About twenty minutes later, we loaded into the vehicle and drove back through the journalists’ base camp again before turning south to head for the eastern front. The drive was quiet until we turned the last corner, where we came face-to-face with dozens of reporters mingling with muhj fighters.
As Adam Khan maneuvered to turn the vehicle around, we noticed two more tanks and a couple of armored personnel carriers. Whether or not they worked was anyone’s guess, but they apparently made excellent backdrops for the international picture-taking media. The news of a sweet photo spot must have spread quickly that morning. As we made our way back to the schoolhouse, we counted four more press vehicles crammed with reporters and photographers zooming past us, heading to the choice real estate and the collection of old armor before their next deadline.
As much as Ali’s inability to control the roaming scores of journalists and their paid local
Both comical and frustrating at the same time, the snag prompted George to berate Ali a little. He reminded him again of the importance of keeping the presence of American commandos secret, for his own good and ours. Ali nodded in slight shame, and again shrugged his shoulders as if to say that he was unsure whether his men had carried out his order for media control. This is when we started to wonder if Ali’s orders were ever disseminated at all, much less enforced, or if such orders were more like advice to be taken or left at one’s whim.
For the second time in as many days, our attempts to conduct a solid reconnaissance of the battlefield had met with limited results, but that was about to change.
As we arrived at the schoolhouse, a notorious special guest was waiting for General Ali, the distinguished- looking rival warlord Haji Zaman Ghamshareek, the defense minister of the Eastern Shura and leader of a second opposition group of muhj. About a dozen of his fighters were with him. We vividly remembered that it had been Zaman’s boys who had tried to swipe our trucks just a few nights earlier.
In his fifties, Zaman was of average size, and his jet-black hair so noticeably contrasted with his close-cropped gray beard that I wondered whether he colored it. He wore a tan traditional Afghan wool hat and had a habit of talking with his hands, which exposed surprisingly well-manicured fingernails. He was well educated, and had at least an elementary command of the English language.
Zaman had been one of the more infamous mujahideen junior commanders during the Soviet-Afghan War. When the Taliban took over, Zaman departed Afghanistan for France. He had visited Alexandria, Virginia, numerous times over the years and was known to favor the bite of fine Johnny Walker Red scotch.
When the Taliban fell from grace after 9/11, the articulate and cunning warlord returned to his homeland to reclaim his former VIP status. He was said to have influential friends within neighboring Pakistan, including members of the Pakistani intelligence service.
Fundamentally, his rivalry with Ali stemmed from the desire of both men to be the sole ruler of Nangarhar Province in general, and the city of Jalalabad specifically.
Zaman was an ethnic Pashtun, whereas General Ali claimed allegiance to the minority Pashai tribe, which meant that he had to augment his small following of loyal fighters with men from other tribes. The recruitment effort could secure loyalty only as long as the daily CIA paycheck continued, highlighting the importance of keeping George happy. For the present, Zaman’s rival group of muhj was allied with, but subordinate to, Ali’s command for this particular battle. Keeping all of the players straight was going to be difficult.
It did not take a master of observation to notice the high tension between the two warlords and their men as Ali and Zaman met on the front porch and shared some tea. After a few minutes of the usual meaningless pleasant welcoming, they were arguing on a subject unknown to us, so George and Adam Khan joined them.
Zaman was disagreeing with Ali’s tactics. He felt that relying solely on heavy bombing without threatening al Qaeda with maneuver forces was a mistake. Zaman even pressed Ali to employ the new American commandos immediately. All of that was good news to us.
Zaman then offered to take us right up to the front, all the way up, to get a better look. He confidently said there would be no problems with the press.
Ali balked. Making the same trip again unnerved him, but after some squabbling between the two, Zaman seemed to have shamed Ali into it.
Ali agreed to go, but he was adamant that the number of vehicles be limited to reduce the attention we would surely receive from both al Qaeda and the press.
As the bickering came to an end, I put in a fresh wad of Redman leaf chew and hopped in the general’s SUV to head to the front. Zaman ignored Ali’s desire to limit the number of vehicles, so our lime green SUV was just one of eight vehicles making the trip, and every pickup truck was jam-packed with gun-toting muhj.
Officially, all of them were Ali’s fighters, but some were more loyal to Zaman. The other warlord seemed more aggressive, but Adam Khan told us after the meeting that Ali had accused Zaman of allowing forty Arabs to pass through his lines and escape into Pakistan last night. Zaman vehemently denied it. Keeping score of who was doing what to whom was difficult.
Enemy spotters high in the mountains must have laughed at the massive dust trail created by our line of slow-moving vehicles. Forget a stealthy approach. They saw us coming. The general was noticeably flustered, and bitched and moaned about Haji Zaman during the entire trip, calling Zaman a “politician” who was only interested in personal fame and fortune.
We took a slightly different route this time in hopes of bypassing the press, but no luck. The media seemed to have every road into Tora Bora covered. Nonetheless, we pressed on through and continued to the front.
Well past the press, the convoy stopped along the right edge of the narrow dirt road, and General Ali, George of the CIA, Adam Khan, and I moved up the high ground to get a look over the hill toward the front lines. I looked skyward in hopes of seeing reassuring signs of aircraft contrails. None!
Haji Zaman arrived with several of his men and started to point out the enemy positions. His English was not much better than a first-grader’s, but it was good enough for me to understand as he briefed us on the lay of the battlefield.
While we stood there, a single enemy mortar round dropped in about a hundred meters to our front right and exploded. Zaman said it was a 120mm, but to me it seemed more like an 82mm. It had landed too far away to hit us and I thought that we were just out of range, that the gunners had given it everything they had, but didn’t make it.
The incident spurred Zaman to complain of how he had been unable to find and destroy the enemy mortars that had plagued them for a week. That assessment jived with Ali’s.
Not long afterward, six or seven more mortar rounds landed and detonated simultaneously to our front, this time only about fifty meters away. The smoke signature revealed a linear sheaf of impacts spread across roughly five hundred meters. This was textbook work-a single tube firing a spotter first round, then multiple tubes using that one to adjust range and fire for effect. This signaled three things to me.
First, al Qaeda certainly had us under observation from somewhere up in the mountains. Second, there definitely was more than one mortar tube at work. Third, and most important, was that these were not being operated by just some bums hastily dropping rounds down the tubes: The crews obviously were well versed in the finer points of indirect fire and trained in bipod and bubble manipulation.
Zaman and Ali were standing by their vehicles, kind of yelling at each other, a useless sort of bickering that would prove to be routine every time they got together. The only words I recognized in their rapidfire conversation were “al Qaeda, al Qaeda.”
With wild arm gestures, Zaman was daring General Ali to venture closer to the front lines and see for himself why they had not been able to get past the dug-in defenses and al Qaeda trenches. Ali clearly was uncomfortable and didn’t want to continue.
“Ask the American commando what he thinks,” Zaman barked.
I told them both that the current observation posts did not offer enough views to support an advance deeper into the mountains. I still needed a firsthand look at the battlefield to refine our plan of action.
As soon as Zaman understood that I still wanted to go forward, he told his men to get into their pickups. The
