All In (31 page)

Petraeus was in a light mood as he left the White House and jumped into his black Yukon. He opened his laptop and read an e-mail that had the letter “U” as the subject line.

“Good luck. Think U won,” wrote his mentor Keith Nightingale.

Petraeus was elusive in his responses.

“Thx, Keith, pretty good week, in fact. Just leaving one-on-one with CINC,” Petraeus replied.

“Congrats. Good guys win. When is it official?” Nightingale replied.

“Don't jump to the wrong conclusion, Ranger! Good, though . . . ,” Petraeus replied, elusively.

“If you are happy we will be also. Press on!” wrote Nightingale.

“RLTW,” Petraeus responded—short for “Rangers Lead the Way.”

“Get some sleep. U earned it. The world can wait. Yes. RLTW!” Nightingale responded.

“Indeed, it can, Keith. Great week . . . And exciting prospects . . . ,” Petraeus said.

“What counts is your view of the task and your assessment as to what you can do with it to further meaningful service. All else is superfluous. Carpe diem,” Nightingale said.

“Spot on, Keith. Or, as a tanker would say, ‘Target!' RLTW—Dave.”

Petraeus drove to the Capitol building for an awards ceremony for a team of Floridians who had gone above and beyond in supporting Central Command troopers—a ceremony originally scheduled for last July that had been delayed eight months—and he then hosted a small dinner, with Holly, at a local restaurant. He was gregarious, but his mind was preoccupied with all that had transpired that week, especially the job prospect. As far as the team around him knew, even his closest aides, they would be heading back to Afghanistan with their future uncertain. The meeting, they thought, had not brought any resolution for them, but it had not closed any doors, either.

Overall, Petraeus and his team were pleased with how the week had gone. Petraeus's team usually conducted after-action reviews after congressional testimony to brainstorm how he might have answered questions better, what went well, and what “questions for the record” his Commander's Initiatives Group would have to draft answers for over the next few weeks. This round of testimony was probably the “most uneventful” he'd ever delivered, his aides believed. “They only threw softballs,” said one inner-circle member who had been with Petraeus for every congressional appearance since he assumed command of the surge in Iraq in 2007.

The team flew back to Kabul via London. Petraeus briefed Prime Minister David Cameron, the ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs, and the chief of Defence Staff on the state of the war in Afghanistan and the dynamics in Washington. The team stayed two nights in London and followed their normal routine. They stayed at the Grosvenor House Marriott, across from Hyde Park, with rooms for entourage members, “designated thinkers” on the CIG and all of their classified communication equipment. The Grosvenor House staff knew Petraeus, and he enjoyed the stark contrast to his Conex container housing in Kabul. The team couldn't wait for a run in Hyde Park—a 4.2-mile loop at sea level in the relatively clean London air. It contrasted starkly with their runs around the eight-hundred-meter loop at ISAF headquarters, where the air was heavy with the acrid smell of burning garbage. The first evening in London, Petraeus attended a dinner hosted by the chief of Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards, ISAF commander in 2006 to 2007, along with Sir Max Hastings, a British journalist and Oxford-educated historian. They quietly discussed the war's progress and challenges as they sat in a booth at Wiltons restaurant.

The next day was full of meetings with VIPs. In the morning, Petraeus met Queen Elizabeth II and gave her one of his COMISAF brushed-steel coins, given to recognize noteworthy achievement and a prize coveted by soldiers in his command. It was engraved with his signature and had a red four-star flag embossed over a black silhouette of Afghanistan.
FOR EXCELLENCE
was printed across the top, along with
COMMANDER, NATO INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE
on one side. On the other, an embossed picture of the ISAF NATO-OTAN patch in black and tan. “And here is another one for your grandson, Harry,” he said as he gave her a second coin. Prince Harry, in his early twenties, had been quietly serving in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as a forward air controller the previous year, guiding jets toward suspected Taliban targets, until he was “outed” by the press a month or so before the end of his tour. Petraeus could relate to the concerns about one's offspring serving in a war zone. He also expressed his gratitude for the U.K.'s continuing support. “She is one well-informed lady,” he mentioned to his staff on the way out of Buckingham Palace. That afternoon, Petraeus headed to 10 Downing Street to meet with Prime Minister Cameron, who had been well briefed on progress in Afghanistan. The team then went out the back door to meet with the secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, William Hague, to discuss the forthcoming announcement by Karzai of the first phase of the ISAF transition of provinces to Afghan control. They also discussed campaign progress and the challenges of the political process. Petraeus felt these stopovers with a key ally were beneficial for bilateral relations, and they also helped ease the jet lag between continents.

On March 22, shortly after Petraeus's return to Kabul, Karzai made his long-awaited statement on transition as part of his graduation address at the National Military Academy. In July, as the United States began drawing down its forces, he explained, Afghan troops would assume sole responsibility for securing three relatively secure provinces: Panjsher, in northeast Afghanistan, Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, and Kabul, the capital province. The Afghan troops would also assume responsibility for four province capitals and municipalities: Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north, Herat, in the west, Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand Province, in the south, and Mehtar Lam, capital of Laghman Province, in eastern Afghanistan. Without mentioning the United States by name, Karzai also used the opportunity to criticize his NATO partners for recent civilian deaths and urged them to stop night raids.

A spokesman for the Taliban called Karzai's transition plan “a symbolic act to deceive the people” that would not “help resolve the main problem, which is the occupation of Afghanistan by foreign forces.” Karzai appeared torn in his feelings about the Taliban. On one hand, he saw them as fellow Pashtuns and Afghans. On the other, he considered them extremists who kill government officials and tried to undermine the Afghan constitution.

The same day that Karzai spoke,
Foreign Policy
published an article arguing that the Afghans' ability to assume security control of even limited sectors in Afghanistan was, most likely, a fantasy. Beyond a “staggering attrition rate and a serious gap in quality recruits,” the authors wrote, were the obstacles of illiteracy, drug use and medical problems.

Fernando Lujan disagreed. Lujan was just returning from an unprecedented mission in which he and two other members of the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team had embedded for a week with an Afghan unit in Zabul Province, the first place in Regional Command South that Afghan forces would begin to operate independently. Lujan was still working toward his goal of taking the CAAT concept inside the Afghan military. Kosh Sadat, an impressive Afghan special forces major who was Petraeus's Afghan military aide, had joined his advisory team. Together, the team's five members—three Americans and two Afghans—ate, slept, showered and patrolled with the Afghan people. The team grew beards, wore Afghan uniforms and conducted all their briefings in Dari or Pashto. Sadat flew down to Kandahar a few days early so that he could participate in planning and team-building exercises. When they briefed an Afghan corps commander before the embed began, Lujan could tell that the general was moved that an Afghan was working as part of the CAAT team. “Kosh told the soldiers and officers everywhere we went that it is possible to rise up through the ranks and make a career for themselves, even if they didn't have money to ‘buy' a position,” Lujan said once he'd returned from the embed. “He basically said that if they worked hard and set their mind to it, they could become leaders of the army. I know it sounds simple, and we as Americans take it for granted, but I'm telling you, there was something special about what we were doing.” At one point, the CAAT team accompanied Afghan troops on an IED-clearing mission. Lujan watched as Afghans, thinking they'd spotted something suspicious in the road, got down on all fours and probed for bombs by hand. “These guys are just fearless sometimes,” he said. “It's a whole different perspective riding in the trucks with them.”

No sooner had Lujan's team written the report and filed it on a classified computer portal accessible to the Afghans than Tanzola initiated a security investigation of Lujan and his team members. Their team's collective offense: including a minor sentence that contained terminology classified U.S. Secret (NOFORN), as opposed to ISAF Secret, which was releasable to Afghans and NATO partners. As committed as the U.S. military was to its NATO partners, the Pentagon did not share its most sensitive classified information with all of them. Instead, it insisted that U.S. personnel follow highly detailed classification rules that spelled out what could be shared with ISAF partners. “At the very most, this is a minor ‘oops'-type incident, but looks like it's going to cloud the whole Zabul report,” a senior CAAT officer said. Soon investigators were interviewing the team. “Always a great experience,” a few members of the team grumbled. “Now we see why people don't take initiative.”

Petraeus, meanwhile, was briefed on Lujan's Zabul embed and said that he was looking for the “right” CAAT leader to replace Tanzola when the time came. He was cheered by the news that his aide Kosh Sadat had been such an inspiring presence among the Afghans. “Kosh is a national asset to Afghanistan,” he told his staff. “Good to see how he was able to contribute.”

Settling back into the rhythms of command after his visit to Washington, Petraeus thought of the coming spring and the warming weather as “teeth in the enemy's jugular time” in the south, around Kandahar and Helmand, and in the eastern mountains of Kunar, Paktika and Nuristan provinces. He knew the Taliban would mount a spring offensive. He and his staff had spent the winter formulating plans to disrupt their operations and their thrusts into Afghanistan from across the border in Pakistan. He felt ISAF had the momentum, partly because the Afghan forces that Lujan championed were growing and fighting better. He did not want the Taliban to take the momentum back.

CHAPTER 9

HIGH STAKES

L
ieutenant Colonel J. B. Vowell knew he had achieved surprise when armed Taliban fighters scrambled away as the rotor blades announced the approach of the Americans in the dead of early morning. Vowell enjoyed the high ground, in a UH-60 Black Hawk command-and-control helicopter equipped with a suite of specialized communications gear. He ordered the pilots of Apache Longbow helicopter gunships, flying with him to ensure that the landing zones were clear, to target the fleeing Taliban with infrared sensors and kill whatever enemy they identified. A dozen insurgents were killed by the attack helicopters before the ground assault had even begun. Vowell could only hope that the element of surprise would keep the Taliban from ever recovering.

Vowell's 2nd Battalion of the 327th Infantry Regiment, was part of the storied Bastogne Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. The attack Vowell was leading, code-named Strong Eagle III—the regiment's third major operation in the rugged Kunar Province, in eastern Afghanistan—began at 2:00
A.M.
on March 29. Helicopters carrying Vowell's soldiers were approaching two villages, Barawala Kalay and Sarowbay, each in the forbidding mountains of Kunar Province, half a mile from the Pakistan border. The villages were only three miles apart, but separated by nine-thousand-foot mountain ridgelines. Vowell knew these two villages were strongholds of insurgent forces in Kunar, providing security, supplies, natural resources and a pliable population. They were “pivots of maneuver,” or staging bases, from which Taliban operations could be planned and executed. No foreign soldiers—not the Americans, the Pakistanis or the Soviets—had ever gone this deep into the mountains. Vowell's spring counteroffensive was designed to deny the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups freedom of movement and maneuver along a corridor, or “ratline,” they had used for years connecting the Kunar River Valley and the Pech Valley from which a sister battalion, the 1st of the 327th, had recently withdrawn after handing off their base to an Afghan army battalion.

Vowell had the benefit of earlier air assaults, and his staff had been able to identify landing zones above the villages. His troops could cordon the villages and control all routes to and from them before clearing operations began. The key was holding the high ground, which would draw insurgent fighters to their positions. This kept the Taliban from massing in a defense of the villages and forced them to attack up the mountain, where the Americans were dug in with machine guns.

After the Apaches gunned down the fleeing Taliban outside the village of Sarowbay, three platoons from C Company, the “Cougars,” commanded by Captain Tye Reedy, began touching down around 2:00
A.M.
As the lead fire team began to approach the village, a third of a mile away, insurgents opened up on them from close range. The Apache pilots had missed some of the enemy, and the Taliban had positioned in trees, from which they were now firing down at the advancing Americans. In the brutal, up-close firefight, Private First Class Jeremy P. Faulkner, 23, of Griffin, Georgia, was killed, and Specialist Dustin J. Feldhaus, 20, of Glendale, Arizona, and Staff Sergeant Bryan A. Burgess, 29, of Cleburne, Texas, were grievously wounded. A platoon leader, Lieutenant Jason Pomeroy, and his soldiers exhibited what Vowell considered “extreme heroism” as they took fire through a wood line to recover the wounded. It would take another forty-five minutes before Vowell could get medevac aircraft to rescue Feldhaus and Burgess, due to intense enemy fire. Both soldiers later died at a trauma center at Bagram Air Base. The operation was off to a tough start.

Soldiers from C Company began moving into Sarowbay to clear a series of compounds. No military-aged males were to be seen, only older women and men. Once the soldiers had worked their way through about a third of the village, a house behind them exploded. It was wired with a house-borne IED, most likely remote-controlled, a common Taliban tactic. Why it wasn't detonated with half a dozen Americans inside would remain a mystery.

As C Company assaulted Sarowbay, Vowell's Headquarters Company, the “Wolverines,” joined by an Afghan unit, touched down at a landing zone high above Barawala Kalay. The two companies were supposed to move simultaneously on the villages, though the Cougars landed much closer to their target.

Finally, A Company, the “Gators,” commanded by Captain Tom Billig and 1st Sergeant Kenneth Bolin, air-assaulted farther north of Barawala Kalay to isolate the village. If Vowell's hunch was correct, Billig's forces, which included a company of Afghan National Army soldiers, would be in for a stiff fight just preventing the enemy from coming onto the main battlefield. Billig's forces would, in fact, kill forty-five insurgents over the next six days during which the enemy attacked from both close range and with distant fire, but Billig had the assistance of a talented joint tactical air controller and a .50-caliber machine gun with plenty of ammunition. Their defense kept the enemy from getting anywhere near Headquarters Company as it cleared Barawala Kalay.

Vowell landed and linked up with Captain Ed Bankston, commander of Headquarters Company, joining his assault on Barawala Kalay. They had to traverse a very steep, rocky piece of terrain, waiting for daylight just to see their steps in front of them. Each soldier wore body armor and a Kevlar helmet, and carried an assault pack with enough batteries, ammunition, explosives, medicine and water to last for three days. The No Slack battalion would resupply each position once a day by helicopter, but the battle plan depended on the force being able to fight for more than three days in order to prevail. The Taliban believed that the Americans couldn't sustain their high-tech force for more than three days. Vowell was determined to prove them wrong.

After Headquarters Company made its way through the first series of houses, soldiers started finding huge caches of ammunition and weapons—82-mm recoilless rifle rounds, AK-47s, thousands of rounds of 7.62-mm ammunition. There were, however, no men to be seen. Families reported that their husbands and fathers “had gone for work in Jalalabad.” Soon, the Americans started to find caches in the tree branches, signs of a hasty retreat by insurgent forces. Vowell's signals intercepts quickly picked up Taliban walkie-talkie chatter that helped corroborate this. His interpreters repeated the words of Taliban commanders: “‘We weren't able to get our things out before the Americans arrived.'”

Vowell then joined Captain Reedy and C Company to assess how they were coping with the enemy engagement. The Cougars had not only lost three soldiers shortly after their insertion; several others had been wounded right off the landing zone. Convinced that Reedy's men were in full control, they lifted off and flew to the location of Vowell's operations officer and tactical air controller, who were with the battalion's tactical command post on a mountain ridge half a mile west of his scout platoon, which had assumed a position on a ridgeline separating the two villages. Vowell wanted to link up with his operations and intelligence officers. Where was the enemy? Why hadn't the Taliban attacked since the first firefight that greeted C Company?

No sooner had Vowell landed on the ridge than dense clouds engulfed them in haze and took away their ability to see the other elements, as well as their air support from lithe OH-58 Kiowas and lethal AH-64 Apaches, as well as full-motion video from unmanned aerial vehicles. It was then that Vowell and No Slack discovered where the enemy had gone. They were all around the Americans.

Vowell's position started taking sporadic fire, then well-aimed fire. The scout platoon to his east came under heavy fire. Then Reedy called—they were under intense, concentrated enemy fire. Vowell could hear attacks on all of his positions even as he was pinned down. With a radio on his chest rack, Vowell quickly tried to figure out what to do. With no helicopter air support, only mortars and artillery, Vowell divided up his weapons systems to defend units that were all being severely pressed.

Sergeant First Class Ofren Arrechaga and Staff Sergeant Frank Adamski of Headquarters Company were hit several times in the middle ground between two compounds at Barawala Kalay. Bounding from one compound to the next, they had moved into an intense barrage of accurate fire. Both were severely wounded, shot multiple times and losing blood. Specialist Jameson Lindskog, the newly assigned platoon medic, moved to help Arrechaga, who was trapped in the kill zone. Moments after he started triage, Lindskog was shot in the chest. In excruciating pain, Lindskog kept on treating Arrechaga. Soon other soldiers reached them, just as Lindskog was starting to lose strength and could no longer help Arrechaga. They dragged Arrechaga and Lindskog out of immediate danger. Lindskog continued to explain how to treat Arrechaga. He slowly drifted out of consciousness, saying that he was “sorry” that he didn't have the strength to help. He died moments later.

Once the weather cleared, Vowell's helicopter lifted off from the ridgeline between the villages, but Vowell stayed behind because the position allowed him to talk to all three engaged companies assaulting the villages. Vowell had lost a total of six soldiers by then. Part of him wanted to go back and join Headquarters Company at Barawala Kalay, as they would have a tough time clearing the village. If he moved, though, he would lose the ability to communicate with C Company, given the mountain range separating them and their objectives.

As the battle raged throughout the day, Vowell asked his brigade commander, Colonel Andrew Poppas, to commit an Afghan commando unit from Forward Operating Base Fenty that night. The Afghans, 120 strong, had been trained by U.S. Special Forces and were highly effective for twenty-four to forty-eight hours of intense combat operations. They were lifted in during darkness, and their arrival and reinforcement of the Cougars proved decisive, enabling C Company to consolidate and continue the clearance of Sarowbay.

The assault of the two villages ultimately involved eight hundred coalition and Afghan soldiers. The added combat power was needed to overcome an intense enemy defense in which insurgents occupied the middle ground between the village and the top ridgelines above the village. The insurgents attacked from this middle ground for the next four days, until they were exhausted. When night fell, Vowell turned a number of sophisticated sensors on the enemy positions, using electro-optical, radar and infrared intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to direct Apaches to the Taliban hiding places. Once Vowell found them with weapons, it was easy for the pilots to engage, killing more and more of the insurgents. With each day, the enemy attacks grew weaker. In short order, the Taliban could no longer precisely target Vowell's forces. Every time they tried, they would expose themselves to a myriad of withering fires from both the air and the ground. Vowell called in a total of ninety-six precision-guided bombs on enemy positions.

Headquarters Company wound up clearing Barawala Kalay by itself, with just A Company to the north providing protection. C Company, along with the Afghan commandos, cleared all of Sarowbay, finding arms cache after arms cache, including one with more than two hundred hand grenades. The scout platoon found the long-sought Radio Shariat transmission center, which the insurgents had used to broadcast Taliban propaganda to Kunar Province and into Pakistan as well. Captain Billig and his platoons found weapons, six dead fighters, communications equipment, wads of Pakistani rupees and numerous cell phones on a ridgeline south of Sarowbay. They also found six machine guns, including one that was hidden in the wall of a home, and collected biometric data that would help determine which leaders were among the dead. When the smoke cleared, Vowell's forces had confirmed killing 132 enemy fighters between the northern Marawara Valley and Ganjgal Valley. No Slack lost six soldiers, and the Afghans fighting alongside them lost three, all in direct firefights.

This was what the war in the eastern mountains was like as U.S. commanders tracked insurgent movements with drone reconnaissance and human intelligence and then responded, either with large-scale air-assault operations, smaller Special Operations Forces raids or drones firing Hellfire missiles at specific high-value targets. These tactics would enable them to keep the insurgents off-balance. But the days when the United States would think of establishing dozens of combat outposts in the mountains and valleys of eastern Afghanistan were over. With U.S. forces drawing down, there would never be enough soldiers deployed to man such efforts; nor, as American and Afghan leaders had come to recognize, were such outposts the answer in some of the more remote areas.

AS THE BATTLE
raged in the mountains of Kunar Province, 220 miles to the southwest, in the lush vineyards of the Arghandab River Valley, Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn, the commander of the 1st Battalion of the 320th Artillery Regiment, the “Top Guns,” sat amid the dignitaries at the opening of a new mosque at Tarok Kolache, the empty, IED-infested village he had flattened with saturation bombing in October. The villagers who had been driven out by the Taliban were back, now that Tarok Kolache was free of all the homemade bombs that had made it uninhabitable. There'd been no gunfire there for five months. The day began with Flynn meeting reporters at the helipad and walking with them to the village, describing battles from the previous fall as he proceeded.

The new mosque was part of a major reconstruction project that included rebuilding every home and replanting every field of pomegranate trees destroyed in the bombing. The project also included the building of a combat outpost in the village to keep the Taliban from intimidating the villagers for working with Flynn's soldiers and civilian engineers and builders. The public affairs office at Regional Command South at first did not want any Americans present, but Flynn would have none of that. The locals had worked very closely with Flynn and his men for several months, and they expected him and some of his key leaders to be there.