Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (31 page)

A lead element under A1 troop commander Major Tom Greer drove down to Tora Bora December 6. The newly arrived Delta operators were keen to get started, but the reality was they were already two weeks late to the fight. Two weeks previously, as soon as Berntsen had received what he viewed as actionable intelligence placing bin Laden in Nangarhar, the CIA team chief and Erwin had gone to Bagram to discuss their options with Colonel John Mulholland, the 5th Special Forces Group commander, and another Special Forces officer assigned to the CIA. Scrutinizing a map of eastern Afghanistan spread over the hood of a Humvee, they wrestled with the operational dilemma before them.
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Their nation's number one enemy was likely ensconced in the Spin Ghar Mountains, defended by an estimated 1,500 to 3,000
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fanatically loyal fighters. Rooting him out would ordinarily require a large infantry force. But the special operations officers had no large U.S. infantry force at their disposal. (There were 10th Mountain Division troops in Uzbekistan and Marine forces in Kandahar, however.) The United States had two major paratroop infantry units: the Ranger Regiment and the 82nd Airborne Division. Each maintained a battalion ready to deploy at short notice, either of which could have been dropped into or near Tora Bora within a couple of days. (Indeed, there had been a plan to drop an entire 82nd brigade to seize Kabul's airport, had the Northern Alliance advance ground to a halt outside the capital.)
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But CENTCOM never seriously considered using large U.S. infantry formations to seal Tora Bora. Up and down the military chain of command, generals and their civilian bosses had become prisoners of their recently formulated conventional wisdom, which was that the introduction of large military formations into Afghanistan would automatically engender fierce hostility and outright resistance from the local population, and that the Afghan mountains posed impossible logistical and tactical challenges for U.S. troops. The speed with which the Northern Alliance had been able to roll back the Taliban once the United States had applied the vital formula of CIA money, Special Forces know-how, and airpower had also seduced the decision makers into believing they could destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban without the deployment of thousands of infantrymen.

But the Northern Alliance leaders were busy helping themselves to the fruits of power in Kabul and had no interest in helping the Americans fight the Taliban on their own turf: the Pashtun provinces of eastern and southern Afghanistan. Most Pashtun warlords were loyal to the Taliban, so in an effort to rent an army with which the United States could assault bin Laden's mountain fastness, the CIA was forced to ally with three less well known and barely vetted militia chiefs in the Nangarhar region, spending several million dollars of U.S. taxpayer money in the process.
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Berntsen was about to move a small element to Nangarhar to work with the militias and develop the situation. He asked Mulholland, whose Special Forces teams had done so much to help the Northern Alliance, to support the plan, such as it was, with a single A-team. (A fully manned A-team, officially known as an operational detachment-alpha, has twelve soldiers.) But the 5th Group commander, who had yet to lose a soldier in Afghanistan, was extremely reluctant to commit his forces into the relative unknown of Nangarhar. He agreed to send the team in a week, if Berntsen's men had survived that long. The next day, November 18, Berntsen sent eight men, including three JSOC personnel, to Jalalabad.
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After linking up with Hazrat Ali, a militia boss the CIA was paying, the Agency team spent a week north of Jalalabad before moving south on November 25 as intelligence increasingly indicated that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. They established a base in an abandoned schoolhouse at the foot of the Spin Ghar Mountains. Once they'd familiarized themselves somewhat with the environment and their new allies, and with no other U.S. forces in the area, on December 4 Berntsen and Erwin sent four Americans into Tora Bora: a Delta operator, a 24th STS combat controller, a former Delta operator now working as a CIA contractor, and a former Special Forces soldier with the CIA's Special Activities Division. After hiking for the better part of two days with their local guides, they found an ideal observation post and called in air strikes on Al Qaeda positions for fifty-six hours straight.
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Once A Squadron's main body arrived at the schoolhouse, the U.S. forces at Tora Bora included the CIA team, a Special Forces A-team Mulholland had finally provided, a few combat controllers from 24th Special Tactics Squadron, and a small Army of Northern Virginia signals intelligence element. But the Delta operators from A1 and A3 Troops comprised the main U.S. combat force. There were also about a dozen operators from the British Special Boat Service, the rough equivalent of SEAL Team 6. A3 lacked a commissioned officer, and was led instead by the troop sergeant major, Bryan “Butt Monkey” Morgan, so Greer became the overall ground force commander. The senior enlisted man and most experienced operator present was A Squadron's command sergeant major, Greg “Ironhead” Birch. Squadron commander Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander remained in Bagram.
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From the outset, the CIA men on the ground in Nangarhar did not think that the formula that had worked thus far would succeed at Tora Bora. They had no faith in their putative Afghan “allies.” To stand a good chance of killing or capturing bin Laden, they knew they would need a more tactically proficient and reliable force, an assessment they relayed repeatedly—with growing alarm each time—to Washington.
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As a result of these warnings, at the end of November Hank Crumpton found himself in the Oval Office briefing Bush and Cheney, a map of Tora Bora and the surrounding area spread out on the floor. Realizing the military chain of command had not conveyed the CIA's concerns to Bush, Crumpton got to the point. “We're going to lose our prey if we're not careful,” he told the president, before urging the immediate deployment of U.S. forces to Tora Bora. Bush appeared surprised. The Pakistanis had promised him they would seal the border. The president asked if the Afghan militias at Tora Bora were “up to the job.” “Definitely not, Mr. President,” Crumpton replied. “Definitely not.”
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On December 3, “Dusty,” a member of Berntsen's team who was a retired Ranger and Delta operator, recommended inserting a Ranger battalion—about 800 men—to seal the south side of the mountains. Legendary CIA operative and former Special Forces soldier Billy Waugh, also on Berntsen's team, echoed Dusty's counsel. Berntsen endorsed the request and relayed it to Crumpton at Langley.
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Another team member called Crumpton directly from the base of Tora Bora to repeat the request. The next morning Crumpton called Franks and passed on the message. Franks was noncommittal, concerned that no planning had been done for deploying any substantial infantry force.
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(Given that, according to Franks himself, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had told him a month previously that bin Laden might already be at Tora Bora,
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it's hard to know who Franks had to blame but himself for the failure to plan for that eventuality.)

Franks was obsessed with not repeating the Soviets' mistake of deploying large conventional formations into Afghanistan. Like President Bush, Franks also had a misplaced faith in the willingness and ability of Pakistani military—the Taliban's patrons—to seal the border. “Our friends in Islamabad wanted the terrorists dead or captured just as much as we did,” he later wrote.
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For his part, Rumsfeld never received a request for more forces from either Franks or Tenet, according to the defense secretary's autobiography.
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The attitudes of Dailey, Mulholland, and, to a lesser extent, John Alexander, reflected Franks's caution. The Delta officer ruled out any Delta teams infiltrating Tora Bora by helicopter, at least on the Afghan side of the border. A Mogadishu veteran, Alexander was leery of using helicopters in a role that put them at risk of being shot down. The Al Qaeda forces in Tora Bora were equipped with 14.5mm antiaircraft guns, 12.7mm heavy machine guns, and RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades, any of which could turn a multimillion-dollar TF Brown Chinook into a smoldering heap of wire and metal. Instead, Alexander proposed a helicopter insertion of several Delta sniper teams onto the Spin Ghar range's southern slopes via Pakistan. This view found support with Greer and his men. “Having Delta guarding the far side of the mountain passes, closing the ring, would have made a huge difference,” Greer wrote. A higher echelon of command “way, way above us” denied the plan, he added. (Alexander also wanted to drop CBU-89 cluster bombs to mine the passes, but this option too was denied, likely at the four-star level or higher, in part because some international partners threatened to withdraw their forces if the United States used such munitions.) However, like his bosses, Alexander was an advocate of letting the Afghans take the lead, something with which his troops on the ground strongly disagreed.
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Mulholland's orders to the members of the one A-team he allowed to venture onto the Tora Bora battlefield were that they were authorized only to engage in “terminal guidance operations”—i.e., calling in air strikes. On no account were they to maneuver against the Al Qaeda forces in front of them.
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Dailey was equally cautious, repeatedly ordering the Delta operators to let the Afghans take the lead. In the December 2 meeting with A Squadron on Masirah, the JSOC commander conveyed “an impression of hesitancy” to Greer. “Somehow I got the impression the general was not too keen on Delta venturing up into the mountains,” the Delta officer wrote. To Greer's disappointment, Dailey ruled out the use of Rangers as a quick reaction force, preferring to leave even that role to the local hires. Greer thought the idea that an untrained Afghan militia could compensate for the Rangers' absence “was a complete pipe dream.”
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There were no easy options available to the generals. Air-dropping or air-assaulting troops to encircle the Al Qaeda forces would have stretched U.S. air-to-air refueling resources and would have required repeated and dangerous resupply missions. The landscape of snowy gorges and steep-sided 14,000-foot mountains was extraordinarily tough—“the most formidable terrain that we fought in,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Mark Rosengard,
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Mulholland's operations officer—and well defended by hard-core fighters who were using every additional day granted them by the U.S. generals' inaction to improve their fortifications. But the United States military, especially JSOC's superbly trained and equipped forces, had a variety of means of infiltration at its disposal and access to the best cold-weather gear in the world, not to mention the ability to call on an almost limitless supply of smart bombs from the jets overhead. It's hard to believe that had those forces been committed to the fight in the mountains, they would not have prevailed against militants drawn in large part from the desert nations of Arabia.

Left to fend for themselves, the JSOC operators and CIA operatives performed heroically. They first took over two observation posts the Special Forces team had been manning, then braved heavy machine gun and mortar fire to push farther into the heart of the Al Qaeda positions. As the CIA men had warned, the Afghans displayed little appetite for the fight, retreating every night from ground taken during the day.
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(It didn't help that the entire operation was occurring during Ramadan, during which pious Muslims do not eat or drink between sunup and sundown. This left the Afghans weak and dehydrated during the day and even less eager than usual to stay on the battlefield overnight.)
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Greer and his men found it hard to contain their frustration. “It was just over two months since 9/11, and for the most important mission to date in the global war on terror, our nation was relying on a fractious bunch of AK-47-toting lawless bandits and tribal thugs,” he wrote.
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This was where Mulholland's refusal to commit any forces to work with the Afghans cost the United States. Unlike Special Forces soldiers, each of whom was specially trained to work with indigenous allies, Delta operators received little or no such training. Greer had received none.
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Day after day, night after night in early December, the operators ground their way forward, always relying on the aircraft overhead and fickle Afghan allies for their protection. No Delta operator used his rifle to kill any Al Qaeda fighters during the battle.
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Having had several weeks to array themselves, bin Laden's troops held the high ground and were dug into well-defended positions of tactical advantage. They even had a small armor force.
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But Greer's men also had what he described as a “secret weapon”—the Army of Northern Virginia signals collectors, who included at least one Pashto speaker and who were “regularly” picking up and, where possible, triangulating, bin Laden's radio calls.
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Getting the Delta operators into a position to profit from that information was proving difficult, however, given the orders to do no more than support the Afghans. In the unlikely event that this approach gave them an opportunity to confront bin Laden, Dailey's guidance to the operators was direct. “It was made crystal clear to us that capturing the terrorist was not the preferred outcome,” Greer wrote.
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Meanwhile, Berntsen continued to urge the deployment of more JSOC forces, telling Langley at the end of the first week of December, “We need Rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!!”
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As usual, his pleas fell on deaf ears at CENTCOM.