a day with the Secretary, one at 0745, the second at 1630. And there were many unscheduled discussions, some long, some short, to the point, and what you might call blunt.
For ten days, the first words the Secretary spoke in virtually every conversation concerned the Special Forces. “When is something going to happen, General?” “I do not see any movement, General Franks.” “What is the situation with those teams, General?” The variations were few, and subtle: “Can you predict when something is going to happen?” “Where are the teams, General?”
Rumsfeld was never personally abusive. But he was not what you would call “user-friendly.” His questions continued—relentlessly.
The answer was that we were all working on it. But moving the Special Forces teams, with their vital combat air controllers, out of K-2 on the Uzbek plains, across the valley of the Amu Darya River—the Oxus of Alexander the Great—and into the Afghan highlands to link up with the Northern Alliance, proved a formidable challenge.
The tactical situation in the north was complex. Taliban forces, supported by groups of al Qaeda troops, occupied the major towns and cities near the borders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. And they controlled the roads with a couple hundred former Soviet tanks and APCs, and dozens of ZSU-23-4s, a particularly nasty tracked anti-aircraft weapon that was also a powerful anti-infantry tool.
The Northern Alliance’s best-defended enclave was in Afghanistan’s far northeastern corner—the former bastion of General Ahmad Shah Massoud, now commanded by Mohammed Fahim Khan. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, commanded the next strongest NA formation. His forces and those of his erstwhile rival and sometimes ally, Mohammed Attah, held a string of strategic ridges and valleys south of the crossroads town of Mazar-e Sharif.
None of these “warlords” was a choirboy when it came to human rights, but they were saints compared to the Taliban. And they had experienced troops. They hated the Taliban and the araban (their derisive term for al Qaeda, which included large numbers of Chechens and Pakistanis), and they were more than eager to work with us.
Our plan hinged on combining these tough, highly motivated opposition fighters with the Coalition’s massive air power. To do so, however, we had to have a Special Forces team—Operational Detachments Alpha (ODA)—with each of the local Northern Alliance commanders.
And that was where we were stuck. An advance CIA team, code name Jawbreaker, was with Fahim, but other Agency officers had yet to link up with Dostum, Attah, and their subordinates. Although we were establishing communications with the disparate Northern Alliance leaders, we’d yet to place any Agency officers physically with them to pave the way for our Special Forces.
John Mulholland’s Task Force Dagger was growing, ready to move at K2. We needed links with the NA and transportation to insert the teams. The CIA had access to a few semi-airworthy Mi-17s, which they were using to support the Northern Alliance. And, because the Taliban used similar helicopters, these aircraft were less likely to draw ground fire than the MH-60 Pave Hawks and the MH-47s of the 160th SOAR. I had wanted Mulholland’s Green Berets to be inserted on the Mi-17s, but the arrangement was not working.
As Mulholland reported, the old choppers never showed up on schedule. And when they did arrive, they usually limped in with hydraulic trouble or engine problems that kept them grounded.
And then there was the terrible weather. Our first attempted team insertions—one each to Fahim and Dostum—were turned back by zero-visibility dust storms. Subsequent flights encountered rain that turned into blinding snow as the old helicopters tried to crest the high passes. Soon it was obvious that the old Soviet equipment would not be reliable enough to meet our required timelines.
But the K-2 air base was not yet ready to support the helicopters of the 160th SOAR that were standing by to be airlifted in from Germany. Mulholland and his Green Berets, assisted by hardworking Air Force base operations crews, were struggling to transform K-2 into a Forward Operating Base, but as each day passed the probability of bad weather along the mountainous infiltration routes increased.
And that wasn’t the only challenge. The Agency advance officers faced the same or worse conditions operating out of Dushanbe, Tajikistan. After initial contact with Northern Alliance commanders, the CIA teams were often unable to return for days. And, struggling to master their new satellite phones, the NA leaders went through batteries more quickly than they could be resupplied so we would frequently lose contact with them for prolonged periods.
Finally, six days into the operation, on a conference call linking me with John Mulholland, Gary Harrell, and Bert Calland, the report we’d been waiting for came in: Task Force Dagger would have MH-60 Pave Hawks and MH-47s up and flying within twenty-four hours.
“That’s great news,” I told the team.
But on the next day John Mulholland reported that bad weather had struck again, almost causing the first Coalition casualties of the campaign. An MH-60 carrying a team en route to Dostum had had its rotors ice up in a freezing mist above twelve thousand feet. The aircraft had “mushed in,” landing hard, and had been destroyed and abandoned; the Green Berets and the crew had slogged down through the snow to a lower altitude, where they were picked up by a CSAR chopper. And another Pave Hawk had been hit by ground fire straining up a steep valley toward a pass; it had limped back to K-2.
“We’ll stay with it, Sir,” Mulholland reported. “But it’s tough going here.”
That afternoon, I answered another barrage of questions from Donald Rumsfeld. “What’s the status of the teams, General?” he began.
I explained the difficulties, but made the mistake of slipping into aviation terminology, cluttering my report with terms like “altitude density,” which affected lift capability in mountain helicopter operations.
“Do we have the right equipment out there, General?” Rumsfeld demanded.
“We do, Mr. Secretary, but this is going to take a while.”
Rumsfeld was not pleased. The Coalition had been bombing Afghanistan for over a week. International journalists who had swarmed in from Pakistan were transmitting video of American planes bombing mountainsides. Networks were running and rerunning tape of Taliban armored vehicles moving in daylight with apparent impunity. The BBC had broadcast a long, pessimistic report on the Northern Alliance being “penned up” behind their trench lines. Rumsfeld wanted results. He wanted to report tangible achievements— something beyond the airdrops of humanitarian daily rations.
And even these humanitarian flights from Ramstein were beginning to cause problems. Oxfam International got wide media play by reporting that hungry villagers in the bleak northern mountains were chasing the bright yellow plastic ration packs into mine fields. Although there was no evidence that this had actually happened, the perception tainted the remarkable humanitarian effort.
But there was more bad news. Since August, the Taliban had been detaining eight Western volunteer workers from the German organization Shelter Now. And they were threatening to try them for espionage and deliver their harsh brand of Islamic justice. Dell Dailey’s operators aboard the Kitty Hawk were planning a rescue operation together with Agency field officers, but the media was spinning the drama to imply that the United States was powerless to help these innocent pawns.
I was concerned, but in the video conferences I had with the White House I noticed no anxiety from President George Bush as I described our difficulties in infiltrating the Special Forces. “Stick to the plan, Tommy,” the President said. “We will be patient. This will take as long as it takes.”
The next afternoon, before my scheduled call with Rumsfeld, John Mulholland reported that a combination of rotten weather and ground fire had turned back yet another infiltration flight.
The Secretary was somber. “General Franks, this isn’t working. I want you to build options that will work.”
Finally, I decided to get away from the unblinking fluorescent glare and ceaseless buzz of hot electronics in the JOC and the Fusion Cell.
“Open a bottle of wine,” I told Cathy. “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes.”
After dinner, I was too agitated to relax. I went to my study and used the secure phone to request an unscheduled conference call with Rumsfeld and Dick Myers. I was exhausted—tired of having to explain every operational problem to the Secretary. I knew we would get our Special Forces on the ground soon, and that the situation would change once we did. But I did not think the Secretary believed this.
“Mr. Secretary,” I said, “from your comments earlier today, it appears that you no longer have confidence in me….”
“General…” Rumsfeld began.
“No, Sir. Please hear me out. It is essential for the mission that you have confidence in the commander. If you have lost confidence…you should select another commander.”
The line was silent.
“General Franks,” Donald Rumsfeld finally said. “You have my complete confidence. This operation will succeed.”
“I concur, Tom,” Dick Myers added. “You’re doing a great job under difficult circumstances and we will support you in every way we can.”
“Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Thanks, Dick. One thing you can do is remind the Service Chiefs about the chain of command. They’re still working hard on their individual service cottage industries, and it’s not helping.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Dick Myers said. And I believe to this day that he did everything in his power to keep the Chiefs in their designated lanes.
During my regular call with the Secretary the next morning, Rumsfeld did not lead off with an impatient question about the teams. Instead, he asked me to comment on the use of precision-guided, 5000-pound “deep penetrator” bombs in the White Mountains. I explained the effectiveness of this operation: though on television the global audience may have seen these as random explosions on blank hillsides, they were actually precision strikes that were killing al Qaeda and destroying their sanctuaries.
“Interesting,” Rumsfeld said. “I like learning these details.”
“You ask, Mr. Secretary, and I answer.”
THE TEN DAYS FROM HELL ENDED ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19.
Near midnight, Afghan time—early afternoon in Tampa— John Mulholland inserted the first Special Forces A-Team into General Dostum’s mud-brick village headquarters south of Mazar-e Sharif. The 160th SOAR MH-47s that had been trying for several nights to lift the team—ODA 595—through the mountains had finally succeeded. We now had a twelve-man highly skilled Green Beret team—call sign TIGER 02—with Dostum’s militia. Good weather was forecast in the coming seventy-two hours, and Mulholland reported that two more A-Teams would be inserted, one each with Mohammed Fahim and Mohammed Attah. As more CIA elements linked up with other warlords, additional A-Teams would be inserted with other Northern Alliance units.
“Things are moving, Sir,” Mulholland reported.
I was pleased. But we were still working on the “dress code” these teams would take into combat. It is part of the Special Forces’ culture to adopt the appearance of the indigenous troops with whom they serve. The teams would be fighting alongside Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara tribesmen, fierce mountain warriors who wore distinctive clothing. And, until we were able to provide the Northern Alliance with European-style battledress, their fighters made do with their homespun. John Mulholland correctly wanted his men to blend in, which meant “going native.” That made good tactical sense as well. The enemy had trained snipers who would easily spot Americans in Desert Camouflage Uniform. But there were legal concerns in Washington.
It was a vexing problem. American soldiers fighting out of uniform might not be treated as prisoners of war if captured, but rather be executed as spies. On the other hand, any captured Green Beret would likely be executed regardless of what he wore. The final compromise required our men to wear at least “one prominent item” of regulation uniform—a DCU shirt, jacket, or trousers would suffice.
This was shaping up to be a strange war.
As soon as I heard from Mulholland, I called Dick Myers. “Tell the Secretary that we’ve got Special Forces troopers on the ground and more are on the way.”
“That’s good news, Tom. The Secretary will be pleased.”
Twenty minutes later I was back at the commander’s console in the Joint Operations Center, watching digital aircraft ID blocks move across the image of Afghanistan on the plasma screen. In the far north, the symbol for TIGER 02, transmitted by secure satellite uplink, appeared at the center of the shaded oval representing Dostum’s area of operations.
It was 1429 hours in Tampa, almost 0100 on October 20 in Afghanistan. Four Air Force MC-130 transports from the 1st Special Operations Wing were moving in trail formation, crossing into Afghanistan from the Baluchistan panhandle of Pakistan. They carried two hundred men from the 75th Ranger Regiment, who would parachute onto the high desert plateau within minutes. Overhead, an AC-130 Spectre gunship was circling the Rangers’ objective: a long paved airstrip, code name Rhino.
Sheik Mohammed Bin Zayed, Military Chief of Staff of the United Arab Emirates, had told me about the desert airstrip, located on a dry lake bed. A passionate falconer, he’d had the facility built to serve a well-equipped hunting camp. “If you can use the airfield,” he told me, “you may not have to put so much pressure on Musharraf for basing. It will be better for him if you can keep your troop strength in Pakistan small.”
Provided with the airstrip’s exact coordinates, we had planned an operation with our Special Operators. The goal of the Rangers would be to secure the field as a lodgment for U.S. Marines, our first conventional force in Afghanistan.
Northeast of the Rangers, a string of MH-47s from the Kitty Hawk were nearing Kandahar, supported by a second AC-130 Spectre. These helicopters carried Task Force Gecko, elite operators from Major General Dell Dailey’s Special Mission Units. Their objective was the central Kandahar compound of the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
We had intentionally chosen not to bomb that target, hoping it would serve as a magnet for Omar and his deputies. And we anticipated that the maze of rooms and sheds inside the compound walls might contain a trove of intelligence: tactical maps, radio frequencies, satellite telephone numbers, lists of overseas agents, perhaps even the locations of secret refuges in Afghanistan where Taliban or al Qaeda leaders might be hiding. The Gecko operators had orders to take the site by force, to kill or capture any enemy found there, and to exploit the target for intelligence.
Like the Ranger airdrop at Rhino, the SMU mission in Kandahar was a moderate-to-high-risk operation. But I had confidence that the Rangers and the SMU operators could handle themselves deep in enemy territory. This two-part operation also had a strategic purpose: Attacking the Taliban’s heartland would demonstrate that we could strike anywhere, at any time of our choosing. And this would serve to fix the Taliban’s limited forces in the south. If we threatened his stronghold in Kandahar, Mullah Omar would not send his reserves north to reinforce the Taliban and al Qaeda units garrisoned along the Uzbek and Tajik borders.
Indeed, it was in the northern mountains, not the southwestern desert, where we would focus our main effort. As I worked with Dell Dailey on his plan, I remembered the 1st Cavalry Division’s successful deception in the Wadi al Batin. That feint had worked perfectly; I expected the same in this case.
“Be kinetic,” I’d told Dell. “Kill or capture, and use the Spectres to demonstrate overwhelming force.”
Dell Dailey called from his op center. “Missions on target in nine minutes.”
I watched the symbols moving toward the objectives. “Any activity on the ground, Dell?”
“Negative, Sir. No issues, no drama.” Dell’s voice was calm, as if he were describing a training exercise.
Now we waited. I stood up and shook a kink out of my right leg. The freshest reconnaissance imagery revealed that the Taliban had installed a security force at Objective Rhino. The Spectre was going to prep the targets with machine-gun and automatic cannon fire, destroying any crew-served weapons with the onboard 105 mm cannon. At no time during the long war against the Soviet occupation had Afghans witnessed such a devastating weapon. I was glad we had these gunships in theater, and that two of them were over these objectives tonight.
At 1451 hours, he called again. “Task Force Rhino and Task Force Gecko on their objectives.”
We also had a Predator up, observing the Gecko mission. Although I’d seen the rehearsal at Fort Benning, the sheer speed of the insertion was unbelievable. The big tandem-rotor helicopters swept in from two directions, so low that the pilots flying on night-vision goggles had to pop up to clear the compound walls. As the dust billowed, the operators pounded off the tailgates and moved toward their objectives, firing on the run.
While I watched, smoke from the compound and dust clouds from the helicopters’ rotors obscured the Predator video. We waited until 1535 hours, when Dell called again. “Gecko and Rhino secure. Resistance at both objectives. Enemy KIA. Friendly WIA. Continuing the mission.” The Taliban had attempted to defend the sites, as we had expected; several of our men had been wounded, some of the enemy killed. The Rangers secured their objectives at Rhino, took several prisoners, and called in two MC-130s to extract the Task Force.
In Kandahar, Task Force Gecko finished its work and departed on the waiting helicopters. One of the MH-47s struck the edge of a compound wall lifting out of the landing zone. The helicopter’s big two-wheel right landing gear was ripped away, but the aircraft was otherwise undamaged.
I was about to return to my office to call Dick Myers when Dell called with an update—and the news was bad. An MH-60 Penetrator standing by with the Quick Reaction Force at an isolated airstrip inside Pakistan had crashed in a “dust-out,” rolling over, severely damaging the helicopter, and killing two Rangers.
It was a sad loss. True to the Rangers’ creed, these young soldiers had led the way.
AS PART OF THE OVERALL INFORMATION PLAN, TORIE CLARK’S Public Affairs office at the Pentagon released dramatic night-vision video of the Ranger airdrop at Rhino, the phosphorescent green sky blossoming with parachutes in a scene evocative of those grainy World War II newsreels of the Normandy invasion. That was exactly the message we wanted to register with the Taliban: You are exposed. Lethal Coalition forces can drop from the night sky at any time, at any place. You can expect us back.
Our plan received support from an unlikely source: a national magazine. In an article on the missions at Gecko and Rhino, one of its star reporters presented a badly distorted version of the operations. One of the most glaring mistakes was a description of the Kandahar mission, which, the reporter claimed, “was initiated by sixteen AC-130 gunships.”
Sixteen gunships, I thought. Excellent. We knew from communications intercepts that the Taliban and al Qaeda were terrified of the AC-130s. Now, thanks to this article, they would believe that CENTCOM could put sixteen of these weapons on a single target. That was fiction, not fact. We had a total of nine Spectre gunships in the AOR and usually could operate three or four over Afghanistan on any given night. But the erroneous reporting furthered the operation. I wondered if the unnamed “senior officer” who fed the reporter this information had done so intentionally, or had simply been one of those ill-informed, disgruntled leakers finishing a dead-end career in some Pentagon cubicle.
I would never know. But as the Taliban concentrated its reserves to protect Kandahar and the south, John Mulholland continued to insert his teams into the north.
EVERY WAR PRODUCES MEMORABLE IMAGES: THE MARINE FLAG-raising on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, frost-bitten troops retreating over the snowy ridges of Korea, Medevac dust-offs in Vietnam.
The first visual icon of Operation Enduring Freedom showed Special Forces soldiers on horseback, charging across a barren slope with their Northern Alliance partners. Dressed in a motley blend of camouflage uniforms and checkered ethnic scarves, the Americans wore beards and mushroom-shaped pakol hats.
Studying the news magazine photographs, though, I recognized details the casual observer might have missed: green fiberglass cases carrying satellite radios, GPS equipment, and laser target-designators lashed to the soldiers’ saddles. It was as if warriors from the future had been transported to an earlier century. And that image captured this most unusual war: resourceful young troops carrying the world’s most advanced military technology onto a battlefield where horse cavalry still prevailed. I was thankful for American technology—and I was awed by the performance of these young men.
As I left for a brief trip to the AOR to consult with our critical allies, the Green Berets and our combat aviators forged a partnership that would break the back of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
AFTER MEETING WITH CROWN PRINCE ABDULLAH AND OTHER senior members of the royal family in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I flew into Muscat, Oman, to reconnect with Sultan Qaboos “Your Majesty,” I told the Sultan, “Crown Prince Abdullah supports our operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda. And, as you know, General Wald, who commands our Air Component, is based in the Kingdom.”
Sultan Qaboos nodded.
“I recently visited his Royal Highness and raised the issue of continuing the war through Ramadan.”
“And what was his opinion, General?” Sultan Qaboos asked.
Joining me in the meeting was Britain’s Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, wearing his Royal Navy uniform. Prince Andrew was visiting Oman to observe British forces on a previously scheduled training exercise. Like the Sultan, he listened intently. His nation was our firmest ally in this war. If the sensitivities of the Muslim world forced us to pause for a lunar month when Ramadan began on November 17, we risked a potentially crippling loss of momentum. By late December, the mountains of Afghanistan would be impassable with snow.
On the other hand, we needed the support of Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia and Oman—and for many of their citizens Ramadan was sacred. President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld had instructed me to sound out my contacts on this crucial point.
“These leaders hope we can defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda before the start of Ramadan.” I shook my head. “But they understand that this may not be possible. I now ask your opinion, Sir.”
“General,” the Sultan said. “Permit me a question. People are asking if the United States will finish the job this time.” He was referring to the token strikes we had launched against the Iraqi regime and Osama bin Laden in 1998.
“America is a different country since 9/11, Sir. I am a different man. We will finish the job.”
Sultan Qaboos was pleased. “Good. As for the Holy Month of Ramadan, I don’t think it will make any difference. Muslims sometimes go to war during Ramadan.” He stood and shook my hand. “You must continue the battle, General Franks. This Ramadan is for war.”
I DID NOT PLAY GOLF IN ISLAMABAD, DESPITE MY EARLIER PROMISE to President Musharraf, when I returned to meet with him again after my trip to Oman.
The Northern Alliance was being revitalized through its partnership with our Special Forces teams. All across the combat zones in the Panjshir and Amu Darya Valleys, Taliban forces and their al Qaeda supporters had been struck by the bombs our special operators had “lazed” onto their targets. Linking combat air controllers to flights of fighter-bombers and B-52s orbiting high above the battlefield had proven even more lethal than military theorists could have imagined.
The enemy seemed incapable of understanding the nature of our precision weapons. Hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda had been killed in the initial engagements. And Northern Alliance units, supplied with weapons, munitions, winter uniforms, food, medicines—as well as oats for their horses—were ready to take the offensive.
When I summarized the tactical picture for Musharraf, he predicted that the Taliban regime “must soon collapse—hopefully before Ramadan.”
“I hope so, Mr. President,” I said. “The Afghan people have suffered under the Taliban and al Qaeda long enough.”
“Do you know where Osama bin Laden is?” he asked.
“No, Sir. Do you?”
Musharraf smiled. “We think he is still in Afghanistan, in the east—Tora Bora. My intelligence officers would know if he had crossed into Pakistan.”
“We’re going after him,” I emphasized. “We won’t stop until we get him.”
“And when you do have him,” Musharraf said, “will you put him on trial?”
“General Musharraf, I’m a military man. We will take him dead or alive. If alive, I’m sure he will be tried as the murderer he is.”
FLYING ACROSS AFGHANISTAN, TOWARD TAJIKISTAN, I HAD AN unusual conversation with Donald Rumsfeld. The Secretary, too, was airborne, headed to Tashkent for more negotiations with President Karimov. “Are you sure those Special Forces teams have senior enough officers in command?” he asked. “It seems to me the Northern Alliance generals won’t really listen to young captains and majors.”
“Mr. Secretary, in a few weeks the warlords will think of those captains and majors as their sons. Our youngsters are very good at what they do.”
“You are the commander,” he said. “But keep an eye on it.”
Months later, Assistant Secretary of Defense Torie Clark told me, “You and Don Rumsfeld complement each other. You make him a better Secretary, and he makes you a better General.”
I think she was right.
MOHAMMED FAHIM KHAN SAT OPPOSITE ME AT A FOLDING TABLE in the echoing belly of the C-17 transport. He wore a cashmere pakol, and his beard was neatly trimmed. But Fahim still looked like a Mafia enforcer.
It was late on the last Tuesday in October, a cold night in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The huge aircraft stood alone on a ramp at the far end of the civilian airport. Fahim and a man introduced as his “Minister of Finance” had arrived in a dusty Mercedes sedan. A veteran CIA Operations Directorate officer I’ll call Hank, who had accompanied me on this trip, sat to my right. To my left, Colonel John Mulholland, a husky soldier who made me look small, rested the worn elbows of his DCUs on the tabletop. He was beyond tired.
We drank strong Air Force coffee, not tea. But this was a tea-drinking negotiation if there ever was one.
As the leader of the Northern Alliance—he had assumed command after Massoud’s assassination—Fahim had come to the meeting to bargain. He led the largest, best-equipped opposition force in Afghanistan. And he had witnessed the effective combination of our Special Forces and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of precision-guided weapons.
“If I can help you and you can help me,” he said through the Agency interpreter, “we both win. My people have fought terrorism for years, with special intensity since the Taliban took power. With both our efforts combined, there will be positive results.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I said, hoping the interpreter, who spoke with a British inflection, would capture the idiom.
Apparently he did, because Fahim replied with an adage of his own. “We respect all and trust all.”
“Will you trust me with your life?” I asked.
“We are soldiers and have no choice. Our lives are in the hands of God.”
He speaks well. But will he press the fight when things get tough? There was a reason he had brought his “finance minister.”
I spread John Mulholland’s tactical map on the table. “What are your intentions, General?”
With a gold mechanical pencil he made a series of neat symbols on the map. First, he drew a line of advance south from the Panshir Valley to the Shamali Plains north of Kabul. Then he circled several northern towns, where the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies had grouped: Taloqan, Konduz, and Mazar-e Sharif. “These are our immediate objectives. Your Air Force should concentrate its bombing to allow our forces to take these cities. Then I will move south to Bagram.” He outlined the jet plane symbol on the sheet that represented the former Soviet air force base north of Kabul.
His plan made good tactical sense. If Fahim did in fact have the loyalty of all the Northern Alliance commanders, he was poised to destroy enemy concentrations across the north and open a vital land bridge to Uzbekistan. With that route clear, we could support opposition forces via a passable highway system that ran through Central Asia all the way to Europe. Vital humanitarian support could flow to the beleaguered Afghans. And, at the end of the day, it would be the Afghans who would determine the success of our operations. If they were provided for, Phase IV (Reconstruction) would be accelerated immeasurably.
Fahim discussed the details of his tactical plan. Taloqan, he said, was a vital early objective because it would give his fighters an airfield.
“And Kabul?” I asked.
Fahim studied me with his deep-set eyes. “We will not enter Kabul until you give permission.”
It was the politically correct answer. Was he sincere? That was the crucial issue. In Pakistan, I had met with several Pashtun opposition leaders from southern Afghanistan. The most impressive was Hamid Karzai, who was sophisticated and multilingual, a man equally at home among tribal chiefs, diplomats, and soldiers. Karzai had broken with the Taliban soon after their Muslim extremist regime began its repression. The CIA station in Islamabad—virtually our Afghanistan embassy in exile—supported Karzai as a future national leader who could unite the disparate ethnic factions.
And I too was impressed. We needed to build a Pashtun opposition force to fight the Taliban. I believed Karzai was just the right Pashtun leader to build that force. If enemy resistance suddenly collapsed and the Northern Alliance composed of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras swept into the vacuum of Kabul, Afghanistan might face another civil war that pitted the northern factions against the majority Pashtuns. It was obvious from Fahim’s answer that he understood and respected the problem. I wondered about his view of Hamid Karzai.
It was time to discuss the price of rugs.
“What more do you need from us?” I asked. Glancing over, I saw John Mulholland studying Fahim’s face. Our Special Forces teams were already making better progress with Dostum south of Mazar-e Sharif than with Fahim’s larger units in the northeast.
“General Dostum needs weapons and ammunition more than we do,” Fahim said, an unexpected admission. “He can capture Mazar-e Sharif quickly if you support him.”
“But what do you need?” I pressed.
Fahim conferred with his finance minister. “What kind of additional logistical… and financial support can you provide?” He looked across at Hank, avoiding my eyes.
Hank laid out a computer printout listing ammunition, communications gear, and medical supplies. “I need an airfield big enough for C-130s.”
Fahim smiled politely. “Your C-130 is a famous airplane. Those with guns have destroyed the spirit of the Taliban and the Arabs.”
“And if you had your supplies…” Hank asked.
“If I take Taloqan and its airport—” Fahim began, then turned to his money man and whispered before continuing, “—I will need three million U.S. dollars a month.”
“You need three million dollars to launch your offensive and secure Mazar-e Sharif?” I asked.
Hank and I had prepared for this. He was good cop, I was bad. We waited.
“Oh, no. For the entire operation,” Fahim added, “I will need seven million dollars a month.”
I stood up and glared at the interpreter. “This is bullshit. Translate that.”
I walked down the front steps of the transport, took a leak, and smoked a cigarette on the tarmac. This was the performance we had rehearsed. In the brightly lit tunnel of the cargo bay, Hank was lecturing Fahim. “General Franks is very angry.”
I reentered the plane and sat down at the table. Hank nodded, and then spoke to Fahim. “It’s agreed. Five million for the entire north. You will take Mazar-e Sharif before Ramadan, and stop outside Kabul until you receive permission to enter the capital.”
“Yes,” Fahim said.
As Fahim and his finance minister left the plane, I could picture duffle bags filled with millions of dollars being loaded into his Mercedes. I hoped the car had good springs; that many stacks of hundreds would make a heavy load.
I didn’t know whether we had traded a horse or bought a carpet. But I was certain that General Mohammed Fahim Khan and the units of the Northern Alliance were going to war with us. As my father would have said, “This car needs a little work, Tommy Ray. But she’s gonna be a good one in a month or two.”
DURING MY LIFE, I HAD KNOWN THE “PRIMORDIAL VIOLENCE” OF war that Clausewitz had described. In Vietnam, my frame of reference had been narrow, one grid-square at a time. As a one-star general in Desert Storm, my viewpoint had been much broader, but still limited to tactical problems. Now I led a joint Coalition and had a wider vision. I trusted my subordinates. I would observe their actions, but not try to control their individual engagements, even though I had the ability to do so from CENTCOM’s high-technology headquarters. I’d witnessed politicians and generals choosing targets in Vietnam; it hadn’t worked then, and it wouldn’t work now. CENTCOM “pushed strategy up,” rather than waiting for Washington to “push tactics down.”
Don Rumsfeld was a hard taskmaster—but he never tried to control the tactics of our warfight. The same could not be said for others in the DoD bureaucracy. While Dick Myers and Pete Pace, the Vice Chairman, were quick to provide support, and slow to critique, a number of officers on the Joint Staff were on their own tactical wavelength, and it was these officers who were the focus of my strategic “push.”
For me, the course of the war in Afghanistan in the first weeks of November 2001 unfolded in a blur of long video-lit days and nights—decisions made and objectives realized. (I will leave the job of recapturing every detail to the military historians.) What was important was that those fights produced victories, and the victories were historic.
Good to his word, Mohammed Fahim Khan delivered the vital towns of the north. Taloqan, Konduz, and Herat fell in rapid succession, all within a week. Tiger 02, the Special Forces team supporting General Abdul Rashid Dostum—led by a young captain, a seasoned master sergeant, and a lanky sergeant first class, whose noms de guerre were Mark, Paul, and Mike—fought one of the most tactically skillful and courageous small-unit actions in American military history. Facing determined enemy resistance, terrible weather, and mounting casualties among their indigenous troops, these Green Berets used maneuver and air power to destroy an army the Soviets had failed to dislodge with more than a half million men. Dostum’s forces routed the Taliban and al Qaeda, and captured Mazar-e Sharif on the afternoon of November 9, 2001.
The Taliban and their araban auxiliaries were defeated in the north.
Other Tiger Teams operating in the south used Coalition air power to pound the enemy into submission. Hamid Karzai, who could affect the persona of a well-manicured scholar, was up to his chin in fierce combat north of Kandahar. When his forces were almost overrun by five hundred Taliban advancing up a steep valley in a convoy of pickup trucks, Karzai trusted his American Special Forces advisers, led by a brave young soldier named Captain Jason Amerine, and held his ground. Amerine’s team called in repeated air strikes, some impacting within two hundred meters of Karzai’s fighting positions near the provincial capital of Tarin Kot. That engagement destroyed the last of the Taliban’s operational reserves; the fall of Kandahar followed quickly.
I WATCHED THE PLASMA SCREENS OF THE JOC AS DELL DAILEY’S operators choppered in to rescue the Shelter Now hostages and fly them to Pakistan and as Marine Expeditionary Unit 15 reoccupied Objective Rhino. As Winston Churchill said decades earlier, this was the “beginning of the end.”
ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 27, 2001, I RECEIVED AN unexpected call from Secretary Rumsfeld. At the time I was working with Gene Renuart and the operations staff on air support for Afghan units pushing into the Spin Mountains around Tora Bora.
“General Franks, the President wants us to look at options for Iraq. What is the status of your planning?”
Throughout the operation in Afghanistan, the situation in Iraq had remained an issue—it was always within my peripheral vision. The pattern of attacks on our aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones had triggered Response Options at varying levels. It was a low-grade war, but a war just the same. Every morning, as I jotted my daily notes on a fresh index card, I listed “Air crew shootdown in Iraq” as a likely challenge.
“Mr. Secretary,” I said, “we have a plan, of course. OPLAN1003.”
“What’s your opinion of it, General?”
“Desert Storm II. It’s out of date, under revision because conditions have changed. We have different force levels in the region than we had when the plan was written. And we obviously have learned some valuable lessons about precision weapons and Special Operations from our experience in Afghanistan.”
“Okay, Tom,” Rumsfeld said. “Please dust it off and get back to me next week.”
Son of a bitch, I thought. No rest for the weary…
“Gene,” I said. “Grab Jeff Kimmons and come see me. New work to be done.”
ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 22, 2001, CATHY AND I SAT side by side on the nylon sling seats of an MH-47. Outside the Plexiglas windows, the arid winter hills of eastern Afghanistan unfolded. We were fifteen minutes south of Bagram Air Base, now the headquarters of the Coalition. The smoggy, half-ruined sprawl of Kabul lay ahead in a bowl-shaped valley.
“It looks like Los Angeles after an earthquake,” I shouted over the rotor thump. The city had been battered by the years of war.
Cathy looked at me and smiled.
Gary Harrell sat opposite in the cargo bay, snoring. Like most veteran Special Operators, he could sleep in the middle of a hurricane.
I was tired, but not sleepy. For the past three days we had been crisscrossing the AOR, staging out of Oman aboard a C-17. Wayne Newton’s USO troupe had traveled with us to the Marine base at Rhino, to Kandahar, and on to Pakistan, bringing Christmas cheer to the troops. And this morning, Cathy and I were attending ceremonies marking the installation of Hamid Karzai’s interim government, which had been selected at a U.N.-sponsored conference in Bonn, Germany, three weeks earlier.
I knew there was still hard fighting ahead in Afghanistan. But the main resistance had been shattered. The remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda were hiding in the snowy mountains of the southeast, subjected to relentless bombing. And twenty-five million Afghans had been liberated, in less than three months of military operations.
The helicopter landed in a rubble-strewn lot near the American Embassy. Marines in Humvees escorted our black Chevy SUVs to the government hall.
There were crowds of camera-toting reporters, jostling for position. Bearded Northern Alliance soldiers in ragged fatigues gaped at the Western dignitaries arriving in their shiny vehicles. An Afghan official in a suit and tie bowed, then led us to the entrance. “Welcome, if you please,” he said, flashing gold teeth.
We passed through a metal detector guarded on each side by unsmiling Northern Alliance soldiers toting Kalashnikovs.
As we mounted the staircase toward the main hall, Cathy said, “Don’t you have a gun, Tom?”
I patted the holster at the small of my back. “You bet.”
Gary Harrell leaned over and winked at us. “I’m packing three handguns and two knives,” he said.
“Well,” Cathy replied, “that must be a ceremonial metal detector.”
A throng from the pages of Kipling filled the echoing room, a rainbow of turbans, robes, and sashes. We took our assigned seats in the front row. Around us were representatives of over twenty Coalition partners, British, French, Germans, and other NATO allies.
Mohammed Fahim Khan dipped his head in respect. Hamid Karzai smiled warmly and shook our hands.
Banners hung on the walls, emblazoned with Persian script and English. “Death to Terrorism.” “May Allah Bestow Peace and Prosperity on the World.” Behind the dais hung a huge portrait of Ahmad Shah Massoud, “the Lion of Panjshir,” now the nation’s martyr.
A boy in a blue robe led a blind, white-bearded mullah to the podium. The old man smiled, felt for the microphone, and then began to chant Koranic verses. Everyone stood for the national anthem of the new Afghanistan, a rousing march. We had no interpreter for the speeches that followed, but it was easy to understand the mood of triumph.
After the second speaker concluded his animated remarks, he suddenly raised his right fist. “Massoud!” he called, as if in prayer himself. “Massoud!”
Around us, hundreds of people raised their fists. “Massoud!” they shouted in reply. “Massoud!”