Fragile Alliances in a Hostile Land

Protected by darkness, the 574th Team of the U.S. Army’s 5th Special Forces Group had ridden “right into the lion’s mouth,” landing deep inside Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province--the cradle of the Taliban. A rocket-propelled grenade had whizzed past the descending MH-60 helicopters.

As the Green Berets unloaded their gear and the helicopters clattered away, Capt. Jason Amerine heard a cheery voice calling to him through the lingering dust cloud, in an incongruous British accent: “Hello, hello, hello! Welcome.”

The Oxbridge-New Delhi accent belonged to Hamid Karzai, the anti-Taliban resistance leader. Karzai was supposed to be raising an army of 200 or more seasoned fighters, a force capable of driving the Taliban out of the all-important southern region of Afghanistan.

Yet barely a dozen ragged Afghans were waiting at the edge of the landing zone, along with a handful of pathetic-looking pack mules. And one of the Afghans, a teenager, confessed it was he who had fired the grenade at the helicopters--in a fit of exuberance.

This did not look like a promising start.

From the earliest days of the Afghan war, small teams like Amerine’s--Green Berets and other Special Forces troops--lived and fought alongside anti-Taliban commanders and fighters, playing a unique and largely unseen role: part soldier, part diplomat, part psychologist.

Some GIs were embraced as trusted partners by their warlords. Others were not. Some worked with hundreds or thousands of hardened Afghan fighters; others found only inexperienced sometime-soldiers quick to flee danger.

These intimate, on-the-ground dealings with the Afghans proved vital in directing warplanes to their targets. And not incidentally, they nurtured the rise of Karzai to the post of interim prime minister, where he represents a fragile hope for his country’s future. The Green Berets and their fellow Special Forces troops were arguably the decisive single factor in the success of the war.

They ate goat meat. They slept in crude huts. They drank green tea laced with gingery cardamom seeds and swapped family stories with bearded warlords.

Then, when it came time to fight, they “brought the magic”--calling down fire from the sky to destroy Taliban and Al Qaeda forces.

“More laser, more laser!” one Afghan commander cried as he peered through a Special Forces laser sight and watched smart bombs destroy enemy positions.

Some see this teamwork between Special Forces and local fighters, combined with air power and other advanced U.S. technology, as a model for future conflicts, a prescription for confronting adversaries who are beyond the reach of conventional forces.

Others warn that the tactics that succeeded in Afghanistan, where an entrenched opposition stood ready to accept U.S. help, may not work as well in other trouble spots.

In Afghanistan, there were failures, cases where plans went awry or good advice was ignored with painful results--including the death and injury of Americans in a November prison revolt near the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

And there were frequent reminders of how vulnerable the Green Beret teams were, of the thin margin between survival and catastrophe.

When the system worked, the results were spectacular--and were toasted in Afghan style.

A skeptical anti-Taliban leader was gnawing on a huge piece of roast goat as he waited impatiently for a promised airstrike. When it came, with devastating effect, he got so excited he tore off a chunk of meat and stuffed it into the mouth of an astonished Green Beret.

The A-Team arrives with a plan and meets up with a band of ragtag fighters. Almost too quickly, things go their way.

The Karzai-Green Beret contingent began operations in Oruzgan province near midnight on Nov. 14.

Loading the mules, which one American said “looked more like dogs,” they set out through the mountains on a narrow trail with a sheer drop of several hundred feet on one side. They tried to move quietly, but the men swore aloud as they twisted their ankles on the rough ground.

Out ahead walked Afghan guides with flashlights. “If the Taliban were planning an ambush,” Amerine confessed, “I’d hoped they would first hit my Afghans with the flashlights. Then we could take care of the threat.”

Hours later, after climbing down a cliff and crowding into a waiting van and a small truck, they reached a farming community. Its 30 families risked their lives to feed and shelter the exhausted party.

Amerine’s unit was the standard Special Forces detachment of a dozen men, counting the captain:

* A team sergeant, the veteran executive officer who served as “team daddy,” since the captains who headed the teams rotated through so quickly that some called them “Kelly girls.”

* Two weapons sergeants trained to operate and maintain an array of foreign and domestic arms.

* Two engineers who could handle chores ranging from demolishing bridges to fortifying them.

* Two communications experts, the team’s lifelines to the outside.

* An intelligence specialist who majored in maps, enemy tactics and local mores.

* Two medics.

Often, as in this case, the A-Team included an Air Force combat air controller who took the lead in arranging for close air support.

Together, they carried a lot of firepower--M-4 assault rifles with especially sophisticated sights; sniper guns; M-203 grenade launchers; the M-249 squad automatic weapon; explosives and more. And they had air support almost constantly on call.

Their mission would reflect what is possible when a Special Forces team establishes an exceptional level of trust with a foreign counterpart who gives it free rein to manage the military side of things.

Unlike most other Afghan leaders, who considered themselves accomplished field marshals, Hamid Karzai left most of the war-making to his American advisors. War, after all, was their specialty.

“The mission that we in theory are always training for is this very mission,” Amerine said. “Infiltrating deep behind enemy lines and linking up with a totally disorganized force that has no logistics capability at all and making things happen.”

With Karzai, the Americans had their chance. The man who in a few short weeks would become Afghanistan’s interim prime minister had deep family roots in the southern province of Oruzgan. He devoted himself to politics--dickering with village elders, inducing local commanders to switch sides, establishing himself as the go-to man who might pull a divided country together.

Not long before Amerine’s A-Team arrived, Karzai had been hunted down and almost killed by the Taliban, as other prominent opposition leaders were. A CIA-Special Forces rescue unit had airlifted him to a temporary haven in Pakistan.

Now he was back, and the Green Berets had a long-range plan for bringing down the Taliban.

One element, Amerine recalled, was “to feed all the impoverished villages in the area ... and in so doing, we would both increase Karzai’s credibility and also they’d be saying that they weren’t getting anything from the Taliban--only starvation and tyranny.”

They had a military strategy as well: to demonstrate American power and deliver weapons and even cash to win over local Afghan leaders whose commitment to the Taliban was pragmatic rather than ideological. Gradually, they would develop a fighting force capable of seizing Oruzgan province and the city of Kandahar, the seat of Taliban power, to the south.

“We expected to be there for six months to a year at least,” Amerine said. The Green Berets brought blankets and food for farmers and villagers, as well as weapons and ammunition for local fighters.

That was the plan as Karzai rushed out onto the landing zone. It barely survived the night.

The next day, Nov. 15, as the Green Berets were bringing in more supplies, they learned that the regional capital of Tarin Kowt had revolted. With no Taliban garrison nearby, local leaders achieved the coup with a single act of violence--hanging the Taliban mayor from a lamppost.

Karzai saw an opportunity; the Americans had no choice but to help him seize it.

“Tarin Kowt represents the Taliban’s heart,” he said. “Crush that heart and we kill the Taliban.”

As they prepared to leave the village for Tarin Kowt, word spread that the Americans were handing out weapons and food. Hundreds of potential fighters streamed in. But this apparent windfall of troops quickly vanished.

“We first thought this would be the army, and were kind of happy with the numbers,” Amerine recalled. “But once we armed them, they returned to their own villages.”

Only 60 ragtag fighters accompanied Karzai and the Americans as they set out.

What they didn’t know was that the Taliban was raising an army, one that dwarfed the 574th Special Forces team and Karzai’s irregulars. A convoy of about 100 vehicles was moving toward Tarin Kowt, carrying as many as 1,000 men.

With Karzai translating, local fighters explained that the most likely Taliban approach would be along a road that led over the mountains and into the valley where Tarin Kowt sits.

At dawn, the Americans and two dozen local fighters loaded weapons and communications gear into six pickup trucks and drove out to find an observation site with a good view of the road.

They chose a ridgeline that offered a perfect vantage point. Some of the Americans positioned the irregulars. “You’re gonna be here. And you’re gonna be here,” they told the Afghans.

Meanwhile, the communications specialists and the combat controller established contact with F/A-18s and other warplanes overhead. It promised to be a turkey shoot.

As the vanguard of the Taliban convoy came into sight, a half-dozen bombs ripped it up. But the Americans had not reckoned with the impact such a blitz might have on their allies.

Terrified by the thunderous explosions barely a mile away, and by the sight of so many Taliban vehicles still moving toward them, the local fighters jumped into the trucks and bolted for town.

With much of their ammunition and other gear still in those pickups, the Green Berets had no choice but to jump aboard too.

The rush back to Tarin Kowt was like an episode of the Keystone Cops. The Americans in one truck would persuade a driver to stop, only to have panic overtake him at the sight of another local fighter speeding past.

By the time they reached Karzai’s headquarters, the Americans were livid. They forced the Afghan drivers out of the vehicles and headed back alone.

Too late. The observation post had been overrun by the Taliban.

The Green Berets, facing an overwhelming enemy, seized the highest ground still available and went to work. By now, the sky was stacked with American aircraft.

“I think the pilots knew how dire a situation it was, because we told them our position. It amounted to 11 guys on a small piece of ground, and here comes this giant convoy,” Amerine said. “They’d get on the radio, calling to us, wanting a piece of the action.”

As quickly as the A-Team could call in coordinates, the pilots unloaded their bombs, then dropped down through volleys of Taliban rocket-propelled grenades to hose down the convoy with machine-gun fire.

Despite the huge holes torn in their line, the Taliban forces kept coming.

Word of the fighting attracted a mob of now-emboldened townspeople to the Special Forces’ position. The Green Berets found themselves surrounded by a milling crowd of children and elderly men. War, Afghan-style.

The Green Berets pleaded with the elders to take the children away as the battle surged back and forth.

A small group of Taliban fighters on foot managed to slip onto the Green Berets’ flank. They got within 400 yards of the Americans before they were spotted by a crowd of townsmen, who somehow drove them off.

Gradually, the airstrikes broke the Taliban assault. About half the attacking force was destroyed, radio intercepts indicated. Some Taliban vehicles made it back to Kandahar. Others tried to hide and were ferreted out by American pilots.

By the skin of their teeth, the Special Forces had survived and, with the help of their air power, prevailed.

Word of the victory spread through the region. Almost overnight, the campaign entered a strikingly different but equally important phase for the Special Forces, and for Karzai.

First, a group of religious leaders came to express their thanks for the food and blankets, and for the defense of Tarin Kowt. Without the Green Berets, the leaders of the uprising would have been slaughtered, they said.

Then, it seemed, every leader in the area wanted to talk to Karzai. He sent runners to surrounding areas to invite leaders in, and continually worked his satellite phone.

As the Americans arranged for air drops of more supplies, all but the hard-core Talibs could see the wind was shifting. Through long afternoons and longer nights, large groups would arrive at Karzai’s mud-and-brick headquarters in Tarin Kowt to discuss switching sides. Karzai, often with Amerine sitting beside him, would tip the scales with offers of food or cash.

One night, Amerine noticed an unfamiliar Afghan with Karzai. The man was staring at the American and grinning broadly.

“Oh, he’s Taliban,” Karzai explained. Amerine and the Taliban mullah, who was negotiating his own surrender, locked eyes and burst out laughing.

With his dual status as a native Pushtun, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, and bringer of American bounty, Karzai also received urgent petitions on more mundane issues, including one from a man who wanted money for a new bull. His old one had died.

“I’d sit down with Karzai at these meetings, and all of these tribal leaders are yelling at each other, and he’d look over in amusement and tell me what they were fighting about. We’d kind of be laughing at some of the silliness that went on,” Amerine said.

“He’d let it go and let it go, and then he’d make whatever decision he had to make and everybody would abide by it.”

In the meantime, the medics, weapons specialists and other members of the A-Team were doing their part to cement relations with the local tribes. They not only handled battle wounds but also brought in medicine for a common local stomach malady and treated the locals’ other minor ailments.

Karzai responded by going out of his way to chat with the soldiers about their wives and girlfriends and their lives back home.

There would be one more battle on the march to Kandahar--at Showali Kowt, 10 miles from the Taliban’s last stronghold. Three Green Berets, including two from Amerine’s team, died in a “friendly fire” bombing there, and Karzai himself was slightly injured. Kandahar fell two days later, Dec. 7.

But it was the cooperation begun at Tarin Kowt that set the dominoes falling.

Two battle-scarred commanders team up with lethal intensity. But their alliance cannot withstand one man’s relentless ambition.

If Hamid Karzai was a Special Forces dream, Gen. Mohammed Qassim Fahim was something of a nightmare.

Chief Warrant Officer David Diaz, 39, leader of the 555th Green Berets, had seen a lot in 18 years of soldiering, including Iraq, Somalia, and a previous stint in Afghanistan when the U.S.-backed moujahedeen were fighting the Red Army. But he hadn’t encountered Fahim.

Just getting to Fahim almost got Diaz killed twice. The first time, navigating on a moonless night with poor maps, the heavily laden U.S. helicopter almost flew into a mountain before turning back. The next time, the crew aborted its mission after a Taliban antiaircraft battery “locked on.”

And when they finally made it through, on Oct. 17, the welcome was not especially cordial.

At least there were no mules. Two CIA agents greeted them at the landing site north of Kabul, the Afghan capital. Also on hand were some Northern Alliance soldiers with old Soviet jeeps to haul Diaz’s team to Fahim’s foothold at Bagram air base, some 40 miles away.

Fahim served up the obligatory huge introductory meal, but he did not hide his anger at the United States for abandoning Afghanistan after Soviet forces ended their 10-year occupation in 1989.

Heavyset, bald and clean-shaven, Fahim had served as intelligence chief and right-hand man for the legendary Ahmed Shah Masoud, who founded the Northern Alliance, fought the Soviets in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s--only to be killed by Al Qaeda suicide bombers just before Sept. 11.

Fahim had received his initial training from the Soviet KGB, before joining the resistance.

Now, at least in American eyes, he was a secretive, ambitious schemer who meant to use-- but not serve--the Green Berets.

“I don’t trust Americans,” Fahim said. “I know why you’re here. If it wasn’t for Sept. 11, you wouldn’t be here.”

Diaz, of modest size by Green Beret standards, was dwarfed by the massive Fahim. The American, known as “the chief” and admired by his men for his experience and what they consider an outsize command presence, told the warlord that he had a point but that they could still help each other.

The first task was to capture Bagram, a former Soviet air base with great strategic potential.

The situation at Bagram was a stalemate out of World War I. From trenches, Northern Alliance and Taliban fighters faced one another across a no man’s land that sometimes narrowed to 100 yards.

Fahim was irritated that, for several weeks, U.S. agents had promised air support that did not come.

Worse, other anti-Taliban commanders were getting air support. Why were the Americans shunning him?

The day after the strained meeting with Fahim, Diaz and his Air Force controller--wearing Northern Alliance garb, complete with sabers, vests, scarves and caps--surveyed the situation from the airfield’s control tower, which stood on ground occupied by Fahim’s troops.

From that aerie, targets were etched by sunlight.

“That’s ‘me’ over there,” a smiling, potbellied general named Babashan told Diaz, pointing to an enemy hut a mile away that was occupied by his Taliban equivalent. The Taliban commanders’ huts could be identified by the large number of radio antennas bristling, porcupine-like, on their roofs.

Diaz nodded to his controller, an Air Force sergeant named Calvin.

Quietly, Calvin radioed a bomber and gave a thumbs-up.

“OK, sir,” Diaz told Babashan. “At that target you pointed out, where their general is, in exactly 30 seconds there will be a 2,000-pound bomb on it.”

For a moment, Babashan’s face was a picture of doubt.

Then, Diaz recalled later, “All of a sudden this thing just disintegrated.”

For 24 straight days, Diaz’s men and U.S. warplanes laid waste to enemy positions that had stood impregnable for three years.

The carnage was all the greater because it claimed enemy leaders from Kabul who often spent the night in the supposedly secure Bagram bunkers. Accustomed to the Soviets’ “dumb” bombs, they assumed U.S. planes could not hit them without risking injury to their own troops nearby.

Sometimes, Northern Alliance soldiers used the radio to trick Taliban commanders into revealing their positions, which the Americans then bombed.

Fahim’s manner changed, suggesting the ice had broken. The Afghans began placing their right hands over their hearts to express their gratitude. Some insisted on walking hand in hand with their American counterparts.

To bolster morale among allied soldiers, the Berets would order many times the number of bombs needed to destroy some targets, especially those housing the fearsome “martyr units”--Al Qaeda fighters who painted their faces to look more intimidating and fought with abandon because, it was said, their families expected them to die in battle.

“It was a lot of overkill,” Diaz said. “We dropped numerous bombs on a small area just for the psychological effect for our guys. And we did it in daylight instead of at night so they could see it all.

“It was good for the generals to see that they were eliminated. I think sometimes for us too.”

The fall of Bagram would open the way to capturing Kabul, and Diaz soon learned just how limited the rapport with Fahim really was.

Never as accessible as Karzai, he became steadily more remote and seemingly paranoid. Meetings with Diaz scheduled for 3 p.m. would be held at 2 a.m.; locations changed without notice.

“I never knew when we were meeting. He would just send a driver for me. When I did meet him, I was frisked,” Diaz said.

For a country as ethnically fragmented as Afghanistan, the question of which commander’s soldiers entered the capital first was an explosive one. Fahim, as an ethnic Tajik, could inflame ancient tensions and complicate the U.S.-Afghan relationship after the war. The issue was so important that Washington insisted that Fahim sign an agreement with the U.S. commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, pledging not to enter the city.

In a candid moment, however, Fahim warned Diaz what was to come.

“Gen. Fahim had told me once he gave the thumbs-up for the ground offensive, there would be some ground commanders he could control, some he couldn’t,” Diaz said. “It would be essentially a race to Kabul.

“He wanted to be the first in Kabul. He had no intention of stopping.”

As the final push got underway, Taliban armor evaporated under assaults by Special Forces and U.S. air power. Wholesale side-switching followed.

“I could literally see them, the same guys that were just shooting at us an hour or so ago, were now on our side,” Diaz said. “And they, in turn, would point out who were Al Qaeda, if they didn’t in fact kill them themselves.”

Fahim split his army--now grown to nearly 8,000 men--as he approached Kabul, and the Berets split too. Diaz decided that if Fahim was going to roll in, they had no choice.

As Fahim led the first convoy into Kabul, surrounded by huge crowds, the Green Berets were screened by the tinted glass of the commanders’ vehicles, and by their native garb, long hair and beards.

“So we went into the city,” Diaz said. “We came rolling along, and I’m thinking, ‘OK, we’ll roll in low-key, like we do in Special Forces, kind of melt our way into the city and we’ll find a place to hole up.’”

But as Fahim’s efforts to establish sole control over Kabul became more aggressive, Diaz separated his troops from him once and for all. Fahim’s bid to exclude other factions from Kabul, and thus ensure for himself a place in the post-Taliban government, violated U.S. policy--which the Special Forces were supposed to advance.

Fahim’s gambit succeeded: He became defense minister in the interim government.

“We should have stayed together,” Diaz said, “but there were things that he was starting to do, attempted to do ... that we just needed to separate ourselves from. It was a lot of tribal fighting. He was going to do whatever he needed to do to prevent anyone else, any other ethnic Afghan unit or tribe, from getting into Kabul.”

Bonds formed over meals and on horseback melt away when the bullets start flying. Ancient honor codes trump reason and caution.

In a land less chaotic than Afghanistan, Americans would have considered a man like Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum part of the problem, not the solution.

A burly, ethnic Uzbek originally trained by the Soviets, Dostum was a maverick in the Northern Alliance, with a record of human rights abuses and a history of betrayal and side-switching fit for a Mafia don.

But in the earliest days of the Afghan war, U.S. Army and Air Force special operations personnel found themselves on horseback with the fearsome Dostum and his troops for more than a week, on mountain trails that were seldom more than 3 feet wide, along 1,000-foot drops into the valleys below.

It was cold and wet. The undisciplined horses, rebellious over moving single file, looked for opportunities to push past one another.

Under such conditions, a skilled rider would have been tested. Most of the Americans had little experience on horseback. All struggled to stay upright in wooden saddles that inflicted pain with every step.

Out in front like a feudal baron rode Dostum, whose goal--backed by American air support--was to capture Mazar-i-Sharif. A strategic highway junction near the country’s northern border, Mazar was considered the necessary first step to toppling the Taliban.

During the first days, things went well.

The trails Dostum and the Green Berets traveled passed above valleys dotted with towns held by the Taliban. From the heights, the Americans would “bring down a rain of bombs,” as one combat controller described it later. Then Dostum would order his men, accompanied by Green Berets, to attack the dazed and fleeing enemy.

The Afghans’ delight at what air power could do was clear. “I remember one instance, we hit a target directly and the Northern Alliance commander happened to be eating a piece of goat at that time,” an air combat controller named Matt recalled.

“He ripped off a big chunk of meat and shoved it in a Special Forces guy’s mouth because he was so happy.”

Between raids, Dostum was on the radio talking to his forces and negotiating with opposition leaders. Air controllers, including a 26-year-old California native with long sideburns named Mike, were coordinating airdrops of food, Gore-Tex gloves and warm jackets.

Drinking water was delivered by young boys riding donkeys and wearing boots with pointy rubber toes that reminded Mike of Aladdin’s footwear.

At night, they slept in caves, out of the wind. When the horses moved in the dark, sparks flew as their iron shoes struck the rocks.

One night, bored with American field rations, Mike joined the Afghan soldiers eating a mixture of meat, rice, grapes and carrots called palau. He was sick for three days.

But when Dostum and the Special Forces got into position to assault Mazar-i-Sharif, such personal relationships seemed to melt away.

The Special Forces team and its assigned Afghan fighters established a forward observation post on a hilltop and began calling in airstrikes. But Taliban units spotted the post, and more than three dozen enemy troops armed with machine guns, AK-47s and grenade launchers came at it like angry bees.

The Afghans bolted. Alone with his Special Forces teammates, Matt remembered firing his M-4 with one hand and vectoring in more bombs with the other.

Only after they had escaped to a sheltering ravine did the Americans find Dostum’s men, waiting safely out of range.

But Mazar-i-Sharif fell faster than anyone expected, and afterward a nearby fortress became a prison for hundreds of captured enemy fighters. Guns and grenades were clearly visible beneath their clothing, but Northern Alliance fighters brushed aside the Americans’ requests that the prisoners be carefully searched.

The prickly alliance between the Americans and Dostum was no match for an Afghan honor code that held that respect for a vanquished foe precluded searching him.

Or for the religious and ethnic politics that led the Afghans to keep some of the most dangerous prisoners out of American hands.

The result was predictable. When the well-armed prisoners revolted, CIA officer Johnny “Mike” Spann became the first U.S. combat casualty of the war.

*

ABOUT THIS SERIES

This is one in an occasional series chronicling untold stories from the war in Afghanistan. John Hendren reported from Afghanistan, Ft. Campbell, Ky., and Hurlburt Field, Fla. Richard T. Cooper reported from Washington. Staff writers Maura Reynolds and Eric Slater, reporting from Afghanistan, contributed to this report.