Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (23 page)

The Maudling formula, “a tolerable level of violence,” if that was to be a component of future of U.S. strategy, would require a stoic, if not resigned, acceptance of the normality of body bags returning from Af-Pak’s poppy-laden killing fields. Certainly, at that time, the nation’s military planners expected the Global War on Terror to be a very prolonged business indeed, stretching over a generation or more. General McChrystal was the first to recognize, publicly, another consequence of the new strategy, combining Special Forces finesse to reduce civilian casualties while killing foreign enemy fighters. As allied casualties resulting from the surge in Afghanistan rose sharply in the summer of 2009, McChrystal “ordered his forces to reduce aerial bombing because of the risk to civilians.” One outcome was that “the additional risks to soldiers were a price worth paying. If the Afghan people swung behind the Taliban this would make the war unwinnable,” he said. “In the long run it is more economical in terms of loss of life to operate this way because we can gain the support of the population.”
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Meanwhile, the cost in U.S. lives was rising. On 26 October 2009 a Chinook helicopter attempted to rescue a Special Forces team that had made a nocturnal raid on a drug smuggler’s compound in Badghis Province, western Afghanistan. The operation was supported by Afghan commandos and civilians from the Drug Enforcement Agency. The helicopter crashed on takeoff, landing in a local bazaar. Taliban sources claimed they had shot it down. A U.S. military spokesman revealed: “Seven U.S. service members and three U.S. civilians were killed.” At least eleven American soldiers were wounded, as were fourteen Afghan soldiers and one American civilian. “More than a dozen enemy fighters were killed in the ensuing firefight.”
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The “ensuing firefight” was a hectic affair in which the Islamists pressed home their attack. It was not clear how the survivors were finally extracted.

There was less doubt about the reasons why the attack was launched. In a radical tactical shift away from poppy eradication toward interdicting the drug supply train and in collaboration with Britain and Australia, the Pentagon had recently placed fifty of the most powerful drug barons on a “kill or capture” agenda, officially described as “the joint integrated prioritized target list.” The list included another 317 individuals. The reason the drug barons now rated equally with leading terrorists as legitimate military targets was that the Taliban depended increasingly for funds on the narcotics industry. The narcos, for their part, could not function without Taliban protection and logistics. To qualify for inclusion in the list, the suspect must have “proven links to the insurgency” confirmed by two “verifiable human sources.” They could not be killed off the battlefield, but “battlefield,” in this context, was not defined. Because of these caveats, in Pentagon eyes, the agenda could not be described as an assassination plan. As Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, senior U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan, confirmed: “The list of targets are those that are contributing to the insurgency—the key leadership—and part of that obviously is the link between the narco-industry and the militants.”
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In the Pentagon’s eyes, the targets were not assassinated, since their deaths occurred on the battlefield.

America’s allies in this strategy were Britain and Australia. It was unclear whether all the British participants knew what they were getting into. Little or no public discussion took place in the U.K. An investigator representing the country’s Serious Organized Crime Agency suggested: “In the past, the military would have hit and evidence would not have been collected. Now, with law enforcement present, we are seizing the ledgers and other information to develop an intelligence profile of the networks and the drug kingpins,” to which an American military officer dryly replied: “Our long-term approach is to identify the regional drug figures and corrupt government officials and persuade them to choose legitimacy or remove them from the battlefield.”
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They might be lucky to have a choice. In 2002, a senior Pentagon legal official suggested to the Crimes of War Project: “When we have a lawful military target that the commander determines needs to be taken out, there is by no means a requirement under the law of armed conflict that we must send a warning to those people and say, you may surrender rather than be targeted,” though U.S. policy “did not try to kill people who could be detained.”
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Whatever the legalities, the new strategy had some early success. An official report discloses: “The village of Marjah in southern Afghanistan has long been an insurgent stronghold and bustling hub of drug smuggling about fifteen miles southwest of Lashgar Gah, the capital of poppy-rich Helmand Province. The Taliban felt safe gathering and training there, and they often stored weapons and explosives in the village bazaars.

“In late April 2009, U.S. military intelligence picked up information that a spectacular attack on Lashgar Gah had been ordered by the Taliban’s leadership in exile, safely ensconced across the border in Quetta, Pakistan. The target appeared to be Gulab Mangal, the new governor who was having some success persuading farmers to turn away from poppy to other crops. Marjah was designated by the Taliban leadership as the staging ground for the attack, and fighters from across Afghanistan and as far away as Waziristan in Pakistan began filtering into the village. Along with the usual arsenal of AK-47s, grenade launchers, and explosives, they towed in four Soviet-era anti-aircraft guns, a sign the operation was going to be big.

“As the contingent grew, the Taliban bosses in Quetta pressed to launch the attack. But the local commanders insisted on delaying because many of their fighters were working in the fields, harvesting the last of the poppy crop. ‘We still have poppies in the field,’ one commander said in a conversation picked up by military intelligence. ‘We do it when we come out.’

“As Afghan and U.S. troops prepared for their surprise assault on Lashgar Gah, an opportune distraction occurred. British forces killed a local tribal leader in an unrelated skirmish, causing the Taliban to postpone the attack for three days of funeral services for the leader, who had ties to the insurgency. The Taliban fighters were in the midst of the second night of mourning on May 19 when they heard the prodigious thumping of a fleet of military helicopters approaching. Within minutes, the night sky was ablaze with the first shots in what would become a fierce three-day firefight on a deadly piece of ground not far from the border with Pakistan.

“The composition of the coalition force that attacked Marjah says a lot about how far we have come in Afghanistan. Eighty percent of the 216 troops were American-trained commandos from the Afghan National Army. They were augmented by U.S. Special Forces and NATO soldiers. The presence of a twelve-man DEA paramilitary team also reflected a new level of cooperation between the military and law enforcement; the DEA was there to identify the drugs and processing chemicals that intelligence had said were hidden in the local bazaars.

“After three days of intense fighting, about sixty militants lay dead and coalition forces had seized roughly 100 tons of heroin, hashish, opium paste, poppy seeds and precursor chemicals used to turn opium into heroin. The troops also uncovered a cache of weapons, suicide belts and explosives as well as sophisticated communications equipment inside the opium bazaar, indicating that the Taliban had used it as a command center. The haul was dragged into a huge pile on the outskirts of the town and plans were made to have a jet fly over and bomb the material. But a senior U.S. military officer said that…the resulting explosion would be the equivalent of an 80,000-pound bomb, which would have wiped out everything in a wide swath. So the cache was divided into smaller piles and blown up from the ground.” An equally large store of drugs was spirited away before the attackers could get to it. Who owned the drugs? “There is strong evidence the drugs belonged to a former police chief now living in Kabul.”
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By the time the Marjah operation happened, a police colonel identified only as Commander S. was in custody in Kabul awaiting trial on drug charges. His property was raided in November 2008 by Special Forces soldiers who discovered forty tons of cannabis plants. His lawyer said the plants were being kept “for use as winter fuel.” He was not arrested until eight months later, when CIA and British SIS agents enticed him into a meeting at Kandahar airport, where he was separated from his bodyguard by local Special Forces, the 333 Commando Brigade, mentored by the British SBS. British officials alleged that 80 kilograms of opium was found in the commander’s home and that instead of congratulations, there were “howls of protest” from President Karzai’s palace. The commander’s defense lawyer pleaded guilty on his behalf to assisting smugglers but denied he ran a network in Arghestan, near the Pakistan border.

The emphasis on a strategy of decapitation was sometimes counterproductive. During the summer of 2009 the son and wife of Abdul Wahid Baghrani, described as “the most senior former Taliban commander in Helmand to have been reconciled” to collaboration with the West, were killed in a “mistargeted ambush by Special Forces operating in the British zone.” The killings caused outrage among Helmand’s tribes. Baghrani was no longer reconciled. Such episodes also left unresolved the depressing possibility that the presence of foreign troops on Afghan soil might become the problem, not the solution.

President Obama spent months weighing the implications of a report from General McChrystal, proposing a new surge of 40,000 men to drive the insurgency out of population centers to protect civilians. An alternative strategy envisaged a minimal presence on the ground accompanied by maximum hunt-and-kill missions targeted on al Qaeda leaders using Special Forces. Obama’s planning was also bogged down by Afghanistan’s stolen election and the confirmation of Hamid Karzai’s re-election as his country’s president.

As he pondered, like Rodin’s Thinker, a parallel strategy of striking local deals with the enemy was lapping around the back of the White House. An incoming tide of new facts was embracing Cnut’s throne; and a throne, as Cnut might have said, is not a beachhead. There were rumors that the Italian contingent had bought peace in its area of responsibility (Sarobi, forty miles east of Kabul), leaving its French successors to walk unwittingly into a hail of bullets when the bribes ceased. Ten French soldiers were killed and twenty wounded in one ambush. A local warlord allegedly on the Italian payroll, Ghulam Yahya Akbari, did not live long enough to spend the money before he, too, was killed by U.S. Special Forces.
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Even the British produced a new doctrine proposing: “The best weapons to counter insurgents don’t shoot. In other words, use bags of gold in the short term to change the security dynamics. But you don’t just chuck gold at them. This has to be done wisely.”
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This, like many other confusions, was not the result of the fog of war. It reflected an uncoordinated military command. As the British experience of Malaya had demonstrated fifty years earlier, an overarching, unified civil/military command structure was vital if this sort of war was not to be lost to the guerrillas.

Meanwhile the CIA had apparently reverted to its old habits, running its war in its own way in Afghanistan, lubricating warlords with dollars. In October 2009,
The New York Times
claimed that a tribal leader was being paid by the Agency to arrange contacts with the Taliban to permit U.S. Special Forces and local paramilitaries known as the Kandahar Strike Force to use a large compound near that city. The compound was a former home of the Taliban founder, Mullah Omar. The tribal leader on the payroll, it was alleged, was none other than the Afghan president’s controversial brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. As a Senate committee report put it: “Stories about him are legendary—how Afghan police and military commanders who seize drugs in southern Afghanistan are told by Ahmed Wali to return them to the traffickers, how he arranged the imprisonment of a DEA informant who had tipped the Americans to a drug-laden truck near Kabul, how his accusers have often turned up dead. No proof has surfaced, and he and President Karzai have denied the accusations.”
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In targeting the drug industry’s big players—or at least those believed to be in bed with the Taliban—Obama’s strategy seemed to be moving toward a revival of the Phoenix strategy of selective assassination in Vietnam. It raised complex legal issues about human rights and rules of engagement. No doubt Obama, a skilled, experienced lawyer, had thought of that. But talking to the enemy, while still killing his grunts, is a classic stratagem in any counter-insurgency, as the British demonstrated in Northern Ireland. It has been tried once and might have succeeded but for the Kabul government. In 2007 Michael Semple, an Irish diplomat working as a UN political officer, established a discreet dialogue with a Taliban former general. Their shared objective was practical reconciliation through rehabilitation camps for former enemies. The Afghans involved were arrested on Karzai’s orders. During the Christmas break a few weeks later, Semple and a colleague from Northern Ireland were expelled for “actions prejudicial to the security of Afghanistan.” It was another missed chance of peace.
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In 2010, President Obama tried again, dispatching another 30,000 soldiers on a limited mission, to regain the military and political initiative from the Taliban in eighteen months. But he also predicted a longer, continuing global struggle beyond that deadline in which Special Operations Forces would be the cutting edge yet again.