mission. Here we were, thousands of miles away from Ground Zero in New York City, at the most extreme and sharpest end of the spear in the hunt for Usama bin Laden. We were enormously thankful for the opportunity.
It was going to be “fly by the seat of your pants” war fighting, in which it would be impossible to predict what might happen within the next hour, much less a day in advance. My formal military schooling had ended as a young infantry captain at Fort Benning in 1995, where the approved course curriculum contained little on the art of ambiguous and unconventional fighting while connected at the hip to some third world warlord.
This type of work, however, was practiced at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, and few officers understood it better than the Task Force Dagger commander, Colonel Mulholland, who did not like it at all. He had voiced his strong objections to going after al Qaeda in a mountainous environment with an unknown army of indigenous fighters and without a solid support structure in place. If things fell apart from here on out, nobody could blame Mulholland. He had sent up the red flags of warning.
Our own task force commander was not without his own reservations. General Dailey certainly could not be described as impetuous or flippant when the lives of his men were on the line. [14] In fact, the general leaned slightly toward the cautious side, as most prudent commanders often do. But Dailey also knew the opportunities to nail bin Laden were going to be few and far between, and killing bin Laden was the premier mission of the war to date, no doubt about it. It required a commander willing to take a deep breath, grasp the moment, suppress the high-risk nature of the mission, and let loose the dogs of war. Whether or not Dailey was personally comfortable with the whole deal or not was irrelevant. He had pulled the trigger, and we respected him for that.
We had been warned by the CIA guys the day before that General Ali was a master of doublespeak, and often talked in circles. He would promise the world, but rarely deliver if he did not see the promise as being useful or helpful to his own agenda. The more time we spent in Afghanistan working with indigenous fighters and warlords, the more we realized Ali’s behavior was far from unique. It was just common to the culture. You don’t obtain warlord status without being able to play both sides, and the middle, and around the edges, too.
On the surface, Ali was physically small, quiet, and unassuming. His formal schooling ended in the sixth grade, which meant little in this harsh environment. What did matter were the hard-knocks education, street experience, and the reputation he earned fighting the Soviets and rival tribes as a young mujahidee. These characteristics had produced a dangerous mix of politician, manager, and warlord who, when stirred sufficiently, became as cocky as a cornered rooster in a henhouse.
General Ali was in good spirits that morning, and was quick to praise his own efforts. His men “generally” had bin Laden surrounded and cut off from any support by the locals, and Ali strongly implied that escaping from Tora Bora was not an option for the al Qaeda leader. This was welcome news to us, for we did not have the manpower, or the permission, to surround the massive battlefield, and we didn’t expect a sizable infusion of reinforcements anytime soon.
We crossed our fingers and took the general’s declaration at face value, since it meshed with the fact that few other people believed the al Qaeda leader would cut and run. Indeed, early radio intercepts told us bin Laden wanted a fight in the mountains, which had been prepared so well in advance. Al Qaeda was confident it could stem the fighting spirit of their fellow Muslim adversaries so as to better focus attention on the American forces that were assumed to be coming.
So we had no reason to doubt that bin Laden wouldn’t fight to the death.
The Prophet Muhammad faced worse odds at the Battle of Badr in the seventh century, an event well known in Islamic circles. Muhammad’s army believed their victory against an overwhelming force of unbelievers was possible only by placing their fate in the hands of Allah.
Certainly, bin Laden, who repeatedly invoked the life, times, and sayings of Muhammad in his war against Crusaders and Jews, knew that a retreat in the face of onrushing
After the aborted attempt to get a look at the front lines before running from the press, General Ali offered to take us to the front again this morning. The general said he had taken care of the media problem, so Bryan, Adam Khan, and I agreed to go. We
George went along as well, a good move, since Ali seemed to respect him. General Ali was not stupid. He knew that George held the large sums of money he so eagerly desired and he seemed to be figuring out that the newly arrived commandos represented his best chance of eliminating bin Laden. The body of Usama bin Laden, dead or alive, equaled a cool $25 million bonus.
This time, we jumped in Ali’s lime green SUV and departed the schoolhouse headed for the southern foothills along the western flank of the battlefield. A few minutes after crossing the dry streambed, Ali’s radio came alive. One of his forward commanders was begging him to stop the bombs from pounding their positions. A U.S. Air Force B-52 was overhead and supposedly their bombs were hitting the friendly muhj, having mistaken them for al Qaeda.
Ali pleaded for George to stop the bombing, and George looked at Bryan and me sitting in the backseat. “Can you guys get them to stop?”
“Uh, well, er, okay. Pull over,” I said. I jumped from the SUV, grabbed the handheld GlobalStar satellite phone from my belt and dialed up the guys back at Bagram, who quickly relayed the message.
Whether or not the word would make it all the way to the aircraft high above the clouds was anyone’s guess, but I jumped back in the vehicle and gave George a thumbs-up. Ali smiled and thanked us graciously, then radioed his forward commander, likely telling him the problem had been fixed. Bryan and I looked at each other with poker faces, savoring the moment as we rolled along, knowing that a B-52 could only carry so many bombs.
Sure enough, the bomber went Winchester-empty on ammo-and curled out of the area to return to its base. In a real sense, this unforeseen event likely raised our stock with Ali. Having some Americans who could order up or cancel falling bombs whenever they wanted might not be a bad idea after all.
We passed through the press with no problem that day, but not necessarily because of Ali’s promise the night before. More likely, most reporters were napping inside their tents after having stayed up all night awaiting a much anticipated drop of a giant BLU-82 bomb. The drop had been postponed several times already.
Developed in the 1960s to cut helicopter landing zones in the triplecanopy jungle of Vietnam, the fifteen- thousand-pound BLU-82 was tested during Desert Storm to clear minefields. Now receiving renewed attention in the new global war on terror, it had been yanked out of mothballs as a potential cave buster. If the $28,000 bomb, which was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, could nail bin Laden, or even scare the shit out of him, it came at a bargain price.
As we crept along a north-south narrow dirt road that skirted the edge of a major streambed, we passed small pockets of Ali’s fighters. We noticed among them a couple of light-skinned Afghans who wore lighter colored beards than the traditional dark-skinned locals. We learned they were from Nuristan Province, and their appearance gave us a little more confidence that we gringos might be able to fit into the surroundings.
The road ended a couple of kilometers farther south, where we dismounted and moved into the foothills. The air seemed thinner, even at this relatively low altitude, and we outlanders were forced to breathe more heavily while trying to hide the pounding of our hearts. Ali appeared to be immune to the physical strain.
After several hundred meters of tough ground, we reached two aging T-55 battle tanks and a T-62, all formerly Soviet property and now controlled by the muhj. They were ominously positioned, with a commanding view of the entire mountain range, their main gun tubes raised skyward as if they were ready to shoot rounds over the tall peaks and hit Pakistan. A couple of muhj crewmen were still asleep on the ground behind one of the tanks, wrapped in thin blankets. Two alert fighters had seen the general’s vehicle approaching and were on their feet, waving and smiling, certainly wondering who the hell the new light-skinned fellas accompanying Ali were.
Somewhere up in those beautiful White Mountains waited a thousand or more al Qaeda fighters, hunkered down and largely invisible to the American bombers circling overhead and invisible to us on the ground as well.
Bryan and I made a few notes, checked our maps a dozen times, and marked our location on our Garmin GPSs. Ali pointed to the bombers far above and said that if the bombers were not overhead, then al Qaeda mortars would be in full swing and certainly would have welcomed us by now.
He also mentioned that enemy snipers had been harassing his tank crews the last few days, which kept his men down behind the tanks or buttoned up inside. Ali seemed to be testing us, always alert to our reactions.
