__________________________________________
ON THE BORDER
Kunar 2010–2011
ODA 3316
If Paktika held the dubious honor of being the most ignored province in Afghanistan’s insurgent belt, Kunar probably ranked as the province that received the most attention throughout the war. The war’s most heroic and horrific fighting occurred in this mountainous region, where six of seven Medal of Honor recipients fought with extraordinary bravery. Korengal, Wanat, and Ganjgal top the blood-drenched roll call of fearsome battles in Afghanistan, much as Khe Sanh, Hue, and Tet do for the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, however, the blood, sweat, and tears expended in Kunar had not translated into anything approximating victory by 2009.
A look at a map explains why Kunar was such a battleground: the narrow, mountainous province borders Pakistan, most of its population a scant fifteen kilometers away. In northern Kunar, the Hindu Kush rises up in a dense, formidable massif that forms a perfect, natural sanctuary for insurgents and terrorists. For years the military threw both conventional and special operations forces into ill-designed raids, each time expecting a different result from the bloody nose they received before. Steve Townsend, an incisive and sharp-tongued officer who fought several tours in the east, was scathing in his criticism. On a piece of paper he sketched the location of the US bases built at the bottom of the Korengal and Pech valleys, where they were sitting ducks for enemy fire from the surrounding mountains. “If you had proposed that at Benning [in Officer Candidate School], you would get an F,” he said flatly.{61}
By 2010 the military had begun to pull out of these remote, beleaguered bases and was ready to try something new. A population-focused strategy needed to be applied. Special operations leaders believed that civil defense just might work to secure the populated southern half of Kunar, where Afghan farmers and merchants presumably had a concrete stake in the prospect of peace. From Asadabad south, the mountains are gentler. The Kunar River forms a broad, fertile floodplain where 80 percent of the province’s population lives. The special ops commander for the east, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Wilson, thought that Afghans there might be willing to defend their lush agricultural valley, which stretched from Asadabad south to Jalalabad, the capital of Nangahar Province. By creating this bulwark in the valley, the insurgents would be bottled up in the sparsely inhabited mountains of the Hindu Kush, unable to attack Asadabad or Jalalabad, the two major cities of the east. Securing these two cities would help ensure Kabul and the Afghan government’s survival.
Kunar was the cornerstone of the region the military referred to as N2K, for Nangahar, Nuristan, and Kunar. It had historically been the route through which guerrillas had threatened the government. The first mujahideen to fight the 1979–1989 Soviet occupation rose up in Kunar, and when the Soviets decided to withdraw, it was among the first to fall. Kunar was both buffer and bellwether for Nangahar to the south. Nangahar was heavily populated and well traveled, with its Khyber Pass crossing from Jalalabad into Pakistan serving as the main east-west link to Kabul and the principal commercial artery. Smuggling abounded, but by and large there was enough business to go around. Nuristan, to the north of Kunar, was sparsely populated by the ethnically and linguistically distinct Nuristanis. Al Qaeda and foreign terrorists regularly trickled in and out of its billy-goat terrain, but Wilson believed their southern Kunar strategy could effectively wall off the badness in Nuristan.
Some outreach to the people of Kunar had already been started by a special forces major named Jim Gant, who had befriended a tribal chief whom he nicknamed Sitting Bull and regarded him as something of a father figure. He wrote about his experiences in a paper entitled “One Tribe at a Time,” which Admiral Olson and General Petraeus both read.{62} Gant was known throughout the district as “Major Jim,” and his relationships provided a springboard for the formal Afghan Local Police program in the province.
Operational Detachment Alpha 3316 arrived for a ten-month tour in 2011 with orders to expand the local defense initiative along the Kunar River Valley. The team was led by Matt, an angelic-looking, blond-haired, blue-eyed captain from the base at Combat Outpost (COP) Penich on the east side of the Kunar River. The highway was frequently mined, so one of the first steps the CJSOTF-A command took was to bulldoze a landing strip next to the base for its recently acquired M-28 Polish-made planes to land. Team members quickly learned that they were in the crosshairs of the Taliban: their base was mortared four or five times a week from the surrounding mountains. When the M-28 came with visitors or supplies, the loader scanned the horizon from a bubble window in the back as they descended, ready to alert the pilot if he saw movement in the mountains or the flash or smoke of an RPG. The loadmaster would drop the back hatch for quick unloading while the Air Force special ops pilot stayed in the cockpit, ready to take off.
Whenever a flight was inbound, the team would roll out of Penich and barrel down the road to meet it, two dune buggies taking up positions toward the mountains, guns at the ready and gunsights trained on the ridgelines. One day the handoff at Penich’s gravel airstrip was especially hurried given the number of passengers coming and going: about a dozen French commandos had come to learn about the local police program so they could apply it in their area near Kabul. A sergeant hoisted gear and shooed new arrivals into his idling Toyota Hilux pickup. For a decade the Hilux had been the runabout vehicle of choice. Although the trucks were unarmored, special operators frequently used them to drive in towns because they blended in and caused much less disruption than the wide, tall, heavy military vehicles. Being unobtrusive was often the safest way to travel. Miller’s command had interceded when Toyota decided to shut down the Hilux production line, and the company decided to keep it open. The operators purchased the double-cab model in white for the Afghan Local Police to use as patrol cars, with a green, red, and black logo painted on the doors.{63}
From the lookout tower on the eastern wall of COP Penich, the broad plain that stretched east to the mountainous border with Pakistan looked unbroken, but in fact it was laced with wadis that led right up to the perimeter of the small base. The insurgents could and did sneak up the wadis to fire on Penich, so the first thing Matt did was post a rotating guard of the 1-16 infantry squad that had been assigned to him. A conventional infantry company was based on the west half of the tiny Penich outpost, but it would depart later in the year as the coalition began to consolidate and draw down its forces. While 1-16 pulled guard duty, Matt also integrated them into all of his team’s operations. The unit had been sent to help special operations forces with very little notice and even less training, but the platoon leader, Lieutenant Jake Peterson, turned out to be a natural with Afghans; he made friends easily while keeping a weathered eye open to security threats. The young infantrymen were delighted to have a chance to hang out with the special operations forces. They were all permitted—nay, encouraged—to grow beards, which Afghan men regarded as a symbol of male adulthood. Any American who appeared youthful and did not have a beard could be open to ridicule or sexual advances. The teams that made the infantrymen feel part of their mission were repaid with all-out effort and potential future recruits.
Upon his arrival, Matt faced an immediate problem. The leading elder from the nearest village to the south had agreed to form a contingent of Afghan Local Police, and for his boldness the Taliban had crept down the valley and beheaded him. They laid his severed head on a doorstep in another village to dampen any enthusiasm there for joining the movement. Trying to counteract the intimidation, the team made the rounds to visit surrounding villages and ask new leaders to come forward.{64}
Although the Afghan Local Police were intended to be purely defensive forces, the special operators could not afford to gain a reputation for passivity. Matt’s team, like other teams who were very nearly alone in the Afghan countryside, made regular forays into the insurgent-infested areas to the east in an exercise they called “creating white space.” Sometimes they waited until the Afghan commandos were available to conduct a combat operation with the special operations team with whom they were partnered. But the commandos were in high demand, so the teams often conducted their own patrols to flush out guerrillas and ensure that both the tentative villagers, sitting on the fence, and the insurgents knew the team had more than enough firepower to win any battle. One such battle took place shortly after the beheading incident. The team had determined that the insurgents had come from a camp near a village called Maya, which was right on the Pakistani border. It turned out to be a major guerrilla camp, training, and rest area. Less than ten kilometers away from Penich, Maya sat at the apex of a V where a valley adjoined another valley that ran to the Kunar River just to the north. Insurgents in Maya could easily attack either their district or the one to the north, Sarkani, and retreat back to their lair on the same day. Studying the geography, the team knew that something would have to be done about the camp in Maya if the main Kunar River Valley was to be secured.
The men decided to push eastward to the edge of the mountains. Two Humvees descended into the mazelike wadi and Matt’s Humvee, packing a minigun mounted on the roof turret, traveled on the valley floor. As they drove east, Matt found himself too far from the Humvees down in the wadi. He turned to drive back to a spot where he could provide overwatch for the other two vehicles, and suddenly a wave of Taliban popped up out of a crevice and began firing AK-47s and RPGs. Matt wheeled again and his gunner let loose with the lethal blast of an M134 minigun, an incongruous name for a weapon that fired 4,000 7.62 mm rounds a minute. The Taliban retreated, although not before several fell dead or wounded. Matt raced back to the rest of the team, which also came under attack just as he arrived. An RPG hit the rear of the trailing Humvee, and then one of the weapons sergeants was wounded. The wadi had narrowed, so the men were unable to turn around. They stood and fought off the attackers. One of the medics attended to the injured weapons sergeant, who was evacuated home. Matt was furious with himself for getting tangled up in the terrain, but the fact was that few had traveled where they had gone. They would come to know that terrain well. The firefight put the Taliban on notice that the newcomers would come out to fight and stay to fight. The team picked up radio chatter in which the insurgents called the minigun “the breath of Allah,” a phrase that delighted Matt and which he and his teammates often repeated.{65}
Matt was blessed with a solid team sergeant, Jay Schrader, who was on his last combat assignment after twenty-five years of service. At age forty-six, he was the same age as the father of his youngest sergeant. Schrader had the even temper of a soldier who had seen it all. He had been coming to Afghanistan since 2003, and the team had been through a trying rotation the year before in Kakhrez, Kandahar, where they had to untangle a very complex tribal, familial, and insurgent human battlefield. Working with indigenous tribes was difficult, dangerous, and maddening, but ultimately rewarding—when it worked. Schrader appreciated the extra help from the 1-16 infantry, but it also represented an additional oversight task, as he had to make sure the discipline among the younger soldiers did not break down. The team was being pressured to split into two as soon as possible so they could expand the local police force. Schrader would move north a few kilometers to head the new site. The idea was to establish a new site with new recruits at least three months before their planned departure in January 2012, so that the incoming team would inherit a relatively mature operation. Split-team operations created a significant additional managerial and logistical burden, not to mention an increased security risk. Most importantly, no one on the team wanted to risk the unraveling of a local police force that was going well but still learning to look after itself. Their Afghan charges were not yet being supported with fuel, ammo, and pay from the local chief of police. The team wanted to make sure they were building something that could last and would not go off the rails.{66}
The team applied the textbook methods of the Afghan Local Police methodology and enjoyed rapid success in recruiting, training, and fielding the force. Because of the district’s strategic location, the police allotment was 400 rather than 300, and the force was almost full with 393 trainees. The team profited from two key advantages. First, there were relatively few tribal frictions, because most of the population in this area came from the Mohmand tribe. The other leg up, in addition to a homogeneous population, was the commander, a thirty-five-year-old man named Nur Mohammed, who had stepped forward to become the Afghan Local Police leader with the blessing of the Khas Kunar district elders. Nur was an industrious Afghan with a steady temperament and good management skills. He was low-key rather than a swashbuckler like Commander Aziz, but he was respected by his men and the townspeople, and he quickly proved to be an adept administrator and an effective recruiter.
The Afghan Local Police adopted a way of operating in Khas Kunar that was different from their counterparts in Paktika: instead of building many observation posts, the police lived at home and conducted roving patrols and snap checkpoints in the valley. They built one main outpost east of the main populated area under the shadow of a huge but nearly vacant Border Police post, high atop a hill, and a few more small ones as they expanded up and down the valley. There was virtually no activity or assistance from the Border Police; even the location of the post, ten kilometers from the border, suggested that they were not serious about their assigned duty.
Matt tried to balance assisting the nascent police force with guarding against dependency. He also tried to prod the reluctant district police chief to support Nur and his men. Nur, for his part, understood that they were all supposed to work together. When a suicide bomber blew himself up by a national police truck at the far side of the bridge across the Kunar River, Nur and his men raced to pick up the wounded and secure the site. The Afghan Local Police also received some backup from the Afghan commandos, who came to Kunar on several occasions to spend a week with them on their training or “yellow” cycle. During Ramadan, the commandos joined Nur and his men at their main outpost for an iftar dinner to break their daily fast. As they waited for the sun to set, the commandos and policemen played with a baby monkey the commandos had brought home from one of their mountain operations. The monkey scrambled up the posts and jumped on the laughing men, biting at their clothes and hats. Other men set up cots in the open-air interior of the fort and spread large tablecloths on the ground to serve as both seats and table. They distributed the nan bread and bowls of food. The 1-16 platoon sergeant had been a chef at one time, and he helped the Afghans man the drum-barrel barbecue while Nur and Matt and others chatted. Another team member stood watch on the ramparts of the outpost, scanning the horizon with binoculars as the rose-colored sun set over purple velvet mountains. All the Americans refrained from eating or drinking anything, even water, out of respect for the Muslims’ fast. As the sun disappeared in a flaming finale, the Afghans gathered at one edge of the compound to kneel and pray. When they were finished they urged all their guests to be seated on the cloth. In keeping with Afghan custom, Nur and his men refused to eat until their guests had their fill.
The members of ODA 3316 were buoyed by the success they were having with Nur and his men, compared to the frustrations they had experienced in Kandahar on their previous tour. They were out living the team life away from the headquarters and senior officers. But making the program work as intended required looking after a lot of minutiae. When the Ministry of the Interior team arrived to process the newly minted police, the officials suddenly demanded to see their contracts, not just their government ID cards. Then they said the contracts needed to be in a new format. Seve, the normally genial senior medic, and Ricky, the weapons sergeant, were beside themselves that after weeks of effort to prepare for this milestone that would turn on the Afghan pay spigot, the ministry suddenly presented them with a new requirement. Nur Mohammed, dressed in a sharply pressed white shalwar kameez, patiently worked out a solution with the ministry team. The contracts were transferred to the new forms, and eventually all his men filed through the tent at the edge of the base to have their retinas scanned and their fingerprints taken.
Nur was philosophical about the glitches. They were minor annoyances compared to the benefit he believed Kunar would realize from the program. He had had no difficulty raising recruits for the force. One old man had answered the door of his home with an old Enfield rifle in his hand. “I’ll gladly give you my sons,” he had said. Nur personally knew all of the recruits, since he had lived in the valley his entire life. His men all knew who belonged and who didn’t, which was not the case with most of the Afghans in the national police and army stationed in Kunar. “Many of the Afghan army and police are not from here, so we have a much better idea of who is causing trouble,” Nur said.{67}
The trouble, he added, emanated from the east. “They come down the valley from Pakistan,” he said. When asked if he considered the people on the other side of the border the enemy, he said, “No, no. They are us.” Asked to explain, he said, “They are Mohmand too. It is the Pakistani government that is the enemy.”
FIGHTING UPHILL
The success of the team in Kunar was tempered by reality: the conventional forces kept tasking the Afghan commandos to help with their own priorities farther north. This left the team and the nascent Afghan Local Police without a remedy to the threat closer to their doorstep: the ever-present shadow of the border, and the numerous ratlines leading right to them. Special operators had cheered when General Petraeus had declared their Village Stability Operations and Afghan Local Police program a top priority for the overall campaign. He issued a FRAGO (fragmentary order) directing the conventional battlespace owners to prioritize requests for transportation, gunships, and surveillance assets to support VSO/ALP. But despite that order, in practice the conventional units’ combat operations always seemed to trump the special operators’ requests, especially in the east. The gravitational pull of combat for the military was inexorable. After the remote outposts in northern Kunar and Nuristan were closed, the conventional commanders began to run frequent “disruption operations” to keep insurgents from consolidating their hold in these areas—or chase a few Al Qaeda–affiliated targets that might slip into Nuristan for a while.
The special operations battalion commander for the east, Bob Wilson, was a genial and easygoing man, but this exasperated him no end. Continual disruption operations meant there were likely no assets available to support the special operators’ priorities. It also meant the Afghan commandos and the special operations team assigned to them were in constant demand. The conventional commanders wanted the commandos on all the operations, since they were the best-trained Afghan force. The time commitment amounted to about six weeks in all, when training time, mission planning, and recovery were factored in. In addition, the commandos often took casualties, since they were the sharp end of the spear.
Every four to six weeks, Wilson was asked to send his team and commandos to Nuristan, with a population of only 120,000. His assessment of the seven operations for which he was requested to supply commandos and his team was scathing. “These operations achieved nothing permanent. They did not extend the government’s reach,” he said. This focus on enemy-centric operations in lightly populated areas was contrary to the campaign plan. Wilson reminded his conventional counterparts that Village Stability Operations were supposed to be a priority, but they viewed their priority as disruption operations.{68}
Wilson also argued that the overreliance on the Afghan commandos was keeping US conventional forces from bringing their Afghan army partners to a higher level of battle-readiness. The conventional forces were not prepared to partner and mentor as intensively with their own Afghan partners as special operators routinely did. Usually American conventional forces sent 3 or more of their own troops on an operation for every 1 Afghan partner soldier. By contrast, the special operations teams—12 to 16 men—would go into battle alongside a 120-man Afghan commando force. In the case of Afghan Local Police, one team oversaw an average of 300 police. As the special operators routinely partnered in ratios of 1:12 or higher, the conventional command set a goal of moving from 3:1 to 1:1 partnering ratios. This was not a formula for moving Afghans quickly to the forefront.{69}
Wilson did his best to represent the special operations’ perspective from his tiny headquarters in the middle of the sprawling Bagram base of 40,000 souls. But he was a lieutenant colonel pushing against a two-star command led by a division and a general who had never been to Afghanistan. Wilson’s subordinate company commander, Major Eddie Jimenez, based at Jalalabad Airport, lived an even unhappier life. Jimenez shared the Jalalabad base with the conventional brigade commander responsible for N2K, a colonel who apparently disdained the junior officer. Jimenez and his company sergeant major, Pat Rotsaert, were for their part astounded by the weak concepts of operation drawn up by the brigade staff. In those operations, troops—often their commandos—were dropped on low ground and forced to fight uphill to enemy positions. Jimenez cemented the animosity when he went over the colonel’s head to object to a planned mission in a hornet’s nest called Watapur. Jimenez objected because his men would be on the firing line. They had already come to the rescue of soldiers dropped into a hot landing zone in Nuristan and pinned in a six-hour firefight. The general agreed, to the fury of the colonel.{70}
OPERATION SAYAQA
Just before winter set in, Jimenez’s company was granted permission to run a commando operation to support the local police and stability operations in lower Kunar. They were going after the insurgent camp in Maya village at last. The conventional forces agreed to supply the needed air support and surveillance assets in early October 2011. Matt and his team were ecstatic. The intelligence reporting was ample and consistent: insurgents used this village on the Pakistani border as a major way station to stage attacks in two districts and beyond.{71}
The commandos and the special operations team partnered with it, ODA 3313, submitted their “concept of operations,” or CONOP, which described the purpose of the mission, the detailed plans for conducting it, and the types of support that would be required. The team received the green light to launch. The major issue was where the helicopters would land. This was tricky because the Afghan and Pakistani governments did not agree on the exact location of the border, which had never been formally demarcated. To make sure they were landing on the Afghan side of the border, the team studied two sets of images. Then the soldiers hit the shooting range, which was about fifty yards from their dining room and gym at Camp Dyer, on their patch of the Jalalabad base, for some last-minute nighttime target practice, as they always did before missions. They drove to the flight line and boarded the two Chinooks that would ferry them in. As they approached the landing site, insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades, and the pilots decided to abort rather than risk losing the birds. The commandos and the team returned to Camp Dyer. They would let the area cool off for a bit, and make another try after the insurgents’ attention had turned elsewhere.
In late November, the mission was reapproved. The commandos and their special operations team brushed off their plan, updated it, and rehearsed it. It was officially called Operation Sayaqa. Sayaqa was Dari for “lightning,” which was the motto of the 1st Afghan Commando battalion, or kandak. This was the original Afghan commando battalion and therefore the most experienced one. It was based in Kabul, but the company that was on active rotation lived at a forward base in the barracks beside the team at Camp Dyer.{72}
Once again, the team and the aviators surveyed the possible landing sites. The pilots pushed for a site close to the village, but the team selected a site that was a bit flatter and with fewer obstacles to navigate in the nighttime insertion. Given the steep terrain, it was still going to be a two-wheeled landing. The Chinooks would touch down on their back wheels, keeping their noses in the air, and open their rear hatches for the commandos and teams to offload, before taking off again.
On the day of the mission, November 25, the weather threatened to scrub the launch, but it lifted by nightfall. At 8:30 p.m. they loaded into the ramshackle base trucks. Eddie Jimenez and his sergeant major, Rotsaert, accompanied the team and the commandos to the airstrip to see them off, as they always did. After the birds lifted off, Jimenez returned to the operations center at Camp Dyer to monitor the mission. He would spend the night in the bare-bones center, watching the video feed and listening to the satellite radio communications. Jimenez’s bedroom was across the hall, in a room that doubled as his office and private conference room. Their boss, Bob Wilson, would also be watching from his base at Bagram, along with those on watch duty at the CJSOTF down the street at Camp Vance.
It was cold, about 30 degrees, and there was very little moonlight, as the moon had not yet risen. The half-hour flight due north of Jalalabad to the staging base at FOB Joyce, just south of Asadabad, passed without incident. The two Chinooks made several trips to ferry all the commandos and the team first to the base and then on to their destination, Helicopter Landing Zone (HLZ) Khoda, deep in the mountains. Hovering like a giant mechanical insect, rotors chopping the thin air, the first Chinook tilted back and delicately touched its tail wheels down. The Americans and Afghans released their harness belts and jumped out of the rear hatch as it yawned open. The team’s chief warrant officer, Mike, was the first to unload with his portion of the team. They fanned out to secure the landing zone for the rest.
Mike was the ground commander for the operation. There were fifteen Americans in all: ten members of his special forces team plus a Special Operations Team–Alpha (SOT-A) signals intelligence specialist, an Air Force combat controller, two navy Explosive Ordinance Disposal experts, plus an army combat cameraman. Two or three Americans were distributed among each of the four thirty-man Afghan commando platoons, as was the team’s usual practice. Those in the second group disembarked, hoisted their packs and weapons, and set off at a quick clip so that the troops would not be all bunched up on the landing zone. They went forward about 150 meters and began conducting searches of the woods and manmade structures to clear the area.
Mike’s plan was for the entire force to stay together and move around the bowl from west to east and then enter Maya. They had landed about a kilometer and a half from the border, southwest of Maya. They were at roughly the same altitude as the village, but the undulating terrain meant that they would need to go down and climb again to reach it. The mountains right behind Maya, on the border, rose straight up about 2,000 meters in sheer cliffs.
Mike sent the first group down into a hollow to clear a cluster of buildings, and then moved off the landing zone to make way for the two final drops. They all started moving around the bowl. As he reached the ridgeline, Mike heard machine-gun fire. The troops clearing the small village below were being shot at. Mike peeked up over the knoll, and the fire suddenly shifted to his location. He called the battalion on the radio and told the assistant operations officer, “Hey, we are sitting here near the Pakistani border taking fire. There’s fire coming from the Pakistani border. You need to make sure the border coordinations were done.” The major agreed to contact the conventional two-star command, Regional Command–East, which was the entity responsible for making sure the Pakistanis were informed of impending operations.
The accuracy of the machine-gun fire led Mike to believe that the shooters were wearing night vision goggles. The team, per procedure, was wearing infrared strobe lights that helped their own aircraft avoid hitting them. He instructed the team members to turn them off.
A few moments later a barrage of 60 mm mortars landed about twenty-five meters from Mike, who immediately called the battalion back to let them know the team was now receiving mortar fire. He requested permission to fire on the targets that were shooting at them.
The Chinooks had already lifted off, but the men on the ground were not alone. Their overhead support consisted of a lumbering but heavily armed AC-130, two AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships, and two F-15E fighters on station higher up, in addition to an MC-12 King Air plane loaded with additional intelligence and surveillance sensors. Mike did not have a direct line of sight to the origin of the fires, but the AC-130 crew told him they saw the fire coming from the mountaintop behind Maya. It was too dark and too far for the men on the ground to see the location with their NODs, but the air crew described the structure on the mountain that was firing in their direction. A fort, which had not existed a month before, was surrounded by men with guns who were visible through the plane’s thermal and infrared sights.
The combat controller suggested to Mike that they request a show of force from the F-15E Strike Eagle. Mike agreed and told him to call the jets. Less than a minute later, the F-15E swooped down with a deafening roar, screaming through the narrow valley between the team and the mountaintop that was firing on them. “I think anybody would know what this means,” Mike said. “It is US forces there and please stop firing.” The “or else” was hardly implicit. Yet, much to his surprise, a few minutes after this bone-rattling display of superpower might, another mortar landed right between Mike’s group and the one behind him. The team’s positions had been bracketed, and the next mortar would almost certainly hit them. Mike had the SATCOM line open to the battalion, which heard the huge explosion through the phone. Mike then requested permission to fire, which Lieutenant Colonel Wilson approved immediately.
Mike had requested the F-15E show of force as an extra step, one not required by standard procedure. But now, knowing that he did not have a minute to spare, he quickly relayed Wilson’s approval to the combat controller, who in turn radioed the AC-130 with the request to target the location that had fired the mortars. Recalling that critical juncture, Mike said later, “If [the fire] had continued we would have definitely taken multiple casualties. It would have been a mass casualty exercise after that.”
The AC-130 came in for the kill, firing its fearsome side-mounted 105 mm cannon at the mountaintop structure that was the source of the attack. About that time the Apaches returned; they had flown back to Asadabad to refuel about twenty-five minutes earlier. The Apaches began scouring the valley and identified more targets, along with the AC-130, which reported a lot of people running around the mountaintop.
The first strike did not end the firing. Mike and his team soon realized that the fire was coming from more than one location, as two more mortar rounds landed about twenty-five meters away from the lead group. These team members and commandos happened to be inside clearing a building, preventing certain injury or death, given the proximity of the fire. Twenty-five meters is considered “danger close” for an exploding mortar. The AC-130 immediately identified the second mortar location and moved in to shoot at the target. Enemy fire then ceased for the time being, and the battlefield fell silent.
By that time, the full force had reached the edge of the bowl. Mike was concerned that his lead element would not be safe crossing the exposed area leading into Maya village. He called the battalion and told the operations officer that even though they faced no imminent threat, he wanted to destroy the target that had previously fired on his men to ensure he would take no casualties. Wilson approved, and the second location was engaged again. It was about 1 a.m.
To reduce the risk to the commandos, Mike had also ordered that they not use white lights in their searches and that they throw away their chem lights—gel-filled plastic tubes that glowed green when cracked, a cheaper tool for identifying friendly forces than the strobes. As usual, the commandos had tied chem lights to their vests.
At 1:44 a.m. the AC-130 crew radioed that they spotted people moving around the target on the mountain top. “Do you want to engage?” they asked. Mike called the battalion; the reply was no, cease all fire unless you are getting directly shot at. “Come up on the Iridium [satellite phone],” Mike was told.
He called the battalion back on the handheld satellite phone. This phone was less iffy than the SATCOM 130 system, which also required them to stop and unfold a spiderweb antenna. But it was also a direct line between the team and the battalion for sensitive communications, since the other command centers monitoring the operation could not hear this conversation. Wilson told Mike that the team had been engaging Pakistani forces. Mike’s principal concern throughout the battle had been making sure he was following procedure to guarantee the safety of his men and that of the civilians in the village. He had not had the time to think much about who was shooting at him. The machine guns had been firing indiscriminately into the village. He had initially assumed they were under fire from the Taliban, because none of their maps showed Pakistani outposts in that area. He had heard from the team at Penich about being regularly mortared, and there were reports that the Taliban in the area had a DShK machine gun. Still, he was not overly surprised by this news. Both the machine-gun fire and the mortar fire were more precise than the Taliban’s normally was.
Given this new information, Wilson told Mike that if anything else happened, Mike would have to paint him a precise picture before he would be able to approve any subsequent fire. There was discussion of an emergency exfiltration to get the troops out, but it was decided that they would stay and clear the area at daybreak. It would be better at this point to continue the mission and do a thorough search to see what turned up.
At about 4:44 a.m., the team started receiving recoilless rifle rounds, fired from a location on the mountains above Maya that was about two and a half kilometers north of the structures that had already been targeted. The Apaches were also fired on by RPGs as they searched an area to the west of the village, in a place where the team and the commandos had caught a high-value target (HVT) some weeks before. In neither case was the fire effective, but Mike reported it to the battalion to keep them informed. Whoever was firing at them, or around them, had not been deterred by the fireworks of the previous hours.
Mike gathered his men and the commandos into a strong point location, a building on the edge of Maya, to wait for daybreak. From this defensible location they would search the entire village. Starting at 7 a.m. he began to send out recon teams to search different locations one area at a time. The MC-12 plane overhead carrying full-motion video, thermal, and other sensor gear relayed what was going on up on the mountaintop, one kilometer away and two kilometers straight up. Mike could see smoke rising from the two smoldering ruins, but that was all. The air crew reported that the Pakistani soldiers had placed their weapons on the ground and moved away to the back side of the ridgeline so their movements would not be interpreted as threatening.
Officers back at the battalion operations center requested that he call again on the Iridium, at which point he was told the Pakistanis would be flying in on two helicopters, armed UH-60s, to investigate what had happened. They demanded that the two Apaches be pulled back from the border to the Kunar River. Mike was uneasy, thinking that his troops might be shot at, but he ordered everyone inside. The Pakistani choppers came in and landed on the back side of the mountain. They stayed about twenty minutes, loading up their dead and wounded. Twenty-four had been killed, and thirteen were wounded.
Mike was glad they had been allowed to stay, because of what they learned and found that morning in Maya. His team and the commandos conducted a thorough search while he and the commando commander talked to the elders. “They were quite relieved that we were there,” Mike said. The elders wanted someone to see what they had been living through. One of the elders told him, “This happens all the time.” For the last six months, the villagers told him, when they ventured out to get water, tend their goats, or work in their gardens, they would be shot at from the mountains above. One elder said his daughter had died of gunshot wounds the previous month, and they had gone to complain to the governor in Khas Kunar, to no avail. The elder alleged that the Pakistani border guards fired on them to allow the Taliban to come into their villages and stash their weapons there. The Taliban had even raped two girls in the valley. The warrant officer surveyed the village and found a bullet-pocked house with a mortar round in its roof.
Meanwhile, the team and the commandos had unearthed an astonishing array of weapons and munitions from multiple caches around the village. They found AK-47s, PKM machine guns, RPGs and launchers, Pakistani uniforms, and the 7.62 ammunition for the Pakistani G-3 rifles. The quantity of ammunition was mindboggling. There were more than 15,000 rounds in all, including 2,000 DShK rounds; 9,000 PKM rounds; 3,000 Pakistani rifle rounds; and mortars.{73} The operation’s haul had more than confirmed Maya’s status as a major insurgent hub. Mike felt sorry for the elders. They had not wanted the Taliban to make use of their village, but they had no means of resisting and no one had come to help them.
It was afternoon by the time the team finished the site exploitation in Maya and was ready to exfil. When Mike radioed in, he was told they would have to hump out three kilometers further than planned to a more distant pickup spot. “You’re kidding,” Mike said. The men were exhausted from the past twenty-four hours, the high-altitude march in full kit, the attack, and then the detailed search of the village. Now they would have to hike twice as far as they had expected, through a wadi deep in enemy territory that was vulnerable to attack from the high ground, to get a ride out.
It was just a foretaste of the holy hell that their operation was about to unleash.
There were three basic elements to the drama that followed: the investigation, the Pakistani reaction, and the American response. In addition, out of public view, there were significant repercussions within the military chain of command and an ensuing impact on military operations in Afghanistan. Operation Sayaqa’s operation was in many respects a watershed moment for the war and everyone engaged in it.
An official investigation was opened by Central Command, the four-star military headquarters in Tampa, Florida, that oversaw operations throughout the Middle East and South Asia. In the weeks of grilling and endless meetings that followed, Mike was mollified by his own conscience and his own command’s support. As he went over every detail of the operation, the decisions he made, and the actions he took, Mike concluded: “I would not have done one thing different. If that situation were to happen again I would do the exact same thing.”{74}
Central Command’s four-star commander, General James Mattis, came to Afghanistan to celebrate Christmas with the troops just as the investigation concluded. Mattis ordered his staff to find Mike. He knew this young soldier had been at the center of the storm, and he wanted to bring his four-star power to bear directly. He had waited until the investigation was completed, since any overture before that would have been a violation. Mattis was as Spartan a warrior as America had, stern, learned, and intensely caring. He was a bachelor, and the military profession was his life. “I looked for things you did wrong, and I could not find any,” Mattis told Mike in their meeting. The general praised him for his “tactical patience” in ordering a show of force by the F-15E before returning lethal fire, even though his troops were in imminent danger and he was fully authorized to respond immediately.
Mike was immensely grateful that the general had personally validated the choices he had made in the battle; he would never forget that. But he was disappointed at the public reaction, or, more precisely, the news media’s coverage of the event, which shaped the general public’s understanding of what had happened. “For the team, it was disheartening that the American media turned on us so quickly without knowing the facts,” he said. “And even afterward when everything had come out and the investigation has completely cleared us, there has been no [recognition that] hey, these guys did do the right thing.” The massive campaign launched by the Pakistani government to shape public opinion was met by a very weak American reply, which led many to conclude that the Americans had been the aggressors. That interpretation of events was well entrenched by the time the official investigation concluded. When the investigating officer briefed the Pentagon press corps, he faced a barrage of accusatory questions implying that the United States had been in the wrong and had cut out Pakistan in the course of the inquiry, when it was Pakistan that shot first and had declined to participate in the US investigation. Pakistan’s official response to the US official report was to claim that its soldiers had shot in the opposite direction at what they believed were militants, and that those posted on the border routinely engaged in what Pakistan called “speculative fire.”{75}
Mike wished that more of the intelligence could have been declassified. “It would shed a lot of light on the [Pakistani] thought processes,”he said. Throughout the war, Pakistan had played both sides of the fence, supporting insurgents when its interests dictated, while taking massive amounts of American money. Mike’s team had been caught up in this central contradiction of the United States’ tolerance for what might be called enemy behavior. The United States, for its part, possessed evidence of Pakistan’s direct complicity in the death of US soldiers—not just near-deaths—and constant firing on US troops along the border. But the United States chose to look the other way.
Mike did not like it, but he also knew his place within the chain of command. He had joined the service in 2000, had entered the special forces in 2002, and was a newly minted chief warrant officer as of 2010. He and the warrant officer on their sister team in Maiwand had graduated from the course at the same time. Mike loved his job and hoped he’d have another four or five years on the job, but he acknowledged, “I’m not sure if my wife loves the job.” For this extra-long deployment, she had moved home to their native Wisconsin, where both sets of parents lived and were available to help her with their baby boy and five-year-old daughter.
The basic fact that got twisted from the very beginning was that the Pakistanis had fired first, on US and Afghan forces. The battle is now enshrined in public memory as a US attack on Pakistan, when it was the opposite. Pakistan leaped immediately into the public fray with the charge that it had been attacked. Then it tried to feign total ignorance of who had been shooting from its side. Then came the extraordinary claim that Pakistan’s military thought that it was under attack from guerrillas, which did not stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Mike’s men may not have known for certain who was firing at them that night, and he was within his right to call for a return of fire no matter who they were. But there could have been no doubt in anyone’s mind that Americans were there on the ground. Although they had landed under cover of night, the sound of their aircraft was a dead giveaway as to their identity. The Chinooks that carried them in could be heard from five or six miles away, and only coalition forces had them, or, for that matter, Apache gunships, AC-130s, or F-15Es—certainly neither the Taliban nor the Afghan government had these things. The Pakistanis repeatedly fired on the American troops—continuing to do so after the show of force—leaving little doubt that this was a concerted attack. But the American government chose not to clarify the basic “who shot first” facts owing to concerns over the diplomatic fallout.
The confusion that had occurred that night was not on the ground, where Mike’s team was fighting. It occurred among those responsible for transmitting advance notice of operations to the Pakistanis. This coordination was most certainly botched, but it is uncertain whether the sharing of that information would have forestalled or halted the Pakistani actions that night. The team had passed its mission concept of operations up the chain of command as required, and it had been approved. It had been sent to the Regional Command–East, the conventional two-star command in charge of sending the relevant information to the border coordination centers that had been established with the Pakistani government. In this case, the coordination center was located at the main conventional base near Asadabad, FOB Joyce. The normal protocol was for the US coordination officer there to share basic information with the Pakistani military liaison officer who was assigned there. A handful of these centers existed on the Afghan side of the border, established by mutual agreement. The Americans had also pressed for coordination centers on the Pakistan side of the border but had been rebuffed by Pakistan.
The border coordination centers served two purposes. One was to relay general information ahead of operations so that the Pakistanis would not be caught totally unawares. The other purpose was to sort out incidents once they occurred. The US military did not relay the specific coordinates of missions in advance, in order to protect them from deliberate or inadvertent compromise. This practice was justified by a long trail of previous incidents in which intended targets had vanished after intelligence was shared with the Pakistanis. Mike’s team had been party to just such an incident the previous month. They and the commandos had gone on a mission to Lalpur, a district in Nangahar along the Pakistani border, where there was a reported insurgent training camp. The Pakistanis had been informed of the pending operation twenty-four hours earlier. When Mike and his team arrived, the villagers told them that forty insurgents had left the village just hours before. The team found the second-largest cache of their tour there after Maya. Providing advance notice not only jeopardized the mission, Mike noted, but his men’s lives. “People don’t understand that it puts us in a lot of danger,” he said.
After Operation Sayaqa was launched, when the team came under fire, Wilson had called Regional Command–East to verify that there were no Pakistani border posts in the area of the engagement. The command had replied that there were no posts marked on its map and authorized Mike’s request for fire. Wilson only found out as the events unfolded that Regional Command–East had not passed the concept of operations the team had prepared, with the slide of information releasable to the Pakistani military, to the border coordination center, so nothing had been shared with Pakistan. Wilson had sent a back-channel copy of the slide to Joyce, but it had not been briefed to the Pakistanis.
When the team came under fire the second time during Operation Sayaqa, Wilson had tried to determine definitively whether Pakistani forces were involved. The situation became even more snarled at that point, however, because the US officer at the coordination center incorrectly loaded a map overlay into his computer, possibly because he was a reservist unfamiliar with the relatively new “command post of the future” software. That error led him to identify the wrong location to the Pakistani liaison officer, a spot fourteen kilometers north of the scene of the fighting. The Pakistani had confirmed that there were no Pakistani forces at that erroneous location, which heightened the confusion.
Wilson became dismayed, as the investigation unfolded, that the RC-East command did not clarify its own actions with regard to the CONOP and the border coordination. The official investigation’s final report was clear on this point, however.{76} Wilson’s battalion had briefed the operation in a video teleconference, and the border coordination center at Joyce had asked RC-East’s border cell for more information but received no response. A tap dance was beginning that would go on for weeks and consume hundreds and hundreds of hours. Wilson’s decisions and the actions of Mike and his men that night were straightforward and entirely justifiable, as the investigation later confirmed. The men were under fire, pinned down, and in imminent danger of being wounded or killed. It did not matter who was shooting at them or why. The rules of engagement were clear. US forces under attack had the right to defend themselves.
What happened next was not just a product of the November 25–26 incident. It was part of a toxic climate of mistrust and bitterness that had reached epic proportions, driven by a series of events. Pakistan had been chafing under the greatly increased pace of US drone strikes that occurred during the Obama administration, often at politically inopportune times. The news media’s publication of diplomatic cables via Wikileaks had revealed just how deeply the United States mistrusted Pakistan. A CIA contractor had shot two Pakistanis in Lahore, and the raid six months earlier by SEAL Team Six deep into Pakistani territory to kill Osama bin Laden—with no advance notice—had deeply humiliated the Pakistani military. The escalating rhetoric over the course of the year was matched by a quadrupling of fire from Pakistan’s side of the border. The Pakistani government was itching for a fight, and Operation Sayaqa provided just the pretext it needed.