In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

CHAPTER TWELVE The Perfect Storm

RONALD NEUMANN was reaching for the light switch in his hotel room at the Crowne Plaza in Amman, Jordan, when the phone rang.

“Hello?” he asked, somewhat perplexed. It was 2005, and he was on a brief layover on his way back to the United States from Iraq, where he had been serving as a senior political-military officer and the U.S. Embassy’s principal interlocutor with the Multi-National Command.

It was Robert Pearson, director general of the State Department’s Foreign Service: “I understand you are arriving in Washington tomorrow,” he said.

“I am,” Neumann replied.

“The Secretary of State would like to see you about where you’re going next,” Pearson noted. “But it’s not where you think.” That was it. He said nothing else.

Neumann could barely sleep that night, anxious about what awaited. Two days later, when he walked into the office of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, she asked him whether he would be interested in serving as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Without hesitation, he said yes.

He later recalled: “It was the only time I was asked directly by the Secretary of State to serve as an ambassador.” Neumann, who had served as U.S. ambassador to Algeria and Bahrain, didn’t leave his Baghdad position until several months later. His final recollections were poignant. “I remember driving up Route Irish in a sandstorm in a convoy,” he recalled, referring to the excruciatingly dangerous road to the Baghdad Airport. “We couldn’t get a helicopter out because of the sandstorm, but we were able to hitch a ride with General Casey,” the commanding general of Multi-National Force—Iraq.¹ It was an ironic twist of events. Neumann was leaving Iraq during a sandstorm and entering Afghanistan during what Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry would eventually call “the perfect storm.” The Afghan insurgency was about to explode.

Eikenberry recalled, “Several things came together. The Taliban and al Qa’ida had sanctuary in Pakistan and conducted operations from bases in Pakistan. Local governance was not taking hold. Narco-trafficking and associated criminality were emerging as significant threats to security. The planning and implementation of critical economic infrastructure projects—roads, power, and water management—were lagging.” As these problems became more acute, however, the United States neglected to respond with sufficient resources. “There were too few international and Afghan National Security forces. In the case of the U.S. forces,” said Eikenberry, “we had one less infantry battalion in the summer of 2006 than in the summer of 2005. All these factors—a complex mix of security, governance, and economic elements—combined to make for a perfect storm as NATO began its enlargement into southern Afghanistan in June 2006.”² Senior Afghan officials had also become increasingly alarmed. Dr. Abdullah, Afghanistan’s foreign minister, worried that the United States and the broader international community mistakenly believed that the Taliban and al Qa’ida were finished. “Our intelligence estimates,” he repeatedly warned U.S. officials, “show quite the reverse.” In his final meeting with Secretary Rice in March 2006 before he left the Afghan government, Dr. Abdullah warned her not to let Afghanistan continue to slip into conflict. “I am deeply worried about the rising insurgency,” he said. “People are beginning to lose hope in their government. We are losing the support of our population.”³

But there was some disagreement among the U.S. policymakers about the severity of the insurgency. “My take on the situation in Afghanistan,” said General James Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, in early 2006, “is that the Taliban and al Qa’ida are not in a position where they can restart an insurgency of any size and major scope.”⁴ Jones was a steely Marine who would become President Barack Obama’s national security adviser. He also became outspoken in his assessment of the insurgency in his 2008 Afghanistan Study Group Report, which concluded that the progress in Afghanistan was “under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country.”⁵ The day after General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, had been battered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his war plan for Afghanistan in their conference room (known as “the Tank”), Franks had confronted Jones and Admiral Vern Clark of the U.S. Navy and told them: “Yesterday in the Tank, you guys came across like a mob of Title X motherers, not like the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”⁶ The reference was to Title X of the U.S. Code, which outlines the role of the armed forces, including the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Whatever the staff disagreements may have been in the armed services, the writing in Afghanistan was on the wall by the end of 2006. Levels of violence had reached their highest levels since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

Upbeat Assessments

The year 2006 did not begin so badly, at least among many policymakers in Washington. Estimates in some sectors were upbeat. According to the World Bank, for example, Afghanistan’s economy grew an estimated 14 percent in 2005 and 5.3 percent in 2006.⁷ Annual end-period inflation, as measured by the consumer price index for Kabul, decreased to 4.8 percent. Annual end-period “national” inflation, covering Kabul and five other cities, was 3.9 percent.⁸ In addition, construction was booming in some Afghan cities, several major roads were built, markets were full of goods, small and large shops had sprouted up, and several large telecommunications companies and commercial airlines were operating and competing for business.

“Cell phones are a wonderful boon in this city,” said one Afghan in Kabul to me, gripping his bright yellow phone and his Roshan calling card. “I don’t know what I’d do without mine.” Roshan, which means “light” in both Dari and Pashto, was one of Afghanistan’s largest telecommunications companies. In February 2005, Roshan won the Best Marketing Award at the Mobile World Congress, the mobile-phone industry’s leading annual event. In September 2006, it won the Best Brand Award at the CommsMEA Awards Ceremony in Dubai. This marked a breathtaking change.

In 2002, more than 99 percent of the Afghan population had no access to telecommunications services. Only five major cities had telephone services, and Kabul accounted for about two-thirds of the country’s 57,000 functioning lines. The country had little or no access to the Internet, and postal services were still recovering from years of conflict. By 2006, the number of telephones in Afghanistan had increased to 2.16 million, and all provinces were connected to a national telecommunications network. Mobile-phone prices dropped from about $400 in 2002 to less than $50 in 2006, and calling costs fell dramatically. The telecommunications sector attracted more than $300 million in private investments—60 percent of all foreign direct investment in Afghanistan.⁹

Robert Gates, who replaced Donald Rumsfeld as U.S. secretary of defense in 2006, argued that “notwithstanding the news [the American people] hear out of Afghanistan, the efforts of the United States, our allies, and the Afghan government and people have been producing solid results.” He noted that, contrary to the situation during the Taliban era, when few Afghans had access to health care, 670 clinics and hospitals were built or refurbished and nearly 11,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives were trained. Fewer than a million children were in school in 2001. “Now more than five million students—at least one and a half million of them girls—are enrolled in school.” He also pointed out that the country’s central bank had been rebuilt and supported with more than $2.5 billion in reserves—a remarkable feat, since there was no commercial banking under the Taliban.¹⁰

Reading the Tea Leaves

But all was not well, and violence in 2006 reached the highest levels since U.S. forces had invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Observers who hadn’t visited Afghanistan, or who hadn’t traveled outside of major urban areas, could be forgiven for thinking there was security and a viable government. The truth, however, was that governance did not extend into rural areas of the country. As former Taliban commander and Afghan Parliament member Abdul Salam Rocketi told me over lunch one day in 2006, “we have created a government that looks good on paper but is very weak in reality. Most Afghans in rural areas never see or hear anything from it.”¹¹

Key metrics of violence showed a disturbing increase. The number of suicide attacks increased from one in 2002 to two in 2003, six in 2004, 21 in 2005, 139 in 2006, and 140 in 2007. Between 2005 and 2006, the number of remotely detonated bombings more than doubled, from 783 to 1,677, and armed attacks nearly tripled, from 1,558 to 4,542.¹² In 2007, insurgent-initiated attacks rose another 27 percent from the 2006 levels, and Helmand Province witnessed among the highest levels of violence, rising 60 percent between 2006 and 2007.¹³ The Taliban and other groups assassinated Afghan government supporters in district and provincial centers. Key targets included police, Afghan intelligence agents, judges, clerics, NGO workers, and any others believed to be collaborating with the government.¹⁴

Public-opinion polls showed that Afghans had noticed the trend. In 2006, just under 50 percent of Afghans said the biggest problem in their country was the lack of security, including from the Taliban and warlords. Concerns were most acute in the south and east.¹⁵ A public-opinion poll for U.S. Central Command indicated that 41 percent of Afghans said they felt less safe in 2007 than in 2006, compared with only 28 percent who said they felt safer. Support levels for the Taliban doubled during the same time period. “The largest increases in Taliban support,” the report concluded, “are among rural people, women, and in Pakistan border regions.”¹⁶ While a bare majority of Afghans continued to believe the country was moving in the right direction, the percentage had decreased from 77 percent in 2005 to 55 percent in 2006 and 54 percent in 2007.¹⁷

In a press conference with President Bush at Camp David in August 2007, Afghan President Hamid Karzai optimistically reported that the Taliban was “a force that’s defeated.”¹⁸ But this was plainly not the case. In private, the Afghan government’s own security assessments had been getting progressively more alarming.

As far back as 2004, Afghanistan’s National Threat Assessment warned that the drug trade, among other factors, was making “Afghanistan an attractive haven for international terrorist groups, organized crime and other extremists while also funding the continued, destabilizing presence of non-statutory armed forces.”¹⁹ The 2005 National Threat Assessment was even less rosy, finding that the security environment was declining and that “the primary source of political subversion comes from internal actors, non-statutory armed forces and their commanders…. [The] window of opportunity that the Government and International Community have to deliver security and improvements to the quality of life of ordinary Afghans is limited, before people become impatient.”²⁰ And Afghanistan’s 2006 National Security Policy noted: “Non-statutory armed forces and their commanders pose a direct threat to the national security of Afghanistan. They are a major obstacle to the expansion of the rule of law into the provinces.”²¹

U.S. intelligence assessments expressed similar alarm. In November 2006, the CIA reported that “the Taliban has built momentum this year. The level of violence associated with the insurgency has increased significantly and the group has become more aggressive than in years past.” It warned that the “Taliban almost certainly refocused its attacks in an attempt to stymie NATO’s efforts in southern Afghanistan.”²² Defense Intelligence Agency analysts reached a similar conclusion, deducing that levels of violence had hit an all-time high. One report, titled The Current Situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, was ominous: “If a substantial international military and Afghan security presence throughout the volatile Pashtun south and east is not established alongside credible civil administrations, central government control over these areas will be substantially restricted.”²³

United Nations assessments were similarly alarming: “The security situation in Afghanistan is assessed by most analysts as having deteriorated at a constant rate…. The Afghan National Police (ANP) has become a primary target of insurgents and intimidation of all kinds has increased against the civilian population, especially those perceived to be in support of the government, international military forces as well as the humanitarian and development community.”²⁴

In February 2006, Ambassador Neumann sent a cable to Secretary of State Rice offering the unfortunate news that “2006 was likely to be a bloody year in Afghanistan.” He warned that the Taliban had successfully regrouped in Pakistan, and neither the United States nor Pakistan had effectively targeted them in their border sanctuaries. The United States had also largely left alone Afghanistan’s lawless south, the Taliban’s traditional heartland. The United States military had some Special Operations Forces in Helmand and other provinces, but most of its resources were focused on counterterrorist operations in the east.²⁵ Unit commanders had been told not to use the word counterinsurgency in describing their operations, since they were only supposed to be conducting “counterterrorist” operations, in keeping with the national strategic guidance and an operational focus on fighting al Qa’ida.²⁶ The same thing was true for CIA personnel.²⁷

Alarmed at the violence, Neumann argued that the U.S. Congress should at least double the current aid to Afghanistan since, “if we take our hand off too early, it can still come apart on us.”²⁸ Neumann asked for approximately $600 million for the fiscal year 2006 supplemental budget, but he received only $43 million, of which $11 million was for debt reduction for Afghanistan.²⁹ He was outraged. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which vehemently opposed increased aid levels for Afghanistan, proved a major hindrance to funding. In his outbrief with President George W. Bush, Ambassador Neumann was blunt: “I would use a JDAM on OMB if I could,” referring to the joint direct attack munition, a guidance kit placed on the tail of a bomb that converted it from an unguided, or “dumb,” free-fall bomb into an accurately guided “smart” weapon. President Bush reportedly chuckled.³⁰

Frustrations with OMB were not limited to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. U.S. policymakers in Iraq were also frustrated with what L. Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, referred to as the petty “small-change struggle” with OMB bureaucrats.³¹ In a memo to Secretary Rumsfeld, for example, Bremer contended that the “assertion by OMB that it has authority over how Iraqi monies are used is an overreach of U.S. government authority.” OMB, he said, is “making efforts to speed up rehabilitation of the Iraqi economy more difficult and time consuming,” and he pleaded with Rumsfeld to “change this.”³² Rumsfeld had asked John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense under President Clinton, to go to Iraq with a team to assess the situation on the ground. In a private note to Rumsfeld, Hamre argued: “I was astounded to hear the constraints your low level folks live with to get money and contracts. It is taking up to 10 days for OMB to approve fund requests after you approve them.” He urged Rumsfeld to “take this opportunity to get OMB off your back now when the White House knows that we have problems in Iraq and need to give the CPA Administrator all the flexibility he needs.”³³

Epic Battles

The years 2006 and 2007 witnessed some of the most intense battles since the Taliban was overthrown in 2001. Fighting became so fierce that British soldiers had to fix bayonets for hand-to-hand combat in Helmand Province against well-equipped Taliban militants. Beginning in January 2006, troops from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) started to replace U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan. The British 16th Air Assault Brigade, later reinforced by Royal Marines, formed the core of the force in southern Afghanistan, along with troops and helicopters from Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. The initial force consisted of roughly 3,300 British soldiers, 2,500 Canadians, 1,963 Dutch, and forces from Denmark, Australia, and Estonia. Air support was provided by U.S., British, Dutch, Norwegian, and French combat aircraft and helicopters.

The British recognized the Taliban threat. “We underestimate, at our peril the resilience of the Taliban and its capacity to regenerate,” a British assessment acknowledged. “The Taliban gain influence and control of the population through coercion, intimidation, and their extensive tribal ties across Helmand.”³⁴

In early February 2006, Afghan forces, backed by U.S. warplanes, engaged in intense fighting in the Sangin district of Helmand Province. The battle began the evening of February 2, when approximately 200 Taliban fighters targeted an Afghan police convoy. American A-10 ground-attack aircraft and B-52 bombers and British Harrier jets supported Afghan ground forces over two days of fighting, which resulted in about twenty Taliban deaths and seven Afghan police and soldiers killed. On February 13, four U.S. soldiers were killed when their Humvee was hit by a remote-controlled bomb while they were patrolling with Afghan National Army forces in the southern province of Oruzgan. The patrol then came under attack from small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, forcing it to call in U.S. Apache helicopter and B-52 bomber support. On March 1, one U.S. soldier was killed and two were wounded in a clash with Taliban insurgents in Oruzgan, after a roadside bomb destroyed a U.S. vehicle and U.S. forces engaged the insurgents. A week later, another roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers in eastern Afghanistan.

In response to Taliban penetration of the east, U.S. and ANA forces launched Operation Mountain Lion on March 25, 2006, in Kunar Province, east of Kabul.³⁵ On June 15, 2006, more than 11,000 U.S., British, Canadian, and Afghan troops engaged insurgents in southern Oruzgan and northern Helmand Provinces during Operation Mountain Thrust. The mission was designed to eradicate Taliban penetration in these provinces and establish a secure environment in which reconstruction could begin. Prior to the operations, these provinces had seen little military presence. During June and July, there was heavy fighting between NATO and Taliban forces, with the Taliban exhibiting a high degree of coordination in their combat operations. Despite the reported killing of more than 1,000 Taliban insurgents and the capture of almost 400 more, the Taliban continued to exert a presence in these areas. In early August, the Taliban mounted a number of ambushes against NATO forces.

As in many other operations, the insurgent response to Operation Mountain Thrust was to flee from the area and prepare to fight another day.³⁶ This classic guerrilla tactic—especially against a more capable conventional adversary—was regularly used by mujahideen fighters during the Soviet War.

By the summer of 2006, the Taliban began to concentrate their efforts on southern Afghanistan—including Kandahar Province—in what would become one of the largest and most important battles of the war. “Truthfully, I was surprised by the resistance they put up,” said Canadian Major Geoff Abthorpe, commander of Bravo Company. “We came at them with what I perceived to be a pretty heavy fist.”³⁷ The southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand represented the Taliban center of gravity. Since several key Taliban leaders came from Kandahar, they had one of their greatest support networks there. The Canadian military, which had just deployed to Kandahar, had not engaged in serious ground combat since the Korean War; their focus had been on peacekeeping operations in the Balkans and other locations. But they were eager to fight.

“I know about all this cultural sensitivity stuff,” said Canadian Sergeant John May. “But I am here to fight. If those [Taliban] are going to set ambushes and IEDs, I am going to kill them. That’s my job.”³⁸

Operation Medusa

The Taliban had developed an important sanctuary in Panjwai and Zhare districts, located west of Kandahar City. The mujahideen had scored important victories there over the ill-fated Soviet 40th Army in the 1980s. Grapes and other fruit grew there, and the fields, vineyards, compounds, and ditches that dotted the landscape offered ideal defensive terrain for the Taliban, with a self-sustaining food supply.³⁹

The city of Kandahar was the urban hub for Operation Medusa. The terrain was marked by Highway 1, which ran northeast to Kabul and northwest to Herat, and Highway 4, which ran south to Quetta, Pakistan. Kandahar Airfield, the headquarters of NATO operations in southern Afghanistan and a former Soviet air base, sat along Highway 4 to the south of the city. Panjwai and Zhare districts lay to the west, and the Arghandab River sliced through the area. The bulk of the activity during Operation Medusa took place in what became known as the “Pashmul pocket,” situated next to the town of Pashmul.

In July 2006, Canada’s Task Force Orion, with roughly 1,200 soldiers, saw a sharp increase of Taliban activity in Panjwai district. The local Taliban, who had long relied on small-unit attacks and ambushes throughout the area, were starting to control ground. The Taliban had allied themselves with local Nurzai tribes in Kandahar.⁴⁰ On August 3, four soldiers were killed and ten were wounded near Pashmul in close fighting. Mao Zedong once wrote that insurgencies can be divided into three stages: (1) political preparation, (2) limited attacks, and (3) conventional war, typified by insurgents beginning to control territory and massing in large numbers. Lieutenant Colonel Omer Lavoie, commander of the Task Force 3–06 Battle Group, told his planning staff that this was “classic stage three of an insurgency.”

“Basically, they want us to become decisively engaged,” he said. No one, least of all the Canadians, had expected the Taliban to conduct conventional operations. Since 2002, the Taliban had used asymmetric tactics, such as ambushes and roadside bombs, to target NATO and Afghan forces. “I have to admit that this is not where I expected to be,” Lavoie explained. “For the last six months I trained my battle group to fight a counterinsurgency, and now find that we are facing something a lot more like conventional warfare.”⁴¹

Over the last two weeks of August, Taliban forces became increasingly aggressive. They ambushed several convoys and regularly mortared Patrol Base Wilson, about twenty-five miles west of Kandahar City. They appeared to be looking for a fight, hoping to draw Canadian forces into a pitched battle. One of their most provocative moves was to take control of Highway I in Kandahar, setting up checkpoints and threatening the city. A legitimate government does not permit an insurgent group to administer a major roadway. The Canadian Expeditionary Force Command asserted: “The securing of these routes…was a vital phase in [Operation] MEDUSA.”⁴² NATO intelligence reports indicated that hundreds of Afghan civilians were fleeing Kandahar on a daily basis in fear of the Taliban.⁴³

In an effort to roust the Taliban from one of their most important sanctuaries, the Canadian planning staff designed an effort to clear the eastern pocket of Panjwai district. The battle group they commanded consisted of three infantry companies, an artillery battery, a squadron of engineers, and an armored reconnaissance troop. Aerial reconnaissance assets monitored enemy movement when they moved in the open. By late August, a combined force of soldiers from the Canadian Task Force 3–06 Battle Group, Afghan National Army, United States, Dutch, and eventually Danish forces waited for H-hour—when the operation was set to begin. The Canadian brigade staff issued a warning to all noncombatants who lived in Panjwai to leave immediately. This left Taliban alone in the area, waiting for the fight they had surely been expecting.⁴⁴

Air operations commenced on September 2, 2006, while ground forces positioned themselves in a pincer formation north and south of the district. Canadian artillery, made up of Echo Battery, 2nd Regiment Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, fired hundreds of 155-millimeter rounds into the area of operations. Apache helicopters from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom fired rockets and 30-millimeter cannons. Harrier jets from Britain’s Royal Air Force and F-16 Falcons from the Royal Netherlands Air Force dropped 500-pound bombs, and B-1B Lancer bombers from the U.S. Air Force dropped precision-guided munitions. As the attack unfolded, Canada’s Charles Company, under the command of Major Matthew Sprague, positioned itself at Ma’sum Ghar, across the Arghandab River from Pashmul. They established a firing line looking northwest toward the “white schoolhouse,” a known Taliban strongpoint.⁴⁵ Bravo Company, under the command of Major Geoff Abthorpe, provided a screen in the north along Highway 1.

On September 3, Charles Company was ordered to cross the Arghandab River and move into Pashmul. Enemy resistance was stiff. The Taliban set up an ambush and destroyed several Canadian vehicles, killed four Canadian soldiers, and wounded nine in intense fighting. Explosions echoed across grape and pomegranate fields, and clouds of dust rose amid the greenery and mud houses. The Taliban used layered defensive positions with trenches and fought with recoilless rifles, mortars, RPG-7s, and machine guns.⁴⁶ Under supporting fire from artillery and with close air support directed by forward air controllers, Charles Company made a tactical retreat back to the original Ma’sum Ghar firing line. They left behind three damaged vehicles: a bulldozer, a Mercedes Benz G-Wagon, and a LAV III in the vicinity of the white schoolhouse.⁴⁷ The LAV III is an 8x8 wheeled vehicle that carries a 25-millimeter cannon and can reach top speeds of more than sixty miles per hour. It is vastly more rugged than the G-Wagon, a four-wheel sport utility vehicle also used in the field. Neither was a great loss, but the troops were unnerved by their retreat. On the same day, a British Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft had crashed, killing all on board. Despite these losses, aerial bombardment and artillery fire continued, along with fire from LAV IIIs and Coyote reconnaissance vehicles.

On September 4, close air support sorties engaged Taliban targets in the Pashmul pocket, including the white schoolhouse, which was leveled by a 500-pound bomb. That same day, Charles Company suffered another setback as a U.S. A-10 Thunderbolt mistakenly targeted Canadian forces, strafing the position of Charles Company with 30-millmeter high-explosive incendiary rounds. The attack killed Private Mark Graham, a member of Canada’s 4x400-meter relay team at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. “He was such a strong and sweet man,” his fiancé wrote in a statement after his death. “He had strong morals, values, ethics and they showed in everything he did.”⁴⁸ In addition, thirty Canadians were wounded that day, including several senior noncommissioned officers and the company commander, Major Sprague. A Board of Inquiry report convened by Canadian Expeditionary Force Command found that the U.S. pilot had lost his situational awareness. He mistook a garbage fire at the Canadian location for his target, without verifying the target through his targeting pod and heads-up display. The forward air controller reacted immediately to the friendly-fire incident, screaming, “Abort! Abort! Abort!” on his radio.⁴⁹

“I had been off to the side and heard the A-10 sound. I hit the ground, and when I got up I saw all the [injured] laying there,” said Corporal Jason Plumley.⁵⁰ An aerial medevac team rapidly arrived. In less than thirty-six hours, Charles Company had lost much of its leadership at the officer and noncommissioned-officer level. All four of its warrant officers had been either killed or wounded. Captain Steve Brown was suddenly in charge of a company that had a corporal acting as company quartermaster and a sergeant as company sergeant major. There was a lull in ground operations after the friendly-fire incident, and the north, along Highway 1, then became the main theater of operation.⁵¹

So-called friendly fire is an unfortunate reality on the battlefield. Two years earlier, U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman had been accidentally killed by his own platoon members in eastern Afghanistan. A long-haired, hard-hitting safety with the Arizona Cardinals in the National Football League, he held the franchise record of 224 tackles. Tillman turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract in the spring of 2002 to join the U.S. Army with his brother, Kevin. As he remarked the day after the September 11 attacks: “At times like this you stop and think about just how good we have it, what kind of system we live in, and the freedoms we are allowed. A lot of my family has gone and fought in wars and I really haven’t done a damn thing.”⁵²

But the circumstances of his death were contentious. Initial reports stated that Tillman was killed by hostile fire, but a month later the Pentagon notified the Tillman family that he had died because of friendly fire. The family alleged that the Department of Defense delayed the disclosure out of a desire to protect the image of the U.S. military, and a subsequent Pentagon investigation concluded: “Corporal Tillman’s chain of command made critical errors in reporting Corporal Tillman’s death,” and “Army officials failed to properly update family members when an investigation was initiated into Corporal Tillman’s death.”⁵³ A similar congressional report found “serious flaws” in the Pentagon’s investigation and suggested that “the combination of a difficult battle in Fallujah, bad news about the state of the war, and emerging reports about Abu Ghraib prison” may have created a motive to obfuscate the details of Tillman’s death.⁵⁴

With Canadian forces still reeling from the friendly-fire incident, five members of Bravo Company were injured on September 5, 2006, when they were hit by mortar fire in the Pashmul pocket while they were resupplying their armored vehicles. The Taliban had almost certainly been monitoring Canadian movements, and waited for an opportune time to strike. As forces were redeployed to the north, reconnaissance patrols were sent out almost daily. Intelligence reports noted that the artillery fire and air support, which had been unceasing since operations began, were taking a toll.⁵⁵ The Taliban found it difficult to resupply and maintain control. On September 6, Bravo Company breached the treeline that divided Canadian from Taliban territory. With the forward position established, they began a systematic move southward. They engaged in firefights, seized and cleared territory, and then waited for the next forward passage of lines. Troops from the Canadian Battle Group, a U.S. company drawn from the 10th Mountain Division, and Afghan National Army troops methodically cleared the compounds, houses, and fields of enemy forces.⁵⁶

By September 10, Canadian, Afghan, and other NATO forces had advanced deep into Taliban territory. Air support from U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets joined the attack from the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in the Indian Ocean. Engineers blew holes in the walls of buildings allowing soldiers to enter, and bulldozers opened routes through fields and vineyards.

“I thought I had some idea of what I was going to be going through,” said Canadian Corporal Jason Legros. “I figured I would be shot at a few times but I didn’t expect to be ambushed.”⁵⁷

Follow-On Operations

On September 13, Coalition forces had reached the Arghandab River. By September 17, NATO forces had cleared most of Panjwai. Estimates of insurgent dead were well into the hundreds, and hundreds more had attempted to flee to Helmand Province or to other pockets of Kandahar Province.⁵⁸ NATO forces in Kandahar followed Operation Medusa with reconstruction and development efforts. They provided emergency water, food, shelter, health care, and animal feed to local Afghans in the area of operations, and they assisted the return of locals who had fled.⁵⁹

But there were complaints from local villagers and human-rights organizations that civilians had been unnecessarily impacted. As Human Rights Watch wrote in a letter to NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, “during Operation Medusa, NATO troops killed large numbers of livestock and destroyed numerous vineyards that insurgents were using as cover…causing much economic damage to civilians and fostering resentment towards NATO troops.”⁶⁰ Human Rights Watch pointed out that NATO lacked a compensation program for Afghan families who suffered losses because of NATO operations, and the organization strongly urged a change in policy.

In tandem with Operation Medusa, approximately 4,000 Afghan and 3,000 U.S. troops initiated Operation Mountain Fury in September 2006 to defeat Taliban resistance in Paktika, Khowst, Ghazni, Paktia, and Lowgar Provinces in east-central Afghanistan. Fighting continued throughout that autumn and into December. During the early morning hours of December 15, NATO aircraft attacked a Taliban command post in Kandahar. The same day, aircraft began dropping three sets of leaflets over the region. The first warned the population of the impending conflict, the next was a plea for locals to turn their backs on the Taliban and support NATO, and the third consisted of an image of a Taliban fighter with a large “X” through it to warn Taliban to leave the area. During the days prior to the operation, Canadian soldiers held several meetings with tribal elders to discuss reconstruction efforts and persuade them to keep the Taliban out of the area. While en route to one of these meetings, a Canadian soldier from the Royal 22^e Régiment—the “Vandoos,” out of Quebec—stepped on a land mine. The soldier, Private Frederic Couture, suffered severe but non-life-threatening injuries and was transported to a military hospital.⁶¹

On December 19, limited offensive operations began against Taliban forces. A massive barrage of Canadian artillery and tank fire rained down on their positions. The barrage lasted for forty-five minutes and was supported by heavy machine-gun fire from Canadian .50-caliber guns. Shortly after the barrage ended, Canadian armored convoys set up a perimeter around the village of Howz-e Madad. Over the next few days, NATO forces secured several towns with little resistance from Taliban fighters. Near Howz-e Madad, a ten-square-kilometer area with mud-walled fortresses provided refuge to a larger group of Taliban fighters. NATO forces gave the surrounded fighters two days to surrender. After the forty-eight hours, the Taliban fired on the Canadian forces. Two rockets flew past Charles Company just south of Howz-e Madad. The Afghan National Army responded with a burst of machine-gun fire, but no one on either side took casualties. On January 5, a forty-five-minute firefight erupted between about twenty members of the Royal 22^e Régiment and a force of Taliban fighters about half that size near the village of Lacookhal, just south of Howz-e Madad, where the soldiers from the Royal 22^e Régiment had been looking for arms caches and Taliban. The Taliban used automatic rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. By the time the firefight ceased, at least two of the Taliban fighters had been killed. There were no Canadian or Afghan National Army casualties.

The year concluded with a controversial ceasefire between British troops in Musa Qala and the Taliban. British troops agreed to move quietly out of Musa Qala, and the Taliban agreed not to conduct attacks in the area. The two sides had thus far fought to a stalemate, with casualties on both sides. In a sense, the ceasefire allowed British forces to withdraw from a tenuous and undesirable situation. It was sanctioned by Muhammad Daud, governor of Helmand Province, and most tribal elders, who felt they could now exercise control over the Taliban themselves. But neithear Daud nor the tribal elders could prevent the return of insurgent fighters. The truce only succeeded in strengthening the Taliban’s penetration of northern Helmand. General David Richards, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, said at the time that the British deal turned northern Helmand into “magnets” for the Taliban.⁶² Apparently he was fuming about the deal. Several months later, a UN report concluded that the ceasefire allowed the Taliban “to move freely in the area.”⁶³

Back to Baghdad

U.S. government officials finally had begun to acknowledge the growing violence in Afghanistan. A 2007 National Security Council assessment of the war in Afghanistan concluded that wide-ranging strategic goals that the Bush administration had set in Afghanistan had not been met, even as Coalition forces scored significant combat successes against resurgent Taliban fighters. The NSC evaluation examined progress in security, governance, and the economy, but it concluded that only “the kinetic piece”—individual battles against Taliban fighters—showed substantial progress, while improvements in the other areas continued to lag. This judgment reflected sharp differences between U.S. military and intelligence officials on where the Afghan War was headed. Some intelligence analysts acknowledged the battlefield victories, but they highlighted the Taliban’s unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium-poppy cultivation, and the weakness of President Karzai’s government as signs that the war effort was deteriorating. While the military found success in a virtually unbroken line of tactical achievements, U.S. intelligence officials worried about a looming strategic failure.⁶⁴

But the war in Iraq continued to siphon off funds and attention. In an unusually frank admission in December 2007 before the House Armed Services Committee, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen observed that an American military stretched by the war in Iraq could only do so much in Afghanistan. “Our main focus, militarily, in the region and in the world right now is rightly and firmly in Iraq,” he noted. “It is simply a matter of resources, of capacity. In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.”⁶⁵

In addition, Secretary of Defense Gates initially blocked a push by the U.S. Marine Corps to move into Afghanistan. In December 2007, for example, Gates met at the Pentagon with General James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, to discuss a formal proposal that would shift Marine forces from Anbar Province in Iraq to Afghanistan. The proposal called for a Marine integrated “air-ground task force” of infantry, attack aircraft, and logistics to carry out the Afghanistan mission and build on counterinsurgency lessons learned by Marines in Anbar.⁶⁶ But senior Pentagon officials, including Gates, were concerned that reallocating resources to Afghanistan would jeopardize some of the fragile gains the U.S. military had made in Iraq in 2007. “The secretary understands what the commandant is trying to do, and why the commandant wishes to transition the Marine Corps mission to Afghanistan,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, “but he doesn’t believe the time is now to do that. Anbar is still a volatile place.”⁶⁷

A small contingent of U.S. Marines eventually deployed to southern Afghanistan, but it was only a token force. By then, insurgent groups led by the Taliban had mounted a challenge to NATO and the Afghan government.