On the night of October 7, 2001, the U.S. military and intelligence high command at the Pentagon, CIA, and various headquarters across the globe were gazing attentively at the video screens that had lately become such a prominent feature of their offices. The recent collapse of the dot-com boom meant that a huge amount of commercial satellite bandwidth capacity had become available for use by the military to transmit all the exciting video streamed by drones to an ever-wider audience. They were watching a grainy infrared video relayed from a Predator drone armed with two Hellfire missiles over the outskirts of Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. The drone “pilot” was sitting in a trailer in a parking lot at CIA headquarters in Langley, although CIA drones in the war zone were under military control. The silent picture showed three vehicles and a motorcycle leaving a mud-walled compound and heading toward Kandahar.
Among the far-flung spectators was General Tommy Franks, the four-star general commanding the assault on Afghanistan from his wartime headquarters in Tampa, Florida. “I felt a familiar rush of adrenaline,” Franks wrote later, for the spectacle took him back to long-ago days watching battles from a helicopter in Vietnam. “This target has all the characteristics of a leadership convoy,” reported a CIA counterterrorism officer who was watching from the trailer, a former day-care center, in the Langley parking lot. “This could be Mullah Omar’s personal vehicle.” Mullah Omar was the Taliban leader, a very high-value target. Here was a chance to eliminate the heart of the enemy war machine at a blow.
“Valid target,” pronounced a military lawyer standing at Franks’ side.
The convoy entered Kandahar and drove through the predawn streets, then stopped as some of the passengers got out and entered a building. “Valid target for Hellfire,” said the lawyer, but the vehicles moved on before the drone could fire. When the convoy stopped again, several passengers entered a mosque, off-limits for a strike without special permission. Meanwhile, David Deptula, mastermind of the 1991 Iraq bombing campaign and theorist of effects-based operations who was by now a two-star general directing all allied air forces in the Afghan War, was also glued to the Predator video feed at his headquarters in Qatar. As he told me later with some irritation, he had four planes over the mosque, waiting for clearance to obliterate the building. “Suddenly a vehicle parked outside the building blows up. I said, ‘Who the hell ordered that?’” It turned out that Franks himself, chafing at the delay, had ordered the drone operator to fire a Hellfire missile at the vehicle, a Toyota Corolla. Like many people, Deptula was not used to the notion that commanding generals were now bypassing the entire chain of command to blow up cars. Minutes later, the remainder of the convoy came to a halt and various passengers disappeared inside a large building. Would it be in order to kill everyone inside, including innocent parties? Franks thought he had better consult Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld announced he was going to refer the matter to the president. Five minutes later he reported back that Bush had agreed the building could be hit. Then the CIA officer monitoring the video reported that the building might be a mosque. Franks, as he wrote later, “swore silently,” concluded that it didn’t look like a mosque to him, and ordered a waiting Navy F-18 fighter-bomber to bomb the building forthwith. “You’re still good,” said the lawyer. A few minutes later, Franks received a call from Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper, who had been watching the entire episode on the Predator screen in his office and who smugly informed him that he thought he had seen the high-value targets escape from the building before the strike. Enraged, Franks demanded that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have Jumper’s screen removed. In this new kind of war, video conferred power, at least in Washington.
Unbeknownst to the high-ranking audience gazing at their separate screens, Mullah Omar had indeed been in the convoy. Earlier that evening an American missile had plowed into his home compound as he huddled in the basement, sparing him but mortally injuring his ten-year-old son. According to the Mullah’s driver, later interviewed by journalist Anand Gopal, the Taliban leader had set off with his family and dying child in the Corolla. But the child could not be saved. When the car exploded from the missile strike while he was inside the building, he and the rest of his family ran off (leaving the remainder of the convoy to proceed on its way), and he has not been seen by any Westerner since that day.
Overall, the initial campaign in Afghanistan was deemed a great success, particularly by Rumsfeld, who relished the notion that it was all thanks to “a combination of the ingenuity of the U.S. Special Forces, the most advanced precision-guided munitions in the U.S. arsenal, delivered by U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps crews, and the courage of valiant one-legged Afghan fighters on horseback.” (Rumsfeld had been taken by reports of one Northern Alliance fighter charging the enemy despite a prosthetic limb.) There was a certain amount of truth in this. Resistance to the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance did collapse when the Taliban lost the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. But most casualties came after the Taliban surrendered, when many prisoners were crammed into shipping containers and left to suffocate. Had the air strikes really had the devastating effects as claimed in Rumsfeld’s history, there would have been a large number of wounded. Yet in the north, where the bombing had been most intense, there were very few fighters to be found among the casualties at local hospitals, even within days of the fighting. Elsewhere, where U.S. planes caught Taliban formations in the open, such as in front of the town of Tirin Kot in Uruzgan Province, they did inflict heavy casualties, but at Ghazni, which had been heavily bombed thanks to the large number of Taliban tanks based there, the total number of casualties, according to postwar local testimony, was three. More important contributions to the victory were the orders from the Taliban’s overseers in Pakistani intelligence to give up the fight and go home as well as the hefty cash payments handed out by the CIA to various Afghan warlords to abandon their Taliban allies.
Meanwhile, the hunt for high-value targets was pursued with unrelenting but somewhat indiscriminate vigor. Bin Laden himself had slipped the net with relative ease. Having evaded efforts to corner him in his Tora Bora mountain redoubt, he took himself off to the mountainous and heavily forested Kunar Province and thence across the border to Pakistan, settling in the pleasant district of Haripur, where he lived in wedded bliss with his youngest wife for two years before moving to a purpose-built compound in equally pleasant Abbottabad. His immediate subordinate, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, also escaped. Less fortunate was Mohammed Atef, another Egyptian, who in addition to being generally considered the military commander of al-Qaeda was also a valued mentor to bin Laden. (Atef’s daughter married Mohammed bin Laden, Osama’s son.) He was killed along with seven associates in a drone-assisted bombing strike during the initial American air assault, but was swiftly replaced as military commander by another Egyptian, former army colonel Saif al-Adel.
The list in Bush’s desk had originally contained some two dozen names, but although the president carefully updated the list with excisions whenever news of a fresh kill came in, the number of nominated high-value targets continued to grow. Just as strategic bombing campaigns that commence with a limited number of select targets have traditionally tended to expand, the attack on Afghanistan that began as a hunt for the perpetrators of 9/11 inexorably widened. In part, this was a function of demand, as the number of hunters eager to join in the chase proliferated. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, irked by the prominent role played by CIA paramilitary teams in the initial overthrow of the Taliban, was eager to enhance the U.S. military role in covert operations. “Have you killed anyone yet?” he would query General Charles Holland, chief of Special Operations Command, whenever they met. In December 2001, a Joint Special Operations Task Force, code-named Task Force 11 for the occasion, with personnel drawn from elite units of all three services, arrived in Afghanistan with the specific mission of killing or capturing al-Qaeda and Taliban “HVTs” (high-value targets).
Task Force 11 appeared to embody the vision of a twenty-first-century military as described in George W. Bush’s September 1999 speech at the Citadel: “agile, lethal … able to identify targets by a variety of means, then be able to destroy those targets almost instantly … able to strike from across the world with pinpoint accuracy … with unmanned systems.” Not only did the task force have the services of the CIA’s Predators, armed and unarmed, the intensely trained elite troops also carried high-tech radios and satellite phones designed to put them in instant communication with commanders near and far. At their disposal were AC-130 Spectre gunships, which could not only lay down withering fire against enemies on the ground but also provide close-up pictures of any area a unit might be thinking of occupying, thanks to the profusion of TV and infrared cameras on board. The NSA and service communications intelligence assets vacuumed up targets’ radio communications and tracked their location. The drones rolling off the General Atomics assembly line gave commanders up to the level of Tommy Franks and beyond a bird’s-eye view of unfolding battles.
Despite the profusion of sensors, it was still hard for the task force to find targets, because in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Taliban regime, there were few to be found. The al-Qaeda leadership had disappeared to Pakistan and elsewhere, as had many of the leaders of the regime. Most of the Taliban had simply retired from politics, at least for the time being, accepting that Afghanistan had entered a new era. Nevertheless, a central war aim of the U.S. military machine had been “to capture or kill as many Al Qaeda as we could,” according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The targeting apparatus embodied in organizations such as Task Force 11 and the CIA paramilitary squads demanded victims. Therefore, supply met demand. Strongmen and warlords found they could dispose of two birds with one stone by denouncing rivals in local power struggles to the credulous Americans as Taliban or al-Qaeda leaders and thereby ingratiate themselves with the country’s new rulers. Even those with ironclad proof that they were not al-Qaeda or Taliban were swept up, including a Syrian named Abdul Rahim al-Janko, who had been arrested by al-Qaeda on suspicion of being a Western spy and tortured into giving a videotaped confession that he had been sent by the CIA and Mossad to kill Osama bin Laden. In a jail in Kandahar when the Taliban regime fell, al-Janko was handed to the Americans, who sent him to Guantánamo. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft later played part of the tape of his confession to journalists, claiming it was a would-be suicide attacker’s martyrdom video. The audio was muted, on the excuse that it might contain coded messages for other terrorists.
Meanwhile the search teams thirsted for bigger game. “By February 2002,” Army Special Operations Colonel Andrew Milani drily noted in a later report, “the Joint Special Operations Task Force (i.e., Task Force 11) had become frustrated by the lack of actionable intelligence for high value targets.”
Even genuinely active Taliban leaders were at this point hard to find. One such was Saifur Rahman Mansoor, a youthful son of a famous anti-Soviet fighter who had risen to be a mid-level Taliban commander. Following the fall of the Taliban regime he had retreated with a few hundred followers, including assorted Uzbek and Arab jihadis, to his father’s old redoubt during the Russian war, a remote, narrow mountain valley close to the Pakistani border called the Shahikot. Finding his arrival unpopular with local tribes, he opened negotiations with the authorities in Kabul, using tribal elders as intermediaries, offerring “to end his armed defiance of the interim government.”
Mansoor’s surrender offer was quickly brushed aside, for the U.S. military, eager to “flush out” such a conveniently consolidated collection of the enemy, was preparing a major assault. A surge in cell-phone traffic from the area and sightings of a number of SUVs had convinced the CIA and Task Force 11 that one or more of the highest-value targets of all—Osama bin Laden, his second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Mullah Omar (quickly dubbed “the big three”)—might be wintering there, protected by a large force of bodyguards. According to the plan, conventional U.S. Army troops would drive down the valley from the north in expectation of pushing the enemy, or at least their leaders, into the arms of other units blocking escape routes through the mountain passes leading toward Pakistan. The special operations units, U.S. Navy Seals and others, would be waiting on observation points, ready to scoop up or kill fleeing high-value targets. In keeping with the exclusive and obsessive focus on these particular targets, the Task Force 11 teams were under an entirely separate chain of command from the conventional force, free to act as they chose. Code-named Operation Anaconda, it would be the largest U.S. military ground operation since the 1991 Gulf War.
The ensuing battle featured almost all aspects of the remote-control high-technology approach to war, notably the abiding faith in remote sensing as a substitute for the human eye. The results were instructive, if tragic.
Overlooking the southern end of the valley was a 10,000-foot mountain, Takur Ghar. Task Force 11 planners thought the summit would be an excellent spot for an observation post. “Unfortunately,” as Milani noted in his report, “the enemy thought so too.” Just to make sure, the task force dispatched one of their favorite tools, a four-engine AC-130 plane, to make a reconnaissance of the mountaintop and confirm that it was unoccupied. The plane carried a formidable amount of firepower, including heavy machine guns and a cannon. But Special Forces esteemed the aircraft even more for the array of surveillance devices it carried, including electro-optical and infrared cameras as well as radar. Relayed back to task force headquarters, the pictures showed no sign of any human presence, nor did any other intelligence report from the various surveillance aircraft and other systems blanketing the area. But they were wrong. In fact, as the elite Navy Seals were shortly to discover, several dozen of the enemy, highly trained Arab and Uzbek fighters, were well dug in, complete with a heavy machine gun in a fortified bunker, concealing themselves with the low-technology aid of snow, trees, and a tarpaulin.
To the naked eye, on the other hand, the enemy force was by no means invisible. There was snow on the mountain, and trails of footprints showed up clearly, as did goatskins and other detritus left in plain view by untidy jihadis. These were exactly the kind of telltale signs that Marshall Harrison, the forward air controller prowling the skies over South Vietnam in his wide-observation little plane, had been ready and able to pick up: a trail of footprints left in the mud after early-morning rain, extra clothes on a washing line, and other indications visible to a well-trained human observer. Staring at the images from Takur Ghar on their (relatively) high-definition video screens, the task force mission planners saw no such signs. Believing these systems to be infallible, the commander ordered the SEALs to head for the mountaintop.
So it was that on the night of March 2, 2002, a helicopter flew a SEAL team directly to the summit. They noticed the fresh tracks and goatskins the moment they touched down, but a discussion on whether to quit the scene was interrupted when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the helicopter, which was simultaneously ripped with machine-gun bullets. The pilot quickly took off again, flying the badly damaged craft to a landing several miles away on the valley floor. But in the sudden jolt of the takeoff, a SEAL, Petty Officer Neil Roberts, who had been standing on the rear exit ramp, fell off, stranding him alone amid the hornets’ nest of aroused jihadis.
Both Roberts and the team leader with the damaged helicopter switched on their high-tech infrared strobe lights, visible to the AC-130 gunship circling overhead. This was a means of revealing location to friendly forces and was much valued by the special operators. It had, however, never been tested in actual combat. Thanks to the images, ascending levels of Special Operations command were aware of these distress signals, but none of them were clear as to whom each light belonged, thus generating a spiral of confusion.
Down in the valley, the officer in immediate command of the unit that had tried to land on Takur Ghar quickly devised a plan to deal with the emergency. He did not have any sophisticated surveillance equipment, merely a radio and a satellite phone to talk to higher headquarters, but he had been in the area for some days and had a clear grasp of the local geography, what had happened, and what could and should be done. None of that mattered, however, because buzzing in the freezing darkness two thousand feet above the mountain summit was a Predator drone, its infrared camera streaming video up to a satellite high above and then across mountains, deserts, and oceans to Task Force 11 headquarters on Masirah, a desert island off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Gulf, a thousand miles from the battle on Takur Ghar. The hypnotic allure of close-up video gave commanders the illusion, not for the last time, that they were in close touch with the battlefield and had a better understanding of events than anyone actually on the scene. They felt they had “total situational awareness,” wrote one historian of the battle later, “making them like gods, omniscient and all-seeing,” and consequently better equipped to manage a complicated and fast-moving series of events far away. “We don’t need you getting all worked up on the radio,” the officer on the scene was curtly informed. “Get off the Net, we’ve got it.”
The chair-bound staff on Masirah, not to mention the technicians and officers at assorted other headquarters in Bagram, Florida, and the Pentagon who were also watching the pictures (Special Operations Command was by now spending $1 million a day renting satellite bandwidth), were in fact glued to a strange depiction of reality. Dawn was hours away, and the silent stream of images generated by warm bodies against a cold background that was filtered through security encryption and satellite relays before ultimate translation into viewable pictures was indistinct at best. Just as Tom Christie’s testers had honestly reported two years earlier (to air force fury), the images gave only a “soda-straw” view of events, with a visual acuity of 20/200. As it so happens, this is the legal definition of blindness for drivers in the United States.
To make matters worse, the people operating this drone were CIA employees sitting in the trailer park at CIA headquarters who felt free to shift the direction in which the drone camera was pointing without reference to the staff trying to coordinate troops and helicopters on and around the mountain. So each time this happened, the headquarters staff on the island off Oman had to contact the CIA trailer park and request a change of camera direction, a process that sometimes took twenty minutes.
Apart from the quality of the pictures, the command post on Masirah should in theory have been able to communicate easily with troops on the scene thanks to the wonders of the radio communications net, which was designed to bypass mountains and other obstacles by relaying signals via satellites. But this system was notoriously unreliable, and true to its reputation, conversations were repeatedly interrupted or broken off completely, causing endless repetition and confusion during the operation. Nevertheless, so determined were the members of the task force battle staff to supervise the battle through the Predator drone, they settled for the deficient satellite radio with its unfulfilled promise of direct and instantaneous communications over long distances. The officer on the scene who had been rudely displaced from command did have direct and instant communication where it mattered, inside the valley and surrounding mountains, because his radios were comparatively simple and could easily reach anyone who was in line of sight, but this advantage was considered secondary to the omniscience conferred by the Predator.
The helicopter carrying the first SEAL team had flown off the mountaintop when attacked and crash-landed in the valley, leaving Roberts behind. A second helicopter, having picked up the survivors from the first, landed on the same spot in hopes of rescuing Roberts. Under heavy fire and taking casualties, including Technical Sergeant John Chapman, an air force combat controller responsible for coordinating air support who was left for dead, the team retreated down the mountain and called for reinforcements, which were dispatched after some delay. But thanks to the confused communications among all concerned, the incoming rescue force of U.S. Army Rangers did not understand that the team had left the mountaintop. They therefore landed on the very same spot where the first two groups had already been attacked. Sure enough, they were met with a blizzard of rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun bullets. Within a few minutes several men were dead and the survivors pinned down. Poor communications made it difficult for them to call in air support until late in the day.
Elsewhere in the Shahikot valley, the U.S. offensive was not going any better. By the afternoon of the second day of the operation, senior officers were seriously discussing a complete retreat from the valley to regroup. The best intelligence that satellites, reconnaissance planes, signals intercepts, and CIA agents could supply had reported that there were some 250 enemy fighters overall in the valley. In fact there may have been as many as 1,000. It had also been reported that there were about 800 civilians living in villages on the valley floor, but there were none. It was believed that the enemy would also be sheltering on the valley floor, but they were dug in on the high ground and far better armed than predicted. The army commander had been confident that the operation would be over quickly because the enemy would cut and run. But the foreign fighters had determinedly stood and fought, despite a rain of bombs from dozens of planes crowding the air over the valley, including B-52 bombers cruising 7 miles above the fray.
Anaconda’s overall commander, Major General H. L. “Buster” Hagenback, was not helping this disordered state of affairs by devoting a lot of attention to the individual manhunt. A vivid dispatch by an embedded reporter at his headquarters described the pursuit, via Predator drone feed, of a “late-model SUV” as it drove toward Pakistan. Among those inside was a man wearing a white robe and turban, a sure sign, according to the senior intelligence officer at headquarters, of a “liaison” between al-Qaeda forces in the field and the terrorist organization’s senior leadership. As described in the dispatch, the entire staff at headquarters was engrossed in the video of the car as they all waited impatiently for strike aircraft to appear on scene. “Go get ’em,” yelled Hagenback. Eventually, a B-1 bomber unleashed 16 tons of bombs, obliterating the car and surrounding landscape. As the smoke cleared, the deputy commander addressed the headquarters staff: “If you haven’t done it recently, reach around and pat yourselves on the back. This is hard stuff. Hell, I’ve been trying to shoot a truck on that damned road for two days!” he said to appreciative chuckles.
In theory, the relentless air attacks were being coordinated by two huge aircraft designed specifically for “battle management” and orbiting ceaselessly above the battlefield. One was a $244 million JSTARS (Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System). Readers may recall that this system was originally developed to track Soviet armored divisions racing across the plains of northern Europe by collecting radar images of moving objects and processing them with on-board computers in order to target the advancing formations. Conceptually descended from Task Force Alpha and the electronic fence of Vietnam days, it had never worked properly (being unable, for example, to distinguish a moving tank from a tree waving in the wind). Tom Christie had caught the air force pretending that it could see through mountains in the Balkans in 1995. But as always, the dream that sensors could make centralized battle management possible had never been allowed to die, so now JSTARS was supposed to be tracking sandal-clad guerrillas hiding behind rocks. Joining it in orbit over the battlefield was a $270 million AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System), an airborne air traffic control system designed to manage aerial battles.
Despite this costly deployment of advanced technology, when Scott “Soup” Campbell arrived on the scene, he found chaos. An air force captain, Campbell flew an A-10 “Warthog,” which could maneuver at low level with relative impunity, allowing the pilot to survey the ground with the naked eye, unlike the sensor-rich AC-130 that led the SEALS to disaster on Takur Ghar.
Campbell and his wingman had been dispatched to Afghanistan on a few hours’ notice late in the morning of the third day of Operation Anaconda. The long journey down the Gulf, necessarily skirting Iran, and across the Arabian Sea and then Pakistan, took 5 hours, with repeated hookups to an accompanying tanker aircraft. As ordered, he flew straight to the battle without landing. At the time he arrived, the sun was sinking behind the mountains, so the valley below, as he told me later, was in deep shadow, and everything was in a state of utter confusion. On the ground, 39 separate Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (whose job is to call for air support) in the 5-by-9-kilometer “killbox” were radioing urgently for air support: “we’re getting mortared, Dshk [machine-gun] fire … we’re getting hammered.” In the gathering darkness, fighters, gunships, and helicopters thronged the airspace, moving at hundreds of miles an hour, all ignorant of each other’s position and missing each other often by mere yards. A navy fighter shot between Campbell and his wingman: a Predator “practically bounced off my canopy.” In his vivid recollection, “weapons coming off the jet(s) fall through that sky.… All of a sudden a 2,000-pounder blows up just as I’m sitting there looking down at the ground. That means it probably just dropped right through my formation off a bomber at 39,000 feet. So it quickly dawned on us that this is a mess and the threat is not from the ground really, from guys shooting at us, it’s from each other.”
In theory, everybody would have been coordinated by an Air Support Operations Center relaying requests from the ground in an orderly fashion. But the colonel in charge of the air operation had elected to direct matters from many miles and several high mountains away at Bagram, the main American base in Afghanistan. This system depended on line-of-sight radios so, thanks to those mountains, it was effectively out of action, and without it, the beleaguered soldiers on the ground had no way of communicating directly with the planes overhead … until Campbell showed up. His A-10 had radios that could talk to both ground units and other aircraft. So he and his wingman became a two-man air traffic control center, relaying the frantic calls for help from the ground to the circling planes while warning bombers off strikes that might hit friendly positions. He could achieve this because his plane was designed, and he was trained, to enable a “fingertip feel” of the immediate surroundings.
Campbell was able to form a three-dimensional mental picture of who was where in and above the valley, coordinating and directing air strikes accordingly, an impressive feat considering that when he finally landed at a base in Pakistan he had been in the air for a total of twelve hours. Over the next few days he returned to the valley, where conditions were slowly stabilizing, until he was urgently dispatched, along with a multitude of other fighters, gunships, and SEAL teams, to pursue a white van on an Afghan back road rumored to contain Osama bin Laden himself, which of course it did not.
Operation Anaconda, which officially ended on March 18, was declared an unqualified success, with over seven hundred enemy casualties in exchange for eight U.S. dead (seven on Takur Ghar) and seventy-two wounded. Others, including friendly Afghan commanders, reported that the number of enemy casualties had been far, far lower. It turned out that none of the “big three” had been anywhere near the battle. For some time it was claimed that Saifur Rahman Mansour, whose foiled attempts to surrender had preceded the operation, had indeed been killed. But he lived to fight on many more days, his reputation reportedly bolstered to hero status by his stand against the Americans in the Shahikot. He finally died in a battle with the Pakistani military in South Waziristan in 2008.
Even as silence descended over the valley, the hunt for targets went on. Joining the effort in June was a new force grandly titled Combined Joint Task Force 180 whose mission was “to conduct operations to destroy remaining Al Qaeda/hostile Taliban command control and other hostile anti-Islamic Transitional Government of Afghanistan elements.” It was also tasked to help establish a “stable and secure Afghanistan able to deter/defeat the re-emergence of terrorism.” But it was the “kinetic” part of the mission that occupied the energies of the force, especially its chief of staff, a tough, aggressive two-star general named Stanley McChrystal. “I always thought Stan was responsible for the Afghan war we ended up with,” a former army general who served in Afghanistan at that time told me. “All we had to do was leave the Afghans alone; they weren’t any threat to us. But Stan insisted on doing all these raids, busting into villages, arresting people, killing people. Pretty soon they were all riled up at us and the whole thing went south from there on in.”
In the weeks following Anaconda, Special Operations Command undertook an intense postmortem into the debacle on the mountain, paying particular attention to the ultimate fate of Neil Roberts, the SEAL who fell from the first helicopter. Fortunately, or so it seemed, the Predator video was available as a firsthand record of what had actually happened. Careful scrutiny of the footage satisfied commanders that he had died a noble death, taking the fight to the enemy despite several bullet wounds and even storming a machine-gun nest. At his crowded memorial service his deputy commanding officer spoke movingly of how the video “shows the mortal wound and Neil falls to the ground … he had expended all of his ammo, both primary and secondary, as well as all his grenades.”
But this was an illusion. As Colonel Milani, the Special Forces officer tasked with assessing the events on Takur Ghar reported (much to the irritation of the SEALs), nothing of the kind had happened. Roberts’ body was discovered very close to where he had landed in his fall. Postmortem examination of his wounds indicated he had been shot almost immediately. On the other hand, the body of Sergeant Chapman, who had been left for dead in the hurried flight following the second landing on the mountain, was discovered in a bunker several yards from where he had been seen to fall and from where he may have been firing on the enemy. The wounds that actually killed him apparently came from the U.S. bombs that destroyed the bunker. Given that Chapman, wounded in the initial attack, had been abandoned on the battlefield, this was not an appealing conclusion. As Milani ultimately concluded in his unsparing after-action report, “Roberts’ colleagues desperately wanted to see him alive and taking it to the enemy. They not only saw what they wanted to see, they saw what they needed to see.” They were, he wrote, “necessarily enmeshed in a network of preconceptions.”
Those officers saw what they needed to see even though they had the leisure of several weeks to review the video in minute detail. But more and more, drone pictures were guiding life-and-death decisions made in a matter of hours or minutes, with consequences that would endure for years.