“YOU’LL HAVE TO KILL
A LOT OF MEN LIKE MY FATHER”
Chris Haas was one of the first Americans to arrive in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. A shaved-bald special forces officer with a hoarse voice and a love of cigars, Haas is easygoing but essentially private, careful and skeptical while maintaining an outward affability. He bowed his head before each meal, but did not speak of religion. His reserve contrasted with the effusive warmth of his Texan wife, Betty, whose smiling picture he tacked to the bulletin board by his desk.
Haas flew in on October 26, 2001, on one of the first helicopters that made it over the Hindu Kush following 9/11. At the time he was a lieutenant colonel, and he would be in command of the first four special forces teams to soldier through the winter weather and link up with Northern Alliance militia leaders. He would work side by side with CIA veterans of the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s, who would r.5eforge their ties with the Northern Alliance, dispensing suitcases of cash for Afghan salaries, equipment, and fuel. The three who arrived first were Agency pros and a pleasure to work with, qualities not shared by some of the whippersnappers the CIA would later send out. They included “Doc,” who had been a special forces medic before joining the CIA; Gary Schroen, a former field officer; and Gary Berntsen, a former CIA station chief.
Haas’s most important duty was serving as liaison to the Northern Alliance leadership, the Tajik-led militia that had been fighting the Taliban for years and was the only armed group with the ability to topple the regime and oust its Al Qaeda allies. The “G chief,” or guerrilla leader, was Bismullah Khan Mohammedi, a wily, determined Northern Alliance leader who was highly beholden to his Tajik faction, the second largest of the groups making up Afghanistan’s ethnic mosaic. As he grilled Haas in his headquarters at Jabal Saraj, he sought to put his would-be patron on the defensive. “Are you ready to lose men? There will be fighting,” he said to Haas and his operations officer, Mark Schwartz. “Is the United States going to abandon us again?” he continued, referring to the abrupt end of America’s interest in Afghanistan after the Soviet departure in 1989. Haas knew it was a test. Bismullah Khan—or BK, as he would come to be known in the years ahead, when he went on to become Afghanistan’s army chief of staff, interior minister, and then defense minister—was trying to level the playing field. The Northern Alliance certainly wanted American help, and it desperately needed the firepower that Haas had at his disposal. But BK wanted to stay in the driver’s seat. The Northern Alliance wanted American help in order to throw out the Taliban and take control of the country.
From his training, Haas knew that managing this relationship was crucial. He could not change BK or his group’s objectives, but he could not become captive to them either. Over the weeks and months ahead, he and BK became friendly, but Haas never gave in. “Haas would call him on that righteous talk,” Schwartz later recalled. “He would talk to him straight.”
The basic objective—toppling the Taliban and getting Osama bin Laden—was clear, but the details were complex. Haas was to strengthen the Northern Alliance militia while simultaneously restraining it from sweeping south to capture Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, and wreaking vengeance on the Pashtuns—who formed the largest of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups. He was to stall the alliance until a multiethnic power-sharing agreement had been forged in Bonn and a leader had been chosen. Meanwhile, he was to keep tabs on feuds among the various militia leaders of the north as well as among the Pashtun factions jockeying for control over Kandahar, the second largest city in the country after Kabul.
During his eventful first tour in Afghanistan, Haas experienced firsthand the difficulties and limitations of warfare with guerrilla allies, first in the drive to capture Kabul, which was complete by November 2001, and then in the December pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda fighters as they fled into the Tora Bora mountain stronghold, bound for Pakistan. At Tora Bora, special operations teams joined up with Pashtuns from eastern Afghanistan who proved dubious allies, as some of them sold safe passage or turned a blind eye as Al Qaeda slipped through the 14,000-foot peaks and across the border.
Next, Haas received a stark and lethal lesson in the fog of war as he led the main attack against the Al Qaeda remnants in Operation Anaconda in March 2002, when his teams trained and led Zia Lodin’s Pashtun force into what became a bloody battle. The battle, which took place following a three-week course of instruction to instill some basic discipline and infantry tactics into the motley band, was complicated by overturned trucks, a collapsed bridge, lack of promised US air support, and precisely ranged mortar, artillery, and machine-gun fire from Al Qaeda fighters dug into the mountains. Zia’s forces suffered a 14 percent casualty rate, including a friendly-fire attack from an AC-130 Spectre gunship that also killed US Army Chief Warrant Officer Stanley Harriman.
One loss particularly stung Haas and reinforced the treacherous nature of guerrilla politics. Just east of the Anaconda battleground lay the Khost-Gardez Pass—a key mountain pass to the eastern border region. It was guarded by a notorious Pashtun strongman named Pacha Khan Zadran. A young special forces soldier named Nate Chapman was killed by his militia, and Haas never forgot what one of Pacha Khan Zadran’s sons, who served as an interpreter for US forces, later told him: “You’ll have to kill a lot of men like my father before Afghanistan will change.”
Afghanistan was in the throes of a cultural and generational transition that would go on for many more years. Strongmen would continue to hold sway, and assassination would remain a common method of settling political disputes. Ethnic factions and Cold War–era alliances led by septuagenarians trumped many of the wishes and aspirations of younger, more educated Afghans. The twelve years after 2001 did see enormous progress—as well as a tremendous amount of killing—but the overall character of Afghan politics remained stubbornly feudal. The rule of the fist, the Tajik-Pashtun divide, and the grip of the few over the many would change only slowly, as the old men and the old ways passed from the scene. Pacha Khan Zadran became a member of the Afghan parliament, but he remained the strongman of the Khost-Gardez Pass.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
Special operations forces achieved an amazing feat, toppling the Taliban with about 350 operators, a handful of CIA operatives, and Afghan militias. They justly received kudos for this unalloyed success: they had had to improvise after 9/11, and overcome Afghanistan’s ferocious obstacles, including terrain, weather, and internecine political machinations. But the special operations forces also missed a huge opportunity in this period—and it was not the failure to catch bin Laden at Tora Bora. Once he had retreated to his mountain lair, it was highly unlikely he could have been found without reliable Afghan partners. No American troops knew their way through the labyrinthine mountain passes, and none were acclimated for trekking and engaging in battle at 14,000-foot altitudes.
The real opportunity missed was the chance for special operators, those first in, to define a game plan, a way ahead that would envision a conclusive endgame to the Afghan conflict. Time and again, the United States has mistaken the decapitation of a regime or a terrorist network as victory, a tactical triumph as the decisive point after which only mopping up remains. Especially in the case of Afghanistan, where the complex political and physical terrain created many possibilities for a rural insurgency—allowing it to survive, thrive, and come back to fight another day—the capture of the cities and the installation of the new government of Hamid Karzai did not constitute a sufficient conclusion to the problem.
Special operations forces were in the lead initially, but they did not capitalize on this moment to design a plan to put Afghanistan definitively on the road to stability. True, the diplomats of the United Nations, the United States, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were all meeting in Bonn to divvy up responsibilities for police, army, counternarcotics, and demobilization, as well as the political tasks of holding elections and writing a constitution. But the special operations forces, by dint of their intensive engagement with the gritty realities on the ground in those first six months, might have made a major contribution, not only on the security front, but to a framework that would provide stability for the 76 percent of Afghans who lived outside the cities. It was a failure that was eventually addressed, but only after eight years.
The biggest reason for the missed opportunity was an institutional one. Although US Central Command (CENTCOM) had handed special operations forces the lead after 9/11, special operators had no fully staffed, theater-level command ready to step up to the task. John F. Mulholland Jr., a colonel, came forward and performed admirably in an emergency situation. But his 5th Special Forces Group had never prepared, trained, or staffed itself to be a battlefield headquarters. A variety of other special operations commands were sent to Afghanistan, but none of them were up to the task, and none was given the overarching responsibility of coordinating all special operations, let alone the entire military effort. The ball then passed to the conventional forces, and special ops never got it back.
In the event, the conventional forces did no better. They were not at the time schooled in counterinsurgency, and they had no particular knowledge of South Asia. Furthermore, although NATO provided a welcome broad umbrella of political support for a coalition that grew to include forty-two countries, it led to a highly problematic bifurcated command structure for the war. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led international peacekeeping force, wanted little to do with combat, and a separate US command focused almost entirely on hunting terrorists on the eastern border with Pakistan. ISAF’s purview was initially limited to the capital and overseeing the coalition members’ nation-building duties as apportioned at Bonn. Neither command paid much attention to the south, which was the Pashtun heartland, the area that had been and would again become the Taliban’s home. As incredible as it may sound to students of military history, none of the constantly changing cast of commanders even bothered to write a campaign plan for Afghanistan until 2009.
Until 2009, the entire US military effort was overly focused on hunting down individuals considered to be problematic. This was a diversion from doctrine, in which counterguerrilla operations are merely a subset of activity, something to be nested within a wider approach that, depending on the circumstances, is termed “counterinsurgency,” “foreign internal defense,” or “stability operations.” They are all aimed at supporting the indigenous government and enhancing its ability to perform the basic functions of government. Because the essential fact of supporting the locals was forgotten, ideas of employing ever greater numbers of US troops gained traction. This flaw should have been noted by special operators, but the hard, cold reality was that they were unprepared to carry out this role except at the most tactical level. They were not employed correctly, and they did not have the opportunity—after that brief initial window—to employ themselves correctly.
Haas was aware of this deficit, and when he returned to the United States after his next deployment to Iraq, he wrote his master’s thesis at the US Army War College fleshing out a proposal for the creation of a special operations forces command structure able to plan and lead such campaigns. But there was no fix in place when he next returned to Afghanistan, in 2006. He came back as a colonel and commander of the 3rd Special Forces Group, which was thrust into a role for which they were still not ready. Whereas a colonel in charge of a conventional army brigade would be expected to plan and execute combat operations for 3,000 to 5,000 men in a province or state-sized area, the special forces groups were put in charge of the full range of special operations conducted across the entire territory of Afghanistan (an extremely rugged land of mountains and desert considerably larger than France, with one of the world’s poorest road systems). It was all they could do to manage the tactical and logistical tasks of fighting in a terrain as forbidding as this.
There was another factor, a more existential question of what special operators were for, that became increasingly cloudy over the decade in Afghanistan, and for that matter in the “global war on terror.” Were they meant to work with tribes and local forces, or were they meant only to hunt and kill? And were they clear enough in their own minds about how they should be used to win wars, or at least how they were to successfully hand them off to others? Many old-timers felt that special operations forces had lost their way at the very moment they burst into the limelight, becoming poster boys for counterterrorism. Haas, along with his comrade Edward M. Reeder Jr. and a black ops special operator, Austin Scott Miller, wrestled with this question as they became generals and returned to Afghanistan, entrusted with leading special operations teams minted after 9/11. It was up to them, as senior special operations generals of their generation, to discover what special operations forces were for and what they could really achieve. In the course of their arduous and fitful journey, they struggled to craft a strategy that would define not only special operations forces deployments for the years ahead, but the essence of US military force abroad in a new era—an era of leaner budgets and ballooning skepticism from all sides about mass military deployments in foreign adventures.