All In Page 12

  Even before Dragon Strike officially commenced, targeted Special Operations raids and initial clearing operations in Kandahar had started to show early gains. The situation was improving, but Petraeus didn’t want to declare success prematurely. He was keenly aware of how the United States had overpromised in Marjah. He addressed this phenomenon in his counterinsurgency guidance: “MANAGE EXPECTATIONS. Avoid premature declarations of success. Note what has been accomplished and what still needs to be done. Strive to under-promise and over-deliver.”

  “We need to be careful announcing dates of upcoming operations and what we expect to achieve by a certain date,” Petraeus said during his stand-up a week before the soft launch of Dragon Strike. “One of the lessons learned from operations in central Helmand was to be careful on what we announce.” He struck the same theme in his stand-up three days later. “We will not tell the enemy in advance of our intentions,” he said. “In my dealings with the press I have restricted myself to stating that operations have started and resisted the temptation to state when we will have achieved success. Do not amp up expectations about Kandahar: no specifics, no dates. A deliberate campaign has begun, and events will unfold.”

  There were numerous fierce firefights, but the Taliban were more difficult to find when troopers from the Strike Brigade showed up before dawn in villages in Zhari, many of which were largely abandoned. Many of the insurgents had melted back into society. The massed force, backed by A-10 attack jets and Kiowa and Apache helicopters, tipped off the Taliban better than any press conference ever could, but this was fine with Petraeus. The objective was clearing the area of enemy and forcing them to displace from long-held command-and-control nodes and IED-manufacturing sites, not killing every last one of them.

  WHILE MUCH OF THE 101st’s 2nd Strike Brigade was moving across the Zhari District, west of Kandahar city, in September, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Flynn’s unit, the 1st Battalion of the 320th Field Artillery Regiment, remained in the Arghandab River Valley, northwest of Kandahar city, clearing villages of Taliban fighters and the hundreds of IEDs they had left behind.

  The Arghandab River Valley had historically been a very tough area. Previous units there had suffered tragic losses, and Flynn’s soldiers had been in an intense fight since the moment they had arrived in late June. Nine years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Flynn was a typical Army commander, experienced and skilled in conducting counterinsurgency operations after multiple tours in combat. Intense and athletic, with piercing blue eyes, Flynn was an artilleryman by training. He grew up outside Boston in suburban Norwood, a Red Sox fan, but attended Clemson University, in South Carolina. His father, a Korean War veteran and retired Army sergeant major, convinced him to join the ROTC in college. Flynn had served in Kandahar from 2004 to 2005, when his artillery unit from the 25th Infantry Division performed what he called a “provisional” infantry role. He remembered that tour as “the good years,” the period before the Taliban had regrouped. He deployed to Iraq with the 25th Infantry Division in 2006 and 2007, serving in Kirkuk with an artillery unit again repurposed to perform infantry tasks. They called themselves “infantillary.”

  When he took command of the battalion at Fort Campbell in 2009, Flynn was initially told that his unit would deploy to Iraq. Flynn spent six months with his soldiers reacquiring artillery skills, only to shift gears and focus for the next nine months on training in infantry tactics before deploying to Afghanistan in late spring 2010. “I’m not downplaying the concern the Army has about the erosion of artillery skills, but I believe you do what you must do now to win,” Flynn said. “There will be time to re-train.” Artillery battalions made sense as an integral component of an Army brigade designed to fight the Cold War, when U.S. war planners contemplated epic battles between large, mechanized forces that included massive artillery duels. Converting artillerymen to infantrymen able to fight small-arms engagements and interact with people at the village level made the 1st Battalion, 320th Artillery Regiment, the “Top Guns,” relevant to the kind of war the nation had been fighting since 9/11. This transformation was difficult, but Flynn believed it was possible.

  The readiness of his troops became an issue in one of the first battles they fought as they patrolled jointly in the Arghandab River Valley with combat-savvy soldiers they would soon be replacing from the 2nd Battalion of the 508th Parachute Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. With temperatures over 100 degrees and extremely high humidity, the paratroopers from the 82nd led an assault on Taliban positions through an orchard on July 11, only to stop when some of Flynn’s soldiers passed out with extreme heat fatigue. The problem became so acute that helicopters had to be called in to evacuate the troops. When the Black Hawks arrived with reinforcements, they took withering fire as soldiers loaded their incapacitated comrades aboard.

  After the remaining soldiers in the orchard, under heavy fire, were finally able to return to the compound where the patrol had begun hours earlier, tensions ran high. Squad leaders from the 82nd clashed with officers from the 101st. “You’re not putting my guys at risk anymore,” Staff Sergeant Christopher Gerhart, of the 82nd Airborne, told 2nd Lieutenant Zak Pantaleo, from the 101st. “You dudes need to think about my guys, who have been out here for eleven fucking months.” Meanwhile, Flynn directed a complex helicopter assault to fly reinforcements to the scene, and he arrived at the compound with a dismounted patrol a short while later. He was struck by the acrimony of the sergeants from the 82nd Airborne toward his soldiers of the 101st. He made it clear that their attitude was unacceptable among American soldiers. He then organized the movement of both units from the battlefield and personally led his reinforcements back to their base on foot.

  Given his previous tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, Flynn was an experienced counterinsurgent. He arrived in Afghanistan as part of the 2010 surge with a nuanced understanding of Petraeus’s tactical approach. He bought in to the mission, and he was prepared to adjust tactics as the mission dictated.

  Staff Sergeant Gerhart was later quoted in the press as saying that the soldiers from Flynn’s artillery unit “weren’t prepared physically, mentally, and tactically.” But in February, when Flynn had learned that his unit would be deployed in the Arghandab River Valley, he had intensified its training on dismounted infantry operations. He could have argued that they should have deployed as an artillery unit, but, having served previously in Kandahar, he knew they would contribute much more as infantrymen—and they’d likely end up performing infantry missions regardless. “As artillerymen, I fully recognize that we could not attain the expertise and experience of our Army’s premier infantry units,” Flynn noted. “But at the same time I knew we could prepare our men to be better than the Taliban, and we are. . . . We studied the area for six months and had access to the 82nd’s classified reports. We knew the terrain, the people and the enemy. We studied the 82nd’s tactics and rehearsed them at Fort Campbell before we deployed. The curve is certainly steep. The weather, the vegetation, terrain and a wily enemy all made this a tough fight but not one we didn’t expect.” Flynn noted that his unit had mounted a “no-notice air assault” to evacuate the soldiers with heatstroke, something very few could pull off without training. “We all have three, four or five deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and would not put a unit in a position for which it was unprepared,” he said.

  The fighting only grew more intense for his soldiers. On July 30, they began a carefully choreographed operation to clear a group of buildings long controlled by the Taliban outside the town of Jelawur. The buildings, which the Americans called Objective Bakersfield, occupied an important intersection of two major roads that connected four U.S. combat outposts. An eerie calm fell over Bakersfield as the first of Flynn’s soldiers arrived at first light. Flynn, accompanied by members of his battalion staff and his personal security detail, set out on foot toward Bakersfield shortly before 8:00 A.M., following a convoy of engineers who were clearing the route of IEDs. But as
Flynn approached, an IED detonated and the Taliban opened up with a barrage of small-arms fire. Then another IED went off and Flynn saw Specialist Michael L. Stansbery, 21, of Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, down on the road, injured by the blast. It had ripped his torso in half. A huge cloud of smoke hung in the air. Captain Andrew Shaffer, one of Flynn’s commanders, remembered how, at that moment, time seemed to slow to an agonizing crawl. “Medic!” he heard someone shout. Radios crackled with reports of small-arms firing coming from the south.

  Minutes later, yet another IED exploded, leaving two of Flynn’s sergeants bloodied and dazed. Then he saw Sergeant Kyle B. Stout, 25, of Texarkana, Texas, in the choking black smoke, gravely wounded on the road. His face was frozen, mouth open. There was a blank look on his face. Three limbs were gone. Shaffer knelt beside him and forced a tourniquet over exposed bone and pulled it tight on flaps of skin and muscle. He remembered thinking how strange it was that Stout wasn’t bleeding—his body was “shunting,” instinctively cutting off blood flow to its extremities in a last-ditch effort to protect its vital organs. Flynn knelt by his side and tried to talk him back to consciousness. A call went out for medevac. A Black Hawk helicopter soon landed in a field fifty meters to the northeast and evacuated Stansbery and Stout from the battlefield.

  Flynn huddled with commanders near one of the simple buildings at Bakersfield to consolidate and reorganize to continue the assault. When he walked the north side of his unit’s perimeter, he felt another IED shake the battlefield, detonating thirty-five meters away, on ground he’d just walked across. At least two more soldiers had been wounded. Flynn regrouped again with commanders, calling for reinforcements from battalion headquarters in what had by now become a battalion-level engagement. With small-arms fire coming from three sides of the battlefield, Flynn set up a command post in the hay-filled building. Then a report came over the radio of another casualty, sixty meters to the west. By the time Flynn got to Robert Pittman, a retired master sergeant working as an adviser for the Asymmetric Warfare Group, Pittman was conscious but unresponsive. Blood trickled from his ear. His eyes were open but unresponsive. He had been a tower of strength for the soldiers. “Mr. Pittman, can you hear me?” a soldier asked. Pittman could not speak, but he blinked his eyes. He’d been hit by gunfire.

  After what seemed like an eternity, a medevac helicopter approached—and Flynn’s men opened up with all the fire they had to provide cover. The shooting was insanely loud. A team of soldiers dashed toward the Black Hawk with Pittman and loaded him on board in hopes that he could be saved. Rotor wash cleared the landing zone of debris as the helicopter lifted off. Minutes later, Flynn grabbed Shaffer. “Drew,” he said. “We can’t shoot like that. We’ve got friendlies eighteen hundred meters in that direction.” He was concerned about the volume of fire at Command Outpost Nolen.

  “Yes, sir,” Shaffer said, feeling almost lost.

  He and Flynn learned later, as the fighting raged and they maneuvered soldiers across the battlefield, that Stansbery, Stout and Pittman had died of the wounds they suffered in the opening moments of the battle. It soon became clear to them how important this simple crossing was to the enemy. The fighting continued for five days before Flynn’s soldiers finally cleared the objective.

  Flynn called Pittman’s wife, Melissa, on the battle’s first day, after her husband’s death had been confirmed. He remembered it as an exceedingly difficult conversation. Except for a short article in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team’s monthly publication, Heart Beat, the Battle for Bakersfield made not a single headline and received not a word of press coverage. It was typical of the grinding combat in Kandahar that almost never rose to conventional force-on-force battle. Regardless, the Arghandab was, as Flynn observed, a “hellacious” place to fight.

  A few days later, at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, Petraeus described the ongoing effort in Kandahar during his morning stand-up. “The important part about Kandahar is that it is a very comprehensive approach,” he said. “Months ago we began targeting Taliban in Kandahar through Special Forces operations. We continue with this, and the tempo of these highly effective strikes builds. Now we have thickening of conventional forces, and that will also continue and will become more visible in the weeks and months ahead . . . as will the eventual addition of Afghan Local Police elements. All of this is following an established timeline. In sum: This is how a COIN operation is conducted; it is not a conventional operation with a D-Day—we need to push this message.”

  Whatever weaknesses Flynn’s forces had coming into the fight in the Arghandab River Valley in July, they had overcome them by late August, having pushed farther into Taliban country than the 82nd before them ever had. “The fight here has been intense and almost exclusively dismounted in the densely vegetated river valley,” Flynn said. “The enemy in our area was estimated to number 150 strong. . . . We have conducted two major offensive operations that have by and large routed the enemy from this area. We now own the villages that have long been Taliban sanctuary.”

  Soon after, in Babur, a village long controlled by the Taliban, Flynn met with village elders and told them they needed to choose whether they wanted to live under the Taliban or under the government. His sense was that the villagers hated the Taliban but were deathly afraid of them, having watched them assassinate those who cooperated with the government and the Americans. His subordinate commanders started holding weekly shuras [councils, generally of elders] with elders in the area, using a “cash for work” program that paid five hundred afghani (about ten dollars) a day to clean canals, refurbish mosques and fix roads.

  In early October, Flynn and other U.S. commanders devised a final plan for clearing the remaining Taliban out of the Arghandab River Valley with the help of Haji Shah Mohammed, the district governor; General Mohammad Naim, Kandahar’s chief of the National Directorate of Security, the country’s equivalent of the FBI; and Colonel Abdul Raziq, a charismatic leader of the Afghan Border Police. Flynn’s Top Guns had seized significant terrain and villages south of the Manarah Canal, on the west side of the Arghandab River, but had yet to clear eight villages north of the canal, including Tarok Kolache, Charqolba Sofla and Khosrow Sofla. General Naim had grown up in Khosrow Sofla, and Flynn had become close with Karim Dad, the village’s chief, or malik. Flynn nodded in agreement as General Naim explained that Khosrow Sofla and Charqolba Sofla had become hubs of Taliban activity and major bomb-making centers and they had to be cleared.

  Colonel Raziq struck Flynn as a brash young Afghan, dressed in upper-class Pashtun garb—off-white dress, Kandahari hat and loafers. A profile in Harper’s in 2009 had described Raziq as a corrupt warlord protecting the opium trade along the border and working closely with U.S. and NATO commanders, who tolerated his corruption because he was brutally effective, with his three-thousand-man command, at helping keep the peace in Kandahar Province. “I have been fighting in the area we are discussing for the past hundred days,” Flynn said, describing a plan to clear and hold Tarok Kolache following a raid by U.S. Special Operations Forces so that Raziq’s Afghan forces and U.S. Special Forces could clear Khosrow Sofla, Charqolba Sofla and Lower Babur. Raziq looked at Flynn and asked, “You’ve been fighting in Arghandab for a hundred days?” With a flamboyant wave of his index finger, he added, “I will clear all of Arghandab in one day.” It was all Flynn could do to restrain himself. But Raziq would prove to be an effective tactical leader in the days ahead.

  Flynn began the work of clearing the Arghandab with directed strikes by lethal rockets from a Multiple-Launch Rocket System (MLRS) on a ten-ton truck. In Afghanistan, those weapons had supported the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) exclusively until 2010, when they were also allocated for support to conventional force-clearing operations. The JSOC controls the military’s most skilled and highly classified units: the Army’s Delta Force, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, and the Air Force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron, in addition to the Army’
s 75th Ranger Regiment and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. These were the units conducting night raids across the country, directed by a Special Operations command center at Bagram Air Base.

  Flynn’s strikes targeted two compounds in Khosrow Sofla that the insurgents were using to manufacture homemade explosives. A short time later, a London tabloid, the Daily Mail, published a story in which Flynn was quoted as telling villagers that if they did not tell him where IEDs had been buried in Khosrow Sofla, he would wipe the village off the face of the earth. But the reporters weren’t at Flynn’s meeting with villagers, who in fact were told that the Americans would have no choice but to destroy compounds from the air if they were unable to determine where they had been laced with explosives. The villagers no longer lived in Khosrow Sofla and knew they would never be able to return unless the village was somehow cleared of bombs.

  After the rocket strikes, Flynn maintained “persistent” surveillance of the village using video from a Predator drone to assess battle damage and capture “patterns of life” in Khosrow Sofla, if any remained. From his command center, he watched six men walking through the rubble of the damaged homes. Flynn thought they looked angry as they walked quickly around the village. Stopping at various places, they might have been planting new IEDs. Although the six were not carrying weapons, Flynn could have killed them with Hellfire missiles from the Predator under the rules of engagement. But he gave them the benefit of the doubt, knowing U.S. forces would take the village within seventy-two hours and could kill or capture them then if they were still around.