Intel Wars (6 page)

The Taliban's strategy was prevailing. Despite having lost every battle since the U.S.-led invasion in October 2001, and suffering casualties so severe that they would have crippled a Western army, the Taliban had not only survived the best shots that the U.S. and NATO forces could dish out, but they had emerged stronger, smarter, and more resilient than before. In the process, they had succeeded in bringing reconstruction in southern Afghanistan to a near-complete halt, driven a wedge between coalition forces and the populace of southern Afghanistan, and further weakened the credibility of Hamid Karzai's government.

According to Major Jim Grant
, a Green Beret officer who served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan, “We have killed thousands and thousands of the ‘enemy' in Afghanistan and it clearly has not brought us closer to our objectives there. Just as important is the fact that we could kill thousands more and still not be any closer five years from now.”

By 2008, Mullah Omar's guerrilla fighters had morphed from what Donald Rumsfeld had while secretary of defense sarcastically described in one of his periodic fits of bravado as a motley collection of “religious zealots, criminals, narco-traffickers, and social malcontents” into a cohesive and surprisingly sophisticated guerrilla force that was, in almost all respects, a tougher, smarter, and more disciplined foe than the local insurgents and al Qaeda fighters that the American troops had faced in Iraq.

American and European politicians may have had only contempt for the Taliban, but field commanders and intelligence officers in Afghanistan had developed a grudging respect for them as soldiers.
For instance, a 2009 study
prepared for the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Activity that was never released to the public had this to say about the Taliban:

Afghan insurgents tend to be brave and tenacious, with a gift for small unit tactics … They have launched hundreds of attacks on fortified bases and raised the costs of maintaining these positions by targeting Coalition supply lines with IEDs and ambushes. When attacked, Afghan insurgents often counter-attack, and maintain contact even when faced with vastly superior firepower. On many occasions, they have fought through air strikes and intense artillery bombardment. Taliban fighters protecting high-level commanders have been known to stand their ground in the face of certain death. They almost never surrender.

As was the case with the Viet Cong in Vietnam forty years earlier, the Taliban had all the advantages that came with fighting on their home turf. The guerrillas knew the terrain that they were fighting on. They spoke the languages and were intimately familiar with all of the intricacies of local tribal politics and culture, which allowed them to seamlessly blend into the local population and move freely without being detected. They had family and friends scattered throughout southern Afghanistan who provided them with food, shelter, and hiding places. Their vast network of spies closely monitored every aspect of U.S. and NATO military activities in southern and eastern Afghanistan in order to discern the strengths and limitations of the U.S. and NATO forces. They had unimpeded access to sanctuaries across the border in northern Pakistan, where they could rest and refit, recruit, train, and raise money without fear of interference from U.S. and NATO forces. Hardened from birth to Afghanistan's brutal climate, they traveled light and lived off the land, allowing them to move farther and strike faster than their roadbound American and NATO counterparts, who
according to a September 2008 Marine Corps report
had “long forgotten how to live off the land and sustain themselves in challenging situations.”

Thanks to generous donations from wealthy Arab businessmen in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as well as the vast sums of money being collected from Afghan opium farmers and narcotics traffickers, the Taliban were cash rich. The Taliban had so much cash on hand that the monthly salary of the average Taliban guerrilla was $200, more than double the amount made by the average Afghan government soldier or policeman. A burgeoning war chest also meant that the Taliban had a plentiful supply of weapons and ammunition, much of which they surreptitiously bought from corrupt Afghan army and police commanders.

Even the lowliest Taliban fighters
believed implicitly in their cause. According to Colonel Donald C. Bolduc, who today commands all U.S. and NATO Special Forces in Afghanistan, the “Taliban fighters truly believe in their cause. Their strength of commitment compensates for their lack of military capability. They are waging total war, not the limited war of their enemy. Coalition soldiers await the end of their tours; Taliban tours only end in death, which the Taliban believe is [their] entry into paradise.”

They also believed that time was on their side. A number of mid-level Taliban commanders captured in 2008 told their interrogators at the Joint Interrogation Facility at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul that the longer the war lasted, the better their chances of prevailing, with one quoting Mullah Omar's now famous line “
The Americans have the wristwatches
, but we have the time.”

The event that finally shattered the last remaining vestiges of complacency in Washington and Kabul about how bad the military situation in Afghanistan had become occurred early on the morning of July 13, 2008, when a force of two hundred Taliban guerrillas came within a hair's-breadth of overrunning an isolated U.S. Army outpost called Vehicle Patrol Base Kahler, which was situated outside a tiny village in southeastern Afghanistan called Wanat. The attack was beaten back only because of the heroism of the base's defenders, but nine American soldiers lost their lives and another twenty-seven were wounded in the engagement. A week later, the U.S. Army abandoned the outpost and the Taliban marched in without any opposition, giving Wanat the dubious distinction of being the first defeat suffered by the U.S. military in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001.

A number of army officers who held command positions in Afghanistan at the time now wonder if Wanat was worth fighting for in the first place. Wanat is situated in the heart of the desolate Waygal Valley in the southernmost part of Nuristan Province, just a short distance from the Pakistani border. Known until 1896 as Kafiristan (Land of the Infidels), Nuristan was the setting for Rudyard Kipling's short story “The Man Who Would Be King” and the 1975 film of the same name starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

Nuristan is remote, mountainous, impoverished, and sparsely populated, with most of the provinces's few towns and villages being located in isolated valleys surrounded by steep mountains. The village of Wanat itself was a tiny, wretchedly poor, and entirely unremarkable place, so small in fact that it did not appear on even the most detailed maps of Afghanistan.

Wanat had no strategic importance other than the fact that it was a district seat, which meant that it had a mayor's office, a run-down police station, and a decrepit, flea-ridden building that had the effrontery to call itself a hotel. But because it was a district seat, albeit an insignificant one with no overall importance to the war effort, the U.S. Army felt obligated to defend it; to lose it would be perceived in Washington and Kabul as a political disaster of the first magnitude.

According to U.S. Army intelligence officials, the Taliban commander who led the assault on Kahler, Mullah Osman, knew in advance virtually everything about the layout of the base's defenses and the size of its garrison, which consisted of a platoon of forty-eight soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne) of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, commanded by twenty-four-year-old 1st Lieutenant Jonathan P. Brostrom, as well as a detachment of twenty-four Afghan soldiers who had never seen combat before.

From the day that the Kahler outpost had been established—July 9, four days before the attack—Taliban sympathizers in Wanat had carefully monitored the progress of the construction work on the base's defensive positions, reporting any changes to Mullah Osman by messenger. This was not particularly difficult to do, since Kahler was built on the valley floor next to the village of Wanat, allowing the Taliban's local spies to sit on the slopes of the surrounding hills and mountainsides and follow every move inside the base without being detected.

Lieutenant Brostrom had no way of knowing it
, but according to numerous government sources he was also being betrayed by the two local Afghan government officials that he was supposed to defend, District Governor Ziaul Rahman and Afghan National Police district chief Hazrat Ali. Both men were corrupt, using their positions to line their pockets with U.S. aid money; they were also secretly collaborating with the local Taliban in a marriage of convenience to force the Americans out of their valley. A U.S. Army postmortem review of the battle found that Rahman and Ali had not only helped the Taliban by providing the insurgents with information about the layout and strength of the base, but the night before the attack they warned local villagers that an attack was about to happen and told them to flee to the hills before the first shots were fired.

While the villagers were leaving the village in droves, Mullah Osman then did what the U.S. Army intelligence analysts said the Taliban could not do. He and his subordinate commanders secretly gathered a force estimated at two hundred men, most of them local villagers armed only with AK-47s and RPGs, and moved them in the middle of the night to their attack positions in the mountains and hills surrounding the base, all without being detected.

The fact that Mullah Osman was able to execute this maneuver without any trace being picked up by the U.S. Army's array of intelligence sensors is not surprising.

There was little SIGINT collection against local Taliban radio traffic because the area's mountainous terrain inhibited the ability of American SIGINT intercept teams to hear the insurgents' short-range signals. Even when the signals could be heard, they could not be interpreted, because the local Taliban communicated in the local Nuristani dialect, which none of the U.S. Army linguists could understand.

Intelligence from foot patrols and human intelligence sources was not available because the hostile Nuristani villagers refused to cooperate with local U.S. Army intelligence officers. This left unmanned reconnaissance drones as the sole remaining intelligence asset that could have provided any warning of the impending attack. The problem was there were only two U.S. Air Force Predators and a slightly larger number of U.S. Army unmanned drones available for all of Afghanistan. With few resources available, Nuristan rarely got any drone coverage because the province was not rated as being particularly important, nor was the Taliban presence there deemed to be sufficiently high risk to warrant additional intelligence coverage.

There had been some desultory airborne reconnaissance and unmanned drone coverage of the area around the village of Wanat after the base was established on July 9. But four days later, on July 12, the day before the Taliban assault on Wanat, Lt. Colonel Pierre D. Gervais, the 101st Airborne Division's chief of intelligence at Bagram Air Base, ordered that all drone and airborne reconnaissance coverage of the area around Wanat be withdrawn because, according to a postmortem study of the battle, in four days of monitoring the area around the town “nothing of consequence was detected,” and Gervais needed the drones that had been orbiting over Wanat to cover a major combat operation scheduled that day around the city of Jalalabad to the south.

Colonel Gervais's decision to pull all drone coverage from the area around Wanat effectively left Lieutenant Brostrom's platoon deaf, dumb, and blind. They did not know that several hundred Taliban fighters were dug in all around them ready to attack until literally the first volley of machine-gun fire and Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades began impacting on their positions just as the sun was coming up.

As relatively insignificant as Wanat may have been when compared with the other great battles in history, its impact reverberated far beyond the Waygul Valley, earning it the nickname among Washington intelligence analysts “the mouse that roared.”

In the aftermath of Wanat, Dr. Peter R. Lavoy, the DNI's national intelligence officer for South Asia, began preparing a new National Intelligence Estimate on the security situation in Afghanistan. By late September 2008, a draft of the NIE was being circulated to high-level policymakers in Washington for their review and comment. According to several former Bush administration officials who read it, the estimate confirmed what almost everyone suspected—that the war in Afghanistan was not going well. The final version of the top secret study was not issued until two weeks after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States on November 4, 2008, which meant that most senior Bush administration officials never read it because they were busy packing up their offices and looking for new jobs.

So it fell to the career Pentagon and State Department officials who remained at their posts to pass on the bad news contained in the report to America's friends and allies.
According to a leaked State Department cable
, NATO officials who were briefed on the contents of the estimate described it as “unrelentingly gloomy.”

The estimate for the first time gave the Taliban guerrillas passing grades as a military force. Up until this point in time, the U.S. intelligence community believed that the lightly armed Taliban were incapable of taking on, much less beating, the much more heavily armed U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Wanat proved this theory to be wrong. The U.S. and NATO intelligence communities had also believed that the Taliban guerrillas could not mount sophisticated large-scale attacks on heavily defended targets. This theory too was proven to be illusory when on the evening of June 13, 2008, a large force of Taliban guerrillas managed to infiltrate the city of Kandahar and blow up the walls of the notorious Sarposa Prison, freeing almost a thousand prisoners, including four hundred hardcore Taliban militants. The attack showed that the Taliban were not only capable of conducting a coordinated battalion-sized attack, but they could assemble their forces without being detected, accurately reconnoiter coalition defensive positions, effectively use massed RPG fire to provide fire support for the attack, and press their attacks despite suffering heavy losses.