Not a Good Day to Die (66 page)

Unfortunately, when Haidar’s tanks rolled into the valley, the first thing they did was fire at the Rakkasans on the mountainside. A T-55 crew put a main gun round right through a 2-187 Infantry pup tent. Fortunately for all concerned, no one was hurt and frantic radio calls soon corrected the mistake. “That’s exactly why we wanted to pull out of there, because we had not trained with these guys,” Larsen, the Rakkasan executive officer, said.

Meanwhile, Blaber was rounding the southern end of the Whale in an SUV with Zia’s troops. This time the Afghans were given free reign to fight as they saw fit. It made a big difference. “They were on fire at this point because they were actually using their own tactics,” Blaber said. Everywhere the AFO commander looked, he saw friendly Afghans manning crew-served weapons on the high ground. “You just knew that whole valley was clear,” he said.

This was it, the moment of official victory for the allied forces in Anaconda. It was something of an anticlimax. The battle had been all but over for a week. Rather than the original concept of Zia’s men confronting Al Qaida troops in the villages, the U.S. operators and Afghan militiamen drove through ghost towns on the valley floor. Using the grid references passed to him by his teams, Blaber went to several sites at which his operators had directed air strikes. The bombs had done their job. He photographed over thirty enemy corpses.

Blaber and his men discovered five working artillery pieces (four 122mm howitzers and a 152mm howitzer) in the riverbeds, as well as an explosives laboratory. But what they didn’t find were people. There was no sign of life, and no sign of civilian death either—none of the corpses in the villages were those of women or children. “I didn’t even see a dead animal,” Blaber said. No one fired at them. The enemy was gone. But where?

Many never made it out of the Shahikot alive. But just how many were killed is hard to nail down. Senior U.S. commanders described numbers of enemy dead as high as 800 publicly and over a thousand in private. However, they offered no evidence to back up their claims. “Ginger Pass,” the gorge just south of Takur Ghar, was a key logistics route into the valley for Al Qaida forces and hence one of the most heavily bombed parts of the Shahikot. Yet a walk through the gorge on March 18, the last day of the operation, yielded no tangible proof that anyone had been killed there. The sides of the pass were scorched brown and black by high explosives. Shards of shrapnel big enough to cut a man in two littered the ground. There was even an unexploded bomb in the waters of the creek that ran through the gorge. But there were no corpses, bloodstains, shallow graves, or body parts. Bodies were found in other parts of the Shahikot, but usually in ones and twos and threes, not dozens. Some of this can be explained by good guerrilla tactics—no irregular army leaves its dead in the field of battle if it can help it, precisely because removing the bodies confuses its enemies about how many they have killed. But it is hard to imagine 600 or 700 bodies being spirited out of the Shahikot without anyone noticing—even America’s imperfect eyes in the sky. (Interestingly, estimates of enemy dead in the Shahikot tended to rise the further the officer making the estimate was from the battle.) Some observers put the numbers as low as the double digits. But there are enough firsthand accounts of enemy fighters being killed—and enough bodies—to suggest this is too low. A better estimate—and one more in keeping with the number of bodies and body parts that were found, and the numbers mentioned in Al Qaida documents obtained by U.S. intelligence—is between 150 and 300. Given the size of the enemy force in the Shahikot—estimated by U.S. commanders in the first week of the operation as upwards of 1,000—one is forced to conclude that at least as many Al Qaida fighters escaped the Shahikot as died there.

ON
March 13 Blaber again drove south from Gardez to the Shahikot, this time to drop off India Team, who he wanted to track the fleeing enemy. Speedy again put his hunting skills to good work. Following footprints, trash, and discarded clothes, he soon picked up the trail, which traced the route that AFO had long suspected the enemy would take from the Shahikot: east through Ginger Pass or the next gorge down into the Upper Shahikot Valley. From there some enemy fighters moved east to Obastay. Others traveled south to Celam Kac, before following a track southeast through the mountains to the Neka Valley, about seventeen kilometers southeast of the Shahikot. The Afghan forces who were supposed to be watching these routes with U.S. Special Forces had apparently abandoned their positions. “There was no one to stop the Al Qaida from escaping Shahikot south, southeast, or southwest,” a special ops source said. From Neka, the guerrillas took old mujahideen routes into Pakistan, where they headed for Miram Shah, a wild town in the North West Frontier Province where Jalalluddin Haqqani had made his headquarters during the 1980s. Signs of distress India discovered along the way—a bloody hat here, a used bandage there—led AFO to refer to the route as “the trail of tears.”

Over the next several weeks AFO and CIA personnel moved through the towns and villages on this route, talking to local leaders. “We really got a great forensic autopsy of what happened,” Blaber said. The warlords and tribal elders told the Americans that Al Qaida had been building up for months in the area, preparing a spring offensive. The locals said they were glad Al Qaida—” the Arabs”—had left, because they treated their hosts poorly.

But “trail of tears” or no, the U.S. failure to fight a successful battle of encirclement in the Shahikot meant several hundred experienced Al Qaida fighters—Arabs, Uzbeks, and Chechens—escaped to Pakistan. Undoubtedly some senior enemy leaders were among them. Just how senior is a matter of conjecture.

The only enemy leader known to have been killed in the Shahikot was Saif Rahman Mansour, an Afghan who led the Taliban force in the area. He may have been the banner-carrying leader killed by an air strike called in by Juliet on D-Day. By contrast, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan leader Tohir Yuldeshev was known to have slipped the United States’ clutches in the Shahikot. Over the next two years the couple of hundred Uzbeks he commanded who made it out formed the core of the Al Qaida force in the North West Frontier Province’s tribal areas. Yuldeshev became the day-to-day commander of Al Qaida’s skirmishes with Pakistani security forces.

No intelligence surfaced that bin Laden had returned to the Shahikot since December. But there were persistent, although unconfirmed, reports that his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been in the Shahikot, and might have been wounded before making his escape. In this regard it is interesting to note that on March 6, an Australian SAS team covering the Arme Khwar stream about eight kilometers south of the Shahikot saw thirteen armed personnel moving through the area. The Aussies said the force consisted of an advanced element of four men, two to three men providing flank security on each side, and a main body of five men. In the center of the group walked a man with a cane who appeared older than the others. “All twelve security personnel wore black balaclavas,” said a report of the episode. The Australians called in an A-10 strike on the group, which split into two elements. The A-10 attacked, but, frustratingly, no allied forces were able to conduct any bomb damage assessment. There were unconfirmed reports Zawahiri suffered a head wound during this period. If so, he survived and was still releasing audiotapes rallying the faithful to Al Qaida’s cause in 2004.

THE
Pentagon declared Operation Anaconda over on March 18, but in reality it had been all but done for well over a week. The Rakkasans returned to Kandahar. But for AFO, there was to be no heading back to the relative luxury of Bagram or Kabul. The Delta operators were already hunting the enemy ever closer to the Pakistan border. Blaber was quietly agitating for cross-border missions. To him the Pakistan border already resembled the Cambodian border during Vietnam conflict—a barrier to U.S. troops behind which their enemies found succor.

It was going to be a long war.