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THE HINDU KUSH

I think everybody thought, “Of all the places to have to fight a war, Afghanistan would not be our choice.” But we didn’t choose Afghanistan; Afghanistan chose us.

—CONDOLEEZZA RICE, JULY 2002

 

 

THE TALIBAN HELD the high ground. This semi-organized amalgam wore uniforms of a sort. Some had the whole getup, including snappy dark green berets. Others sported only mottled military field trousers. A few, like the great Osama bin Laden himself, favored camouflage jackets. Here and there, a bearded man in traditional woolen robes topped off his outfit with an old, rounded Soviet metal helmet. Some of their AK-47 automatic rifles and PKM machine guns were clean; others not. Just below the crest of the scrubby ridge line stood two elderly, Russian-made T-55 tanks, a couple of mortars, and one cockeyed howitzer. Disciplined soldiers they were not. But there were a lot of them.

Try as they might, the Uzbeks hadn’t been able to get up there. To get into the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, a place they very much wanted to take, Abdul Rashid Dostum and his men needed to crack that position. They had tried before. On the heights, the Taliban looked down, scattering a few shots among the Uzbeks taking cover behind the rocks and dirt piles on the other valley wall. The same old game with the same old score, it appeared.

Then it changed.

A flash of white light stabbed the ragged Taliban trench line. Up went a dark brown column of dirt, rocks, bushes, and God knew what else—ammunition? Weapons? Body parts? Seconds later, delayed by a thousand-plus yards, a crashing roar sounded, a pressure wave that pushed hard against the chests of Dostum’s Uzbek fighters.

It happened twice more. The Uzbeks cheered and opened fire.

Dropping his binoculars, Dostum reached for the hand mike of his field radio. The assistant tuned it to a channel used often in the country. The Uzbek leader addressed his Taliban counterpart.

“This is General Dostum speaking. I am here”—he paused for effect—“and have brought the Americans with me.”

It didn’t take many more big U.S. bombs to make the point. The Taliban cracked; some ran, leaving behind their damaged tanks and more than a hundred dead. An equal number raised their hands, finished. “We killed the bastards by the bushel-full today and we’ll get more tomorrow,” reported Captain Mark Nutsch, the American commander with the Uzbeks.

 

Nutsch and his men enabled Dostum to sweep all before him. Some Taliban resisted much more fiercely, but in the end, just about all quit. Within three weeks, methodically bombing from ridge to ridge, the Uzbeks joined the final push that took Mazar-e-Sharif on November 9, 2001. Other Northern Alliance bands, also with U.S. CIA and Special Forces teams, pushed on to Kunduz and Taloqan, other key cities in the area. American officers and sergeants on foot, in battered pickup trucks, and even on horseback fought side by side with the Northern Alliance Afghans. At each center of resistance, American airpower broke the enemy.

From the outset, the campaign relied on airpower. Operation Enduring Freedom began with airstrikes on October 7. That day, less than a month after 9/11, American and British jets and cruise missiles smashed up what passed for the Taliban air defenses. Every one of Mullah Omar’s creaky aircraft, his handful of old surface-to-air missiles, and his few active radars were all hammered. In addition, U.S. Air Force bombers and Navy jets struck known al-Qaeda training camps. A British Royal Navy submarine fired two of the fifty Tomahawks launched that day. Within a few hours, the Afghan skies belonged to Uncle Sam.

For about two weeks, American aircraft ranged unchallenged over the country. They bombed some new sites and re-attacked previous targets. One British voice spoke sardonically about strikes to “rearrange the rubble.” The ever-helpful Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suggested suspending bombing for the upcoming Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Taliban spokesmen began to scoff at the U.S. effort. Sure, the air show impressed. But what next? Where was the great Northern Alliance ground offensive? The guys up in the American press box started to squirm in their seats. The suits in Washington soon did likewise.

At this point, though, the only U.S. “boots on the ground” (a grossly overworked cliché of that time) belonged to a few CIA officers inserted by nondescript Agency helicopters near the end of September. Linking up with the Northern Alliance, the CIA elements brought their expertise, necessary cash in strongboxes, and an absolute guarantee of U.S. commitment. But to run U.S. airstrikes, they waited on the uniformed special operators. The first military teams entered during the third week in October.

United States special operations forces (SOF), in 2001 and now, amount to about 3 percent of the U.S. Armed Forces. Most SOF had roles in Afghanistan, but only a few kinds got much official coverage. The wide variety of names, code words, and colloquialisms associated with SOF is intentional, to some extent. These units work in the shadows, and they prefer it that way. Composed of specially selected and highly trained personnel, SOF are of two basic types: the regional forces and the others.

Regional SOF includes contributions from each service. The U.S. Army provides almost half of the total, including Army Special Forces (SF, the Green Berets of Vietnam fame), the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment (superbly trained parachute-qualified light infantry), and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (aka Night Stalkers, an elite helicopter contingent). U.S. Air Force special operations squadrons fly long-range penetrator airplanes and helicopters as well as the deadly AC-130 gunships employed for close air support. Navy SEAL (sea, air, land) teams and their supporting special warfare units form the maritime component. In 2001, the Marines sent individuals only to SOF, but as the war continued, the Corps organized its own unique units tied to the service’s amphibious core mission. Together, these forces organize and deploy in support of a regional commander like General Tommy Franks in October of 2001. Such regional SOF is acknowledged to exist. Given their tasks deep in hostile territory, however, the U.S. military rightly limits how much publicity they receive.

The other kind of SOF also do a lot of key missions in various regions, but they strive to avoid any publicity, and usually succeed in that effort. In the tradition of the British Special Air Service (SAS), which pioneered this line of work, these guys do the most difficult, demanding national counterterrorist tasks. They are manhunters, although they, too, had much to learn after 9/11. Nobody was supposed to talk about them, and as a rule, nobody in uniform did. Sometimes the media, fascinated with these highly capable forces and their impressive set of challenging missions, reported on their exploits. Even Hollywood got interested now and then. That mattered not at all in the SOF ranks, and so it mattered not in the wider U.S. military. You didn’t speak their names. You didn’t depict their emblems. You didn’t acknowledge they existed. You just didn’t. But you knew they’d be there. Conventional soldiers referred to them, in whole or in part, as the Task Force, and left it at that.

The men sent to help Abdul Rashid Dostum came from the regional SOF, specifically Army Special Forces. Captain Mark Nutsch commanded a twelve-man Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA), the basic SF element, with a very experienced warrant officer deputy, a senior team operations sergeant, an intelligence sergeant, and then two NCOs, each focused on the key specialties of weapons, demolitions/construction, communications, and medical aid. Each member had been through a grueling multiweek course of selection and assessment followed by overall SF and then specialist training for a year or so. Standards exceeded the demands of the most intensive college courses, with a relentless physical fitness regimen to boot. SF team medics, for example, were as skilled as some countries’ licensed physicians. The men cross-trained in more than one specialty. When they joined a team, they learned appropriate regional languages, no easy task, especially along with parachute jumping, hours of skill shooting, and all the rest. Nutsch and his people, for instance, knew some Dari and Pashto. A twelve-man ODA could subdivide as required to advise a guerrilla unit of thousands.

On arrival in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, Mark Nutsch and his men met a pair of CIA officers. They were not in charge of the SF, nor did they work for Nutsch. Rather than devise a formal command relationship, they all just shook hands and cooperated. After about a week on the ground, two highly welcome U.S. Air Force joint terminal air controllers (JTACs were the men who directed airstrikes) joined the ODA. With those useful attachments, and some borrowed horses, Nutsch and his team accompanied Dostum and the Uzbeks.

Such an ODA is indeed the basic SF element. But they do not live in a vacuum. Six ODAs form an SF company, an Operational Detachment Bravo (ODB), commanded by a major. Three ODBs make up an Operational Detachment Charlie (ODC), and three of those, plus support elements, make up a Special Forces Group. The SF mixes and matches teams to form mission-tailored organizations. To keep all the parts straight, each sub-element has its own individual number. Nutsch, for example, commanded ODA 595. Its counterparts were quite similarly configured to include the CIA ties and the Air Force JTACs.

The entire array deployed under the rubric of Joint Special Operations Task Force–North, formed by Colonel John Mulholland around the core of his Fifth Special Forces Group, augmented with U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine, and British military elements. The headquarters were set up at Karshi-Khanabad airfield in Uzbekistan. Once established at K2, Mulholland preferred to use his command’s code name: Task Force Dagger.

Large, tough, and smart, Mulholland gave his teams a mission with a lot of latitude: “Advise and assist the Northern Alliance in conducting combat operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda; kill, capture, and destroy al-Qaeda and deny them sanctuary.” He named the main enemy much more clearly than most, and it greatly helped his SF commanders stay focused. Mulholland also wanted some airfields so he could build up numbers, bring in supplies, and pave the way for conventional army battalions to follow. Mazar-e-Sharif filled the bill. Its seizure on November 9 marked the first major victory on the ground in Afghanistan.

Taking Mazar-e-Sharif started a Taliban unraveling that accelerated dramatically over the next few days. Around Afghanistan, the word went out: No men, no matter how much they prayed, could stand against the devastating U.S. bombers and the handful of sharp-eyed, sharpshooting, bearded, tough Americans that accompanied the Northern Alliance. Mulholland’s Task Force Dagger had two ODAs and an ODC (battalion-level headquarters) with Dostum’s aggressive Uzbeks, and eventually five teams joined the various segments that made up Fahim Khan’s Tajiks. Overhead, a succession of huge Air Force bombers and the carrier-launched Navy F-14 and F/A-18 fighter-bombers continued to deliver ordnance on time, on target, and, when necessary, in tremendous volume.

The Taliban backpedaled and made for the Pashtun regions in the south and east. Up north, Taloqan, which had changed hands a few times during the ongoing 1996–2001 civil war with the Taliban, gave up on November 10, the day after Mazar-e-Sharif was taken. Mulholland’s ODAs 585 and 586 were there. Victorious, energized Northern Alliance bands closed on Kunduz, the last major city holding out up north.

Urged on and accompanied by the CIA and SF teams, the anti-Taliban Afghans pressed the fight. The capital of Kabul fell to Fahim Khan’s men and ODA 555 on November 14. The Taliban collapse and retreat happened so fast that the smart guys in Washington and the press color commentators began to fret that it had been entirely too precipitous. Various experts worried about the lack of Pashtuns in the streets of Kabul—except the Taliban Pashtuns running out the other end, of course. The optics were all wrong, with too many Northern Alliance Tajiks in Kabul. No, the cognoscenti intoned, this wasn’t being done properly. In many cases, these American voices were those that three weeks before had worried about a developing quagmire. Some people were just never happy. It reminded one of General George S. Patton’s sardonic rejoinder when his Third Army took Trier, Germany, in 1945 ahead of schedule: “Do you want me to give it back?”

Victory developed momentum even in the Pashtun belt. Afghans like winners, and it was becoming clear that Mullah Omar and his Taliban were losing. In the south, Hamid Karzai and ODA 574 catalyzed enough Pashtun militia to take the provincial seat of Tarin Kowt on November 17. No soldier, but a gifted and relentless rabble-rouser, Karzai kept the locals motivated and encouraged them to march south on Kandahar city itself, the final Taliban outpost. The much less articulate but significantly more ruthless drug smuggler and gunrunner Gul Agha Sherzai, aided by ODA 583, brought his hundreds up from Takh-te-pol, tracing the long road from the border with Pakistan to the south. Taliban Kandahar hung in the balance, its days numbered. In a few weeks, several dozen brave, tough, highly skilled Americans, a deadly cascade of aerial firepower, and thousands of invigorated Afghan partners smashed the Taliban and liberated Afghanistan. Like most successes in that sad country, it led almost immediately to more trouble.

 

In Afghanistan, only the dead really surrender. The living might indulge in it for a while, and many did in that momentous November of 2001. For Afghans, giving up is a time-out, not a game-over. Surrender is merely a tactic to be employed when confronted with overwhelming odds. When the opportunity arises, combat resumes. Pauses or not, scores must be settled.

In the Afghan tribal culture, especially that of the Pashtuns who filled the Taliban ranks, the death of a family member created a blood feud to be settled by lethal vengeance. Inside the community, blood money could be accepted, but not outside it, and especially not from the infidels. The Americans and the Northern Alliance had killed a lot of Taliban. Those thousands captured included many families’ brothers, sons, fathers, and cousins. The Taliban remnants weren’t willing to let it go.

This applied in spades to the sullen, alienated survivors of Brigade 055, sometimes called the Arab Brigade. Many of these men, volunteers raised through al-Qaeda, were graduates of bin Laden’s Afghan training camps. Many came from Pakistan and were as Pashtun as any of the locals; others hailed from Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt. Long on indoctrination and short on useful weapons and tactical skills, the foreigners envied their comrades martyred under the rain of U.S. bombs. Now they faced shame and Allah knew what else at the hands of the Uzbeks and these infidel Americans.

Rightly focused on new business to the east, in and around Kunduz, Abdul Rashid Dostum left a mass of captives in his wake. His subordinates looked for places to put them. Any sort of enclosure would do. Among several sites they used, the Northern Alliance leaders elected to deliver hundreds of captives to the imposing brick compound of Qala-i-Jangi, about six miles west of Mazar-e-Sharif city. That place looked plenty secure.

The octagonal brick Fighters’ Fortress, six hundred yards across, dated back more than a century. This massive castle had been built over the course of a dozen years, starting in 1889, at the behest of a royal lieutenant in the north, Abdul Rahman Khan. The fort’s walls—ten feet wide and anchored by big corner towers fifty feet across—rose forty feet above the surrounding farm fields. Firing slits scored the upper ramparts. A smaller east-west wall, ten feet high, split the facility in half. In its center, a plain metal door limited access between the two areas. The main entrance gate stood almost in the middle on the east side, just north of the central wall. Built into the north wall, a large headquarters and a two-story barracks housed the garrison, and horse stables were provided for their mounts. The southern half was more open, with a few single-story buildings, rows of dusty stables, and dank storerooms along the central and outer walls. In the center of the wide south yard, a long rectangular structure squatted; the Uzbeks called it the Pink House, a reference to its lighter shade of mud brickwork. Just to the east, another, smaller rectangular single-story adobe building capped a warren of underground storage rooms.

Following the lead of the Taliban, which had used the fortress for years as an armory and barracks, Dostum took over the better-appointed northern half as his temporary headquarters during operations around Mazar-e-Sharif. The Taliban had left stacks of ammunition and weapons of all types in almost every room in the structure. Dostum’s Uzbeks added more, so the place had a lot of value in its own right as a munitions storage site. When he left to move south, Dostum appointed militia chief Majid Rozi as the fortress commander. Rozi kept a hundred Northern Alliance people with him. They inherited all the arms. He also assumed the unpleasant job of guarding a lot of very disgruntled Taliban prisoners.

The trucks arrived within hours after Rozi took over, as dusk gathered late on November 24. Packing up to fifty prisoners each on the beds of six large, old Russian-made vehicles, the Uzbek drivers entered the main gate, turned into the southern half, and dumped their human cargo. Many of those unloaded came from Brigade 055; they were al-Qaeda types, foreigners, men with nothing to lose. The outnumbered guards barked at the new arrivals, telling them to line up and be searched. Rumors passed through the ragged crowd: Native Afghans would be freed. Foreigners would be turned over to the Americans. That did not seem likely to end well.

When one of Rozi’s officers leaned in to question a man who did not look Afghan, the man pulled out a live hand grenade. The blast killed himself and the Uzbek. Another captive fighter did likewise at the other end of the mob. A second Northern Alliance leader, a Hazara, died along with the grenade wielder. The mob seethed and began to move forward.

Alarmed, several Uzbek guards fired their AK-47s into the air, long, ripping bursts. An officer stepped up and addressed the prisoners, assuring them they would be treated well. Nobody was going to be given to the Americans. In fact, he announced, the United Nations planned to take the foreign fighters. (This would have been news to that distant body.)

Accurate or not, the message spread. The detainees subsided. Some glowered at their captors. A few pulled their dirty blankets over their heads. As a concession, the sentries ended their halfhearted attempts to search the prisoners. Honor had been served. Blows had been struck, and Allah had seen fit to remove the actors and the victims. Enough was enough.

Cowed, nervous, and dealing with a surly crowd as night approached, the Uzbek sentries lowered their weapons and prodded the prisoners into the long blocks of stables and the Pink House. Some were directed into the underground passages, already hosting prisoners from earlier hauls. The outer doors clanged shut and were locked. All those piles of weapons and bullets were locked in there too.

With the south yard now cleared, the Northern Alliance men pulled back across the middle wall and slammed the big sheet-metal gate. With AKs in hand, a few Uzbeks mounted the wall to keep watch on the dark buildings. Amazingly, the night passed without incident.

 

In the morning, several captives asked to be released from their cells to wash up and pray. Hopeful that the previous night’s episodes would not be repeated, the guards opened the doors and let the prisoners come out. Water came in large tubs, followed soon after by a rice breakfast in similar containers. In small groups, clustered here and there on the flat southern dirt yard, men washed, prayed, and ate. The Uzbek sentinels relaxed. The warm sun helped.

At 11:15 a.m., a Northern Alliance officer opened the middle metal gate. Through it walked two men dressed in a mix of Western military gear and traditional Afghan clothes. Both men were armed with AKs and pistols. The pair separated, stopping about a hundred yards from each other. The Uzbek guards were told to assemble the prisoners in the courtyard. It took several minutes to gather up the various groups of captives. The prisoners sat on the ground. Each of the two visitors stood watching, searching the faces of the grimy men below.

Johnny Micheal “Mike” Spann and David Davis (pseudonym), both CIA officers, wanted to hear what these prisoners had to say. The presence of the Brigade 055 types suggested that the people held in Qala-i-Jangi possessed important information about al-Qaeda. A prisoner or two might even be able to pinpoint Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, or the other al-Qaeda senior leaders. It was worth a try.

Spann and Davis proceeded with confidence. They had been active from the outset with the SF and the Northern Alliance. Indeed, Davis was one of those who’d met Captain Mark Nutsch on the landing zone when ODA 595 came in by helicopter on October 19, just over a month ago.

The CIA pair spoke Dari and some Pashto. Each American leaned down to question a man. Spann had his bunch. Davis had another. The questions started.

“Who are you?”

No response.

“Why are you here?”

Nothing. Seated in front of Spann, a thin young man hung his head. His legs slowly uncrossed and flexed.

Meanwhile, grumbling rippled around the yard. Seated men leaned toward each other. Americans; these two were Americans. The Brigade 055 fighters knew what that meant. Several stood up even as the Uzbek sentries motioned them to sit back down. Five, ten, twenty, and then more got up and moved forward. The Uzbeks gestured uselessly. Upright men shifted toward Spann and Davis. An Uzbek raised his AK-47 auto-rifle.

Absorbed by his subject, Spann focused on the man seated at his feet. He asked again, his tone even: “Why are you here?”

“To kill you,” the enraged prisoner shouted in English. He jumped up in an instant, his skinny arms reaching toward Spann’s neck. The CIA officer yanked out his pistol and pulled the trigger. The attacker jerked back and went down, finished. The gunshot echoed off the mud bricks.

Now all the prisoners stood up. The frontline converged in a wild, gesticulating knot around each of the two Americans; the rest filled in, adding weight to the inchoate mass. Panicked Uzbek guards started firing. A cacophony of yelling voices filled the courtyard, interspersed with the crack of 7.62 mm AK shots. One captive wrested an AK-47 from a guard. Then another took a rifle. The Uzbeks began to fall, drilled with bullets from their own weapons.

Hands, arms, bodies, a press of hot, dirty robes closed on Spann like a woolen wave. The American fired twice more, killing an attacker with each shot. But there were way too many. Davis was separated, mobbed too. He wriggled free, beating at the swarm of hot bodies around him. The CIA officer shot two or three Taliban prisoners and ran for it, toward the middle wall.

Behind Davis, as Spann was engulfed, other Uzbek guards fell. Cheering Taliban and Brigade 055 men stripped the AKs from the dead sentries. Surviving Uzbeks ran toward the metal gate, already closing in front of them. On the walls to the north, Northern Alliance sentries opened fire. They shot at the Taliban, now dispersing, splitting into singles and pairs, seeking cover in the brick buildings. The former prisoners, now very much combatants, returned fire. More gleeful shouts erupted. Some of the Brigade 055 men discovered a stock of AKs and ammunition.

Shooting grew in volume. On the north wall, in the headquarters building, two Red Cross representatives, one of them Simon Brooks of Great Britain, looked up as Dave Davis came forcefully into the room. The CIA officer was all business. His weapons smelled of cordite. The Red Cross people before Davis provided a nice touch, albeit absurd, checking to ensure those in captivity had access to shuffleboard or whatnot. Well, Red Cross rules be damned. The Taliban weren’t playing by any Western legal niceties.

“He burst in and told us to get out of there,” Brooks recalled. “He was really shaken up. He said there were 20 dead Northern Alliance guys and the Taliban were taking over the fort.” Davis indicated that he had to go back and get Spann. The Red Cross man and his partner didn’t want any part of that. They went out on the wall and found a way down and away. A German television crew and a Time magazine reporter and interpreter stayed. Until then, they had figured the war had passed them by, leaving them in the boring backwash. Now they had a story, all right.

 

Davis called his superiors. They contacted K2 airfield, Task Force Dagger headquarters, way up north in Uzbekistan, over the mountains and under the shrouds of thick clouds. The first version of the story suggested that the prison was in enemy hands and there were two dead Americans, bad indeed. The second, more accurate but no less sobering, reflected Spann down and missing, with Davis and Majid Rozi’s Northern Alliance element under siege by hundreds of rampaging, armed exprisoners.

For men like Colonel John Mulholland, few messages resonated like the report that one American was trapped and another American might be missing. Special operators do not leave their own, ever. A good portion of the brutal engagement in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993 revolved around U.S. determination to recover every comrade, alive or not. Despite valiant efforts, the Somali foe got a few dead Americans and dragged their corpses through the dusty streets as the camera rolled. The battle spawned Mark Bowden’s gripping, authoritative book and the film based on it, Black Hawk Down, which was just about to open in theaters back in America as Qala-i-Jangi erupted. Americans in uniform, especially in the tight-knit SOF family, knew only too well how bad this kind of fight could get.

At one point in Mogadishu, with two helicopters crashed and thousands of heavily armed hostiles swarming isolated units, the U.S. SOF commanders had only two men on hand to save a crew of downed aviators. Leaving their circling helicopter to go on the ground promised almost certain death. But it might, just might, save those trapped down below. Two senior snipers went: Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart. Down in the street, they killed many Somali gunmen. But in the end, enemy numbers prevailed. Their heroism protected the wounded Chief Warrant Officer 3 Michael Durant long enough for a senior Somali to take the man prisoner—he survived and came home. Gordon and Shughart died under enemy fire. Each was recognized for his selfless valor with the Medal of Honor. Nobody up at Task Force Dagger wanted to repeat that episode.

That said, Mulholland had almost nothing to send to Qala-i-Jangi. His ODAs were spread all across northern Afghanistan, moving and fighting. He had the First Battalion, Eighty-Seventh Infantry from the Tenth Mountain Division protecting the K2 airfield. Maybe they could do something, but they’d need a lot of helicopters, of which Mulholland had only a few, to take the long flight south. They might stage to the Mazar-e-Sharif airstrip aboard Air Force C-130 transport planes, but Mulholland had none of those at the moment. Such a response took time to assemble. Task Force Dagger staff people got to work. Something could come together in a day or so. But with Spann already lost, Davis pinned down, and the Uzbeks hanging on by their fingernails, who could wait that long?

In the interim, all the big colonel could commit was a battalion headquarters: Operational Detachment Charlie 53, under Lieutenant Colonel Max Bowers. Even that little element, thirty-seven men on paper, was understrength. Bowers himself was forward with part of his team outside Kunduz, helping with the ongoing Northern Alliance encirclement of that key city, the final major Taliban position up north. The command post in Mazar-e-Sharif was overseeing all operations in support of the Northern Alliance, including looking after the city’s vital airfield. Well, they were SF men, not clerks. Conditions called for immediate action. And most important, ODC 53 had Air Force joint terminal air controllers, ensuring a form of firepower not available during the Black Hawk Down battle. Mulholland gave the order.

At 1:45 p.m., the battalion XO, Major Kurt Sonntag, got the word. Sonntag had multiple situations to juggle. He turned to his counterpart and nominal subordinate, Major Mark Mitchell, the S-3 (operations officer; that is, the key planner and battle tracker in the command post). Mitchell tagged others from the small headquarters: two SF operations NCOs, the surgeon, and an interpreter. Mitchell enlisted, as the security element, the only available fighting force he owned, eight newly arrived British Special Boat Service (SBS) Royal Marine Commandos. The SBS section included two members of its U.S. counterpart formation, Navy SEALs. Most important of all, Mitchell took the two Air Force joint terminal air controllers. Staff Sergeant Michael Sciortino and his fellow JTAC had the radios and skills to ensure that the fifteen-man relief element brought a very, very heavy punch.

Within a half hour—the SF aboard two battered minivans, the SBS and SEALs in two Land Rovers—the little team drove up to the main gate at Qala-i-Jangi. Even over the engine noise, they could tell they were driving into a major firefight.

“You could hear the bullets whistling overhead,” Air Force controller Mike Sciortino remembered. “Random explosions could be seen from mortar rounds landing along the northern wall that surrounded the fort.” The Americans and British exited their vehicles just inside the main gate. Majid Rozi met them and, through the interpreter, explained the situation. Obviously, the Taliban held the south half of the fort and were keeping the northern half under fire.

Mitchell did not hesitate. He turned to Sciortino and told the Air Force controller: “I want SATCOM [satellite communications] and JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions]. Tell them there will be six or seven buildings in a line in the southwest half. If they can hit that, then that would kill a whole lot of these motherfuckers.” Mitchell told the airman to use his long-range satellite radio and get airplanes overhead with guided bombs. A JDAM used a strap-on fin kit and a little guidance package to convert a dumb explosive device into a smart weapon that would hit within spitting distance of the assigned map coordinates. Since a thousand-pound bomb could kill out to two hundred yards and wound out to four hundred, that was more than good enough. Of course, it wasn’t going to be easy steering these things into a fortress that was six hundred yards from one side to the other.

Sciortino started calling the warplanes overhead. As he did, one of the Special Forces NCOs got Dave Davis on the radio. Addressing Mitchell, the NCO summarized their conversation. “Mike is MIA. They’ve taken his gun and ammo,” he said. “We have another guy [Davis]. He managed to kill two of them with his pistol, but he’s holed up in the north side with no ammo.” The sergeant then looked at Sciortino: “Tell those guys to stop scratching their balls and fly.”

The SF and the Afghan commander set up on top of the northeast corner tower. It took until almost four that afternoon to get aircraft overhead. After all, the fort lay in a supposedly quiet rear area, well away from the day’s major fighting to the east around Kunduz and far to the south, near Kandahar. The concept of frontlines represented a holdover from another era, the one that had favored the U.S. Qala-i-Jangi demonstrated that the enemy was learning to discard such Western conventions and go with what worked best for Afghans, which was to say, treachery and ambuscade. Fortunately for Mitchell and his embattled team, warplanes can be rerouted pretty quickly, and the experienced U.S. airmen reacted even quicker than most.

Outside the walls, Rozi evacuated his Uzbek wounded by taxicab. The Northern Alliance resupplied ammunition. Canteens and bottled water went around. The Taliban shot at them now and then, but they seemed happy to hold their part of Qala-i-Jangi. When a few Taliban tried to get outside, alert North Alliance riflemen killed them.

Now the American planes appeared overhead. The enemies were about to be reminded of how they’d ended up as captives. Sciortino talked on the radio, calmly relaying map coordinates. “Four minutes,” he said. The Americans and British looked at each other.

The countdown continued. Three minutes. The Americans passed the word through the interpreter: Take cover.

Two minutes. Everybody got down, but some of the Uzbeks kept their heads up. They just had to see. The Americans waved them flat.

One minute.

Thirty seconds.

“Fifteen seconds,” Sciortino said, calm and steady, a man doing his job.

Right on time, the guided bomb whooshed overhead, a white spear just visible as it slanted down out of the heavens and lanced into the southern wall. The thing slammed into one of the domed stables, crumpling the half sphere as if it were an eggshell. A huge V of dark brick dust shot up. Roaring air pressed the men down. Hot metal fragments spun overhead. Splinters clattered off the brick parapets.

At the south end, firing stopped. On the north wall, the Uzbeks cheered. Then a Taliban shot rang out. More followed. This was not going to be easy.

Six more times, the Air Force controllers brought down JDAMs. The British SBS commander raised Davis on the radio. After two more bombs, Davis and the German television crew planned to make a break for it. What about Spann? “From what I understand,” one SF NCO said, “he was already gone before we got here.” Continued bombing and darkness ensured that Davis and the television people escaped cleanly. But Major Mitchell and his people stuck with Rozi and the Uzbeks. They had to finish off this Taliban revolt. And they intended to find Mike Spann, dead or alive.

 

Morning brought reinforcements. Majid Rozi’s people nursed an ancient T-55 Russian tank up to the battlement, its rust-streaked treads clattering slowly up the long ramp. Grinning Uzbeks methodically hand-cranked its long 100 mm cannon around to face the south. The tank began banging away.

On the nearby brick catwalk, two Northern Alliance mortar teams fiddled with their thin metal tubes, fussed with the angles, and dropped some test shots down the barrels. Each round slid down, went off with a metallic plonk as it struck the firing pin, and then arced out toward the south end of the fort. Once they had the range, the men took turns dispatching an occasional fat little bomblet onto the Pink House and stables. Many domed roofs showed gaps. Whole walls were gone.

Defiant Taliban gunfire continued.

About 10:00 a.m., coming all the way from K2 in Uzbekistan, four SF men and an eight-man rifle squad from the Tenth Mountain Division showed up. The Tenth Mountain riflemen represented some of the first conventional troops in country. Mulholland had no other units to send, but he delivered what he had. The SF colonel knew the airpower would keep coming.

Although hit by the tank and mortar rounds, Taliban gunmen kept returning small-arms fire. Mitchell knew it was time to bring in the bombs again. He turned to Sciortino. His partner handled the calls. These were different planes than the ones that had come the day before. These particular Navy F-14 Tomcats came off a carrier way out in the Arabian Sea.

Over the cracking and snapping of small arms, the Americans and the British near the JTACs caught snatches of the radio conversation. “Be advised,” said one of the Navy guys up in the fighters. “You are danger close. You are about a hundred meters away from the target.” All the strikes the day before had fallen danger close, a term defined by the military as six hundred meters from the proposed target. Hell, by that definition, any bombing inside Qala-i-Jangi equaled danger close. The Air Force controller cleared the strike.

“Making their run now,” said the naval aviator far overhead. The usual countdown started. Everybody knew the drill.

Men got down, waiting. One minute.

Taliban shots kept up. Thirty seconds. Waiting.

Fifteen seconds.

A massive hot light; air sucked from lungs; brown brick dirt gushing up like gritty water; a blast wave roaring like a thousand cracks of thunder—the bomb, a two-thousand-pounder, hit almost squarely on the northeastern tower. “I went flying through the air,” recalled Sciortino. “I blacked out.”

Around the airman, others lay sprawled. Some rolled over. A few reared up, unsteady. Several didn’t move at all. The T-55 tank turret flipped cleanly off, the hull overturned and blackened. A huge divot, hazed by drifting yellow dust, breached the thick outer brick wall. One Uzbek shouted in English, “No! No!”

An American spoke on the radio: “We have men down.” Four Northern Alliance men had died. Another dozen lay wounded. So did two British and five Americans, including Mike Sciortino. It had been a mistake, no doubt. Something zigged when it should have zagged. A transposed number in the map coordinates, a bent fin on the bomb, a 1 turned 0 in the circuitry due to dust or banging around on the plane or just plain bad fortune—nobody knew for sure, except maybe Carl von Clausewitz, who’d said such foul-ups happen in every war. Sooner or later, friction collected its blood toll.

As the afternoon dragged by, shooting died down on both sides. The trapped, battered Taliban must have been hungry and tired. Americans and Uzbeks took advantage of the relative lull to move their wounded and dead. November 26 had been a long day already. It got longer.

Just before sunset, CIA officer Dave Davis returned and linked up with Mark Mitchell and the SF element. The CIA and SF leaders had a powerful reinforcement on its way in, one likely to break the Taliban’s back. Davis turned to Alex Perry of Time magazine. “You don’t want to leave here tonight,” the CIA officer offered. “There’s going to be quite a show.”

There was. After sunset, up in the black sky, droning engines sounded. An AC-130 aerial gunship circled overhead. It pounded the Taliban buildings with dead-on, rapid-firing 40 mm Bofors guns and a succession of 105 mm shells. The loud cracking and dull booms pulsed again and again. The aircraft had a large stock of ammunition and worked through it slowly, steadily, relentlessly. Taliban shooting died away.

When the first gunship went off station, a second AC-130 took over. The pounding went on and on for hours, all night. The succession of hits chewed up the adobe structures. Walls got knocked over. Ceilings caved in. One could imagine the effects of this on those trapped inside and helpless.

After a few hours of the relentless stream of projectiles, an ammunition stock detonated in one of the southern buildings. The explosion lit the night and initiated a fierce conflagration that burned into the dawn. The blast rattled walls and popped open doors six miles east at the ODC 53 headquarters.

On the morning of November 27, the Northern Alliance and their SF brothers decided to finish it. Taliban fire had dwindled to occasional pop shots. Subsisting on stringy horse meat from slaughtered animals, these men were low on morale, low on ammunition, and low on armed effectives. Dave Davis said to his comrades, “We’re going to close in on these guys pretty hard.” They did, shooting as they went.

In each of the holed, dusty storerooms, the SF men and Northern Alliance people took turns clearing. The Uzbeks proved liberal with hand grenades and bullets, dumping in a fragmentation device and following it up with an entire magazine or two (or three) of wild AK fire. Fortunately, the brick walls absorbed the 7.62 mm rounds rather well. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked.

Much better trained, the Americans and British used aimed fire. Tossing frag grenades onto hardened brick floors often got you an immediate face full of hot metal. The SF and SBS men entered like lithe cats, scanned and shot, methodically cleaning each cubicle with a few precision rifle rounds. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, the sergeants teach you. On it went, storeroom after storeroom.

It took time and sapped the energy of men wearing heavy body armor. But it had to be done. Smart enemy fighters raised their hands, not always an effective tactic with the enthusiastic Uzbeks. Dumb ones raised their AKs and got themselves drilled.

Resistance proved minimal. The AC-130s had reaped a grim harvest. The room-clearing added more. “On the field below lay hundreds of dead and dying,” eyewitness Alex Perry of Time wrote. “Two embraced in death. Alliance soldiers stepped gingerly over the bodies.” After crossing the killing ground, the Americans and British found Mike Spann. His body was booby-trapped with a hand grenade, which was carefully disarmed by the recovery team.

Johnny Micheal Spann became the first American killed in action in Afghanistan. Mike Sciortino received the first Purple Heart earned by an airman in the Afghan campaign. Mark Mitchell received the Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second-highest award for bravery and the first one given in this war. Others also earned military recognition. It all reflected the scale of the engagement, a major one by any measure. You would have to go back to the Korean War’s 1952 Geoje Island prisoner revolt to find anything similar.

Rozi’s men spent the next few days cleaning out the underground rooms and tunnels. Taliban holdouts battled like cornered rats. Grenades, gunfire, and hunger did not bring them up. Burning oil didn’t do it. Finally, after days of shooting and explosives, icy water washed them out. Eighty-six gaunt, filthy, beaten men stumbled up into the light. Among them, two Americans emerged: John Walker Lindh, a twenty-year-old from California, and Yaser Esam Hamdi, age twenty-one, born in Louisiana. Osama bin Laden’s recruiters got around.

 

The Qala-i-Jangi uprising was treated as a one-off, a bloody postscript to the unorthodox, highly successful SOF/airpower/Northern Alliance blitzkrieg that blew away the Taliban. In his postwar memoirs, USCENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks didn’t even mention it. His summary of the Afghan campaign in the north ends with the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif. Indeed, on November 27, the same day Mark Mitchell’s men found Mike Spann, the USCENTCOM commander got a call from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. It wasn’t about Qala-i-Jangi. “General Franks,” Rumsfeld said, “the president wants us to look at options for Iraq. What is the status of your planning?” The big guys in Washington had already moved on.

What happened at Qala-i-Jangi deserved a much closer look. Inside that crumbling fortress lurked the shape of things to come. The clash at Qala-i-Jangi prefigured a few key aspects that grew to characterize the Global War on Terrorism, especially its Afghan variation.

As it so often would in the future, the trouble started with prisoners. More difficulties followed Qala-i-Jangi, especially as the Brigade 055 survivors headed to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Clever Bush administration lawyers thought they’d evaded U.S. law by placing Camp X-Ray on a borrowed patch of territory in Cuba, an avowed U.S. enemy that nevertheless honored a long-standing prior agreement. Some of those who survived the Qala-i-Jangi battle ended up in Guantánamo. Their struggle continued inside the wire. Though the camp operated at a very high standard and admitted inspectors from international human rights organizations, the very word Guantánamo became shorthand in the Islamic world for “prisoner abuse.”

Even the word prisoners was shelved. Administration lawyers in Washington didn’t want to identify the men in Brigade 055 as prisoners of war. Under the Geneva Conventions, a POW denoted a person in national uniform captured under a clear chain of command via a procedure that adhered to defined regulations. Under international protocols and military law, POWs had rights, and the holding country accepted responsibilities to secure, protect, and care for enemy troops so captured.

The Taliban and al-Qaeda didn’t seize any U.S. prisoners early in the war. When the Afghan foes and their Iraqi affiliates eventually did pick up a few American captives, they treated them abominably. By sawing off heads for the benefit of the Al Jazeera audience, these enemies put themselves right up there on the sadism meter, surpassing even the twisted malice of the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese.

With all of this in mind, and recognizing that many of those captured in Afghanistan were camp-trained terrorists, the suits in Washington decided that the guys in Guantánamo and other holding sites were not POWs. They were not like the bedraggled Iraqi conscripts who’d surrendered en masse back in 1991. You couldn’t toss them some porkfree ration packs and send them home. No country wanted these brutal characters. So the legal people labeled the captives unlawful enemy combatants, which was certainly true, as they didn’t wear uniforms or have much organized authority. They entered captivity for the duration of a war that had no defined termination point. Not entitled to POW status, they became merely detainees.

While this designation passed legal muster, it left a lingering perception up and down the chain of command that maybe the normal rules for treatment of prisoners of war didn’t apply. Americans in uniform asked how to handle the captives. How were they to be housed? How about questioning? What about means of restraint? Sometimes the answers came back freighted with ambiguity; sometimes no answers came back. As the war devolved into night raids that dragged men out of bed and harsh little firefights against roadside bombers in civilian dress, U.S. soldiers developed dark thoughts. Leaving the detention situation so loosely defined would come back to bite them in ways nobody foresaw in late 2001.

Qala-i-Jangi also made it clear that people were already watching and grading the Americans. The U.S. intended to adhere to a high standard. Outsiders wanted to see how the Americans measured up. Qala-i-Jangi happened with international do-gooders, in this case the Red Cross, right in the middle of things. Those, like Simon Brooks, wanted to enforce Marquess of Queensberry rules on the side that hosted them, the Americans. The opposition got a pass. The Taliban and al-Qaeda had never welcomed international detention observers and never would, except in wholly contrived displays. It wasn’t fair but it happened over and over again.

In addition to those well-meaning civilians, Alex Perry of Time magazine and a German television crew observed almost everything at Qala-i-Jangi. To their credit, they recorded what happened and left the editorial slants to others. The CIA and military SOF don’t care for publicity, especially at the business end of their activities. Yet war generated interest, interest generated business, and the media, being run by commercial concerns, followed events that attracted customers and so sold advertising. As most of the coverage at this point was neutral or favorable, few in uniform thought much about it. Those thoughts would change as the war continued.

At Qala-i-Jangi, the spooks and the operators, the CIA and the SF, had held center stage. But John Mulholland knew that he needed reinforcements. He sent in a conventional force, admittedly just a few men from the Tenth Mountain Division. It reminded all that there were never enough SOF. Airpower had killed effectively in Qala-i-Jangi. After all the hammering, though, people had to go in on the ground with rifles, grenades, and guts. To control dirt and the societies that lived on it, you had to use live, trained, disciplined humans, and more than a few. As the war evolved, it demanded way more than handfuls of CIA officers and special operators. That, too, was a lesson from the prisoner uprising.

Those needed conventional battalions began to arrive in December 2001, even as the water froze in the abandoned dungeons at Qala-i-Jangi. In the south, near Kandahar, the First Marine Expeditionary Brigade established Forward Operating Base Rhino. Well to the north, coming in behind Mulholland’s Task Force Dagger command post at K2 air base in Uzbekistan, the Tenth Mountain Division headquarters arrived. They joined the busy First Battalion, Eighty-Seventh Infantry already at K2. The Second Battalion, 187th Infantry, drawn from the 101st Airborne Division, guarded the Shahbaz Air Base in Jacobabad, Pakistan, quite a concession by Pervez Musharraf’s ever-suspicious government. In Kabul itself, the headquarters of the British Third Mechanized Division set up what would become the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), initially limited to securing the capital.

By that time, the Afghan capital wanted securing. America’s chosen Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, headed something grandiosely announced as the Afghan Interim Authority. On December 5, Karzai auditioned for the job from outside besieged Kandahar via a U.S. Special Forces satellite-phone connection. After listening to him, a United Nations conference in Bonn, Germany, gave him the task.

Then, in an incident all too similar to the errant two-thousand-pound bomb at Qala-i-Jangi, a mistake in coordinates led to a strike that hit way too near Karzai, his bodyguards, and his comrades of ODA 574. Six Afghans and two Americans died. Sixty-five Afghans and the rest of the U.S. SF team sustained wounds. Karzai received a splinter cut to his face. The tough Afghans and Americans worked through this lethal friction. After their casualties had been treated and evacuated, they formed up and pressed on to take Kandahar city.

Like those who fought at Qala-i-Jangi, Hamid Karzai learned some things. The Americans owed him for stepping forward. For his part, and it frustrated him greatly, he owed his life and his new position to the Americans. And they were not always careful with their weapons . . . or their allies.

 

General Tommy Franks exulted. In his memoirs, he put it this way: “In Operation Enduring Freedom, Central Command and its Afghan allies had defeated the Taliban regime and destroyed Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist sanctuary in seventy-six days.” In this triumphal statement, Franks echoed the conventional wisdom of that time.

True, the Taliban in late 2001 lay prostrate. In a decision reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s embrace of a conventional defense of his country in 1991, Mullah Omar elected to fight this war the Western way. “Defending the cities with front lines that can be targeted from the air will cause us terrible loss,” Omar opined. But he did it anyway, and his men got plastered.

In the aftermath, local Taliban leaders went to ground. The senior ones crossed into Pakistan. There they hid, pondering the lessons of their speedy defeat.

First, they decided that they would determine the timeline for this war. Their defeat proved temporary, although it would take half a decade for them to commence a significant resurrection. Convinced they had won big, the U.S. assumed there would be no such Taliban resurgence. Naturally, few asked why the Taliban was, or if it should remain, America’s enemy. The U.S. just declared victory and kept going. The Taliban, meanwhile, began to rebuild their networks in the Pashtun belt along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Second, the Taliban saw the advantage of playing the victim. Most of the Western media outlets were skeptical, but the uneducated on the Pashtun Street and their coreligionists on the Arab Street took it all at face value. As the lesser power, not bound by inconvenient things like the truth, Mullah Omar wrapped his followers in Afghan nationalism and Islamist righteousness against the occupying infidels. Over time, inside Afghanistan and out, people forgot about the thunderous opening round and regarded instead the squalid, drawn-out morass that followed.

Finally, the Taliban went back to their preferred ways of war. Sniping, raiding, roadside bombs, trickery, and cunning, all financed by the opium trade, promised much better results for the Taliban than Western tactics had produced. Uniforms and discipline (such as it was) were abandoned. Loose tribal gangs and thuggery became the norm. Let the U.S. try to sift the fighters from the innocents in the Afghan countryside. Breaking into Afghan homes at night, rounding up both the usual and unusual suspects, dropping bombs with big blast patterns—well, the Americans couldn’t help but be ham-handed. They were outsiders, infidels. Eventually, the Taliban reckoned, the locals would side with their own.

As for al-Qaeda, even at the time, many decried Osama bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan. A major operation by the Task Force in the first three weeks of December 2001 flailed at the Tora Bora cave network on the rugged border near Jalalabad. Extensive airstrikes, a handful of determined SOF, and Afghan partners gave chase through the Hindu Kush. Slipping through the snowy peaks, the remaining al-Qaeda leadership and their security details played hide-and-seek in the tunnels and bunkers of one of the Contractor’s big projects from the 1979–89 Soviet war. The Task Force almost had them.

Many enemies never made it out of the air-delivered meat grinder. The thousand al-Qaeda casualties mentioned by some sources actually amounted to a conservative estimate. But the Sheikh and his immediate circle escaped. Later recriminations lambasted Franks, not to mention Secretary Rumsfeld and even President Bush himself, for not committing a Ranger battalion, the Marines, or perhaps the First Battalion, Eighty-Seventh Infantry to block the high trails into Pakistan. But in that extremely convoluted terrain, in that awful winter weather, Franks could have deployed the entire Tenth Mountain Division, and a few others to boot, without sealing off all those ratlines.

It didn’t matter. The opening Afghan campaign finished bin Laden and al-Qaeda as a viable, operational entity. Never again would Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri select, review, and approve operations. They dared not even speak except through cutouts, couriers, and a dwindling coterie of confidants. The Afghan camps were overrun and never rebuilt. Al-Qaeda, “the Base,” disintegrated. An American raiding force finally found and killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011. But in many ways, he was already dead, and had been for years.

The smashed organization resembled a large pane of high-quality glass that had been shattered: each shard was sharp, still fine, but small and separate. Like companies in the aftermath of an antitrust corporate breakup, the lesser franchises at first very much resembled al-Qaeda. Gradually, though, they developed their own unique regional flavors: al-Qaeda 2.0. Many acts, great and small, drew inspiration from Osama bin Laden the Sheikh. But bin Laden the Contractor was no more. All that remained was an inspiration that catalyzed the Islamist fringe and haunted the West like a ghost.

Three major attacks aped the al-Qaeda approach and honored the Sheikh, who claimed them all. The Bali nightclub and consulate bombings of October 12, 2002, killed 202 people and tipped the hand of Jemaah Islamiyah (the Islamic Congregation), an Indonesian group. The Madrid, Spain, attacks of March 11, 2004, that featured the near-simultaneous bombing of four commuter trains and killed 191 civilians was traced to Moroccan Islamists. The London subway and bus attacks on July 7, 2005, that saw four detonations and fifty-two deaths was tied to a local Islamist cell in Great Britain. Other successor elements drew on al-Qaeda’s name and cachet and exhibited features pioneered by bin Laden: al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. All acknowledged bin Laden. Affiliated groups like Abu Sayyaf (Father of the Swordsmith) in the Philippine Islands, Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) in Pakistan, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and Al Shabaab (the Youth) in Somalia did likewise. Rhetoric aside, all ran their own shows with a nod to the ghost in Abbottabad.

It would have taken the prescience of a prophet to see all that so clearly in the heady early winter of 2001. Around President Bush, in the ranks of the senior military, the prevailing attitude amounted to relief. The fighting had gone quicker than anyone had hoped and cost far less than anyone had feared. What came next? It all went back to that old question: Who was the enemy?

Defined narrowly as al-Qaeda and its immediate Taliban patrons, that enemy was suppressed for now. In truth, classic, real al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s construct, lay in ruins. But in December of 2001, nobody in Washington possessed enough hard intelligence to prove that. After 9/11, going with hunches did not seem wise. Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld advised President Bush to keep going, to finish the fight in Afghanistan (whatever that meant) and look beyond. Iraq came up, a threat still out there, a country brimming with ill will against America and presumed to have the means to act on it. Cheney argued again and again, “But if we don’t get them, they’ll get us.” Rumsfeld agreed. That massive blackened gash in the Pentagon sure buttressed his case.

One of the only members of the highest circle who knew what battle was like warned the others. Colin Powell cautioned repeatedly against expanding and extending the war. As with Cassandra in ancient Troy, he stayed on the inside looking out, doomed to be both correct and unheeded. Years later, informed by solid hindsight, the smart set all agreed that Powell had it right from the outset, but at the time, he alone spoke these unwelcome thoughts. In late 2001, among Bush’s key advisers, Powell was an outlier. To the rest, including those in uniform, pressing ahead to Iraq seemed reasonable, prudent, and probably the best way to ensure that Saddam Hussein did not strike first. Like President Harry S. Truman in the autumn of 1950 en route to Korea’s Yalu River, George W. Bush decided to keep going.

To finish off al-Qaeda, America needed Afghanistan, both to mop up there and to launch strikes into neighboring Pakistan, with the grudging assent of that dubious state. Working in Afghanistan involved supporting Hamid Karzai, nursing along this ISAF business with the allies, and continuing to go after the Taliban, which threatened both. Each step made all the sense in the world. In the aggregate, however, they ensnared the U.S. in an experiment in nation-building in the forbidding Hindu Kush. Osama bin Laden might well have been out of it, but a key part of his master plan came to pass.

Was there an alternative? Bush’s father had found one in 1991. Faced with Saddam Hussein on the ropes, the Kurds and Shiites in rebellion, Kuwait wrecked, and a victorious military straining at the leash, George H. W. Bush took his limited victory and pulled back. True, forces remained, patrolling the air over Iraq. But the major war ended. America could have done the same in late 2001—declared 9/11 avenged, al-Qaeda smashed, and Afghanistan freed, and then pulled out; if the handwringers had insisted, perhaps the U.S. might have left a small residual force. One could conceive of such a thing.

Except George W. Bush’s administration and the U.S. citizenry had lived through 9/11. Nobody dared chance another such horrific event. To guarantee beyond doubt the end of al-Qaeda, to knock out its affiliates, sponsors, and imitators, America had to keep up the pressure. “I will not wait on events,” the younger Bush declared.

So there it stood. Al-Qaeda had been run off and disrupted, left badly disorganized, but not killed. The parts and franchises, the copycats and wannabes, took up where the Sheikh and company had left off. In December of 2001, we just didn’t have the manhunters, and, more to the point, the manhunters didn’t have the good scenters and able beaters to track down and tear apart a terrorist network, whether large or small, transnational or local. We could smash it—and we did—but we could not kill it, not yet.

Scattered strikes and sloppy swings left too many lingering ghosts, too much inspiration for the next wave of terrorists and their financiers and sympathizers. The work could not be left to a few hundred specialists. It took thousands, locals especially. The spooks couldn’t find this will-o’-the-wisp enemy, certainly not on their own. Put another way, the early days in Afghanistan showed all too well the course of the entire war: never enough spooks but way too many ghosts.