To Dare and to Conquer

Back Bay Books

Chapter One

Less than six weeks after a band of kamikaze air pirates destroyed the World Trade Center towers and blasted in the Pentagon's northeast face, 199 U.S. Army Rangers parachuted into the night upon an isolated landing strip sixty miles from Kandahar deep in the southern Afghan desert. A still undisclosed but truly small number of "black" special operators (who serve in units unacknowledged by the Pentagon but going by such names as Delta Force and Gray Fox) landed by silenced helicopter to hit the compound of the head of the regime at the edge of the city itself, while SAS elements struck buildings believed to house other Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. A key purpose was to demonstrate to the enemy and to the world that soldiers of the democracies could reach at will deep inside the most forbidding of enemy territory. It was akin to Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle's squadron raining few but utterly unanticipated bombs on Tokyo just months after Pearl Harbor. All were out by dawn from a land for centuries a byword for consuming its invaders, and whose intransigent resistance had done so much to ruin the Soviet colossus just ten years earlier.

"When can we get our teams in?" the secretary of defense had demanded in a September 25 strategy meeting. "When CIA tells us they are ready," unhelpfully replied the air force general at the head of U.S. Special Operations Command-not until, that is to say, the agency had some notion of what was going on inside Afghanistan. "I want targets worldwide," continued the secretary. "But we don't have actionable intelligence," the general countered. There might have been much to discuss, but not enough to jump on.

The very day following, the first seven-man CIA insertion of paramilitary experts, as well as a former station chief in Pakistan, were flown by agency pilots over the Hindu Kush from Uzbekistan into the Afghan northeast. They had been gathered swiftly at Langley headquarters and dispatched to convince the Northern Alliance, a loose confederation of mutually predatory warlords aligned against the Taliban, to cooperate with America's imminent retaliation. They were also to lay the groundwork for the arrival of twelve-man Green Beret teams, or operational detachments.

Those Special Forces soldiers, as the Green Berets prefer to be called, were not intended to execute a decisive move, let alone to slice through northern Afghanistan under close air support to overthrow the Taliban. They were to follow their calling of living and working with all sorts of fighting men whose countries (or in this case, factions) enjoy more or less friendly ties to the United States. In their current mission, they were to join with the Northern Alliance in a holding action until U.S. divisions could be prepped and lifted to embark on a campaign that the military chiefs expected to take at least two years.

In none of the record of sporadic outrage during the preceding decade had U.S. commandos been deployed against terrorists, let alone to unravel a terrorist state. Nor had the obscure workings of CIA specialists, responsible under law for covert action, drawn any visible blood from an increasingly aggressive enemy. As the defense secretary impatiently judged, the agency had devoted the two weeks since the atrocity to pleading with the military for medics, more pilots, and logistical capacities to get a handful of its own people on the ground merely to discover what might ultimately be possible. "They've neglected to do what they should have been doing all along," he snapped, taking in the enormous gap in the "sensor-to-shooter loop," the time required between identifying and bringing down these menacing objectives.

The former agency station chief who had gone in on the twentysixth with what the Operations Directorate unadmiringly calls its "knuckle draggers" would soon make his own complaints public at the "delays in getting army Special Forces teams into Afghanistan," and "infighting among the various Special Operations components." To him, plans put forward by Delta operators were "impossible and lame," and "the U.S. military community" would not permit its commandos to accompany him because his fly-in was said to be "too dangerous." "We have begged and pleaded," he exclaimed, but the nation's special operations forces were reluctant to cooperate. "This situation is broken!" On all counts, there would be much to answer for in the arrangement of U.S. commando and intelligence operations, certainly by an intelligence service whose parking lot at Langley had been merely half full on 9/12, when the federal workforce in Washington was told that only essential employees need show up at the office.

In time, the 9/11 commission would commend the use of joint CIA-military teams in Afghanistan. But without even knowing decades of well-concealed CIA paramilitary blunders, it came to conclude that responsibility for covert commando actions should henceforth shift to the Pentagon, a recommendation that cut to the core of the agency's storied Directorate of Operations, renamed the National Clandestine Service. The quarrel distills thirty centuries' failure to come fully to terms with this deadly arm of war-its possibilities, its moral standing, its effects on the larger sphere of violence. Is it dirty work, or the apotheosis of the warrior's craft? (It has been both.) With whom to trust it? Where to apply it next?

Nonetheless, within weeks of the Rangers' descent, U.S. improvisation combined with the Special Forces' speed and agility to marshal the tribes and impart the momentum for the drive on Kabul, center of Taliban authority. That capital fell on November 13 to a mode of war that had taken form overnight largely under Green Beret sergeants and air force Special Tactics combat controllers. Commandos urged horses through hostile valleys to pinpoint air strikes with satellitelinked laser markers-a step back into Kipling's day to recoil in a blow out of science fiction. Though it was only one move in crushing a preindustrial foe, it was a crucial one, accomplished on the ground by just 315 special operators.

By this time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's original concept, showing its claws as Operation Enduring Freedom, was being pared way back. The brass's initial reaction to press photos of the Green Berets who surfaced among the warlords was to order that the soldiers' beards come off, right now, an order wisely rescinded. Instead, the Green Berets' finest hour was welcomed as reason not to plunk down big conventional forces, as had the Russians. The number of armed Americans in the country would thereby essentially be capped.

A problem lay in ignoring the fact that the first thing one needs to know about a weapon is what cannot be done with it. Should it be perfect for this or that tight spot, one may fatally be tempted to bring it into a different type of fight. The next move against the Taliban and Al Qaeda showed that there was little understanding among the war planners about what special operations forces could not do, as an irresistible entity seemed suddenly to be at hand.

In December, the same formula used to take Kabul was applied against bin Laden himself and fifteen hundred to two thousand wellarmed fighters holed up in the miles of reinforced granite caves and...