Victory Point (11 page)

A known militant who based his efforts out of the Korangal Valley, Najmudeen held the distinction of having his name on a list of the most wanted Islamic extremist fighters not just in AO Trinity, or in RC-East, but in all of Afghanistan. SOF had been trying for over eighteen months to catch him through a number of failed direct-action operations. Cooling and Priddy soon reasoned that the best way to take him was not through quick hard-hit raids, but through a consistent campaign of pressure, forcing him over time to come forward. SOF commanders scoffed at this plan; they believed that Najmudeen could only be killed or captured, and that the militant would never surrender or pledge allegiance to the new government of Afghanistan. But in early April, CJSOTF-A Command jaws hit the floor when they learned the news that near the town of Nangalam, deep in the Pech River Valley, Najmudeen met Captain Jim Sweeney, India Company commander, halfway across a bridge, stating to Jim, “Welcome, my friend.” The battalion’s continuous platoon-level presence in the Korangal Valley over the course of three harsh winter months—an uncomfortably austere, drawn-out, and downright unglamorous mission (particularly when compared to SOF direct-action raids)—had forced Najmudeen to live in a series of small caves, where he fell gravely ill and lost all options but surrender. Weeks of subsequent debriefing yielded reams of actionable intelligence from the former militant, intel vital for future operations—including those ⅔ would undertake within a matter of weeks.

In late March, after 3/3’s operational ingenuity had led to success and subsequent COIN progress, members of ⅔’s predeployment site survey arrived, including Colonel MacMannis, Tom Wood, and Scott Westerfield. As Westerfield dug into the intelligence-gathering side of things and Wood worked with Priddy to gain a full understanding of the way 3/3 developed joint operations with SOF, MacMannis realized that while there would be a change of battalions, the operational tempo must remain consistent. As soon as ⅔’s main element arrived in early June, they would prepare to launch a battalion-size operation against the greatest remaining threat in the region. And Scott Westerfield would spend the following months identifying that threat.

3/3 had achieved success not just through operational ingenuity, but through consistency—keeping the pressure on the bad guys even through the dead of winter. Because it was now primarily a COIN fight, MacMannis felt it was far better to continue to coerce the enemy out of the hills and onto the government of Afghanistan’s side than to take them on kinetically. But with the spring thaw coming, the enemy was undoubtedly going to force the Marines to put rounds downrange, and with the operational model set forth by 3/3, the Island Warriors would have a full spectrum of opportunities open to them to win the fight.

4

M
arking the final stretch of their Afghan tour with yet two more successful battalion-level operations in the wake of
Spurs,
3/3 maintained its vigorous tempo straight through to the bitter end of their OEF deployment. But while the battalion’s pace and outlook remained rock solid, the command structure under which the Marines of 3/3 stood in Afghanistan changed just weeks before ⅔ rolled in to replace them—and changed in a way that would dramatically affect the operational construct that Cooling and Priddy had developed and that ⅔ looked to adopt. New commanders replaced not one or two, but all three levels of command above 3/3 in Afghanistan, with Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry taking the reins of CFC-A from David Barno, Major General Jason Kamiya taking over CJTF-76 from Olson, and just two weeks before 3/3 officially handed over authority to ⅔, Colonel Patrick Donahue of the 82nd Airborne (known in-country as Task Force Devil) assuming command of RC-East from Gary Cheek. And while Donahue and his staff would ensure a smooth transition for ⅔, working to provide all types of support from intel, to aviation, to artillery for the Marines for both their COIN campaign as well as kinetic ops, Major General Kamiya, after assuming command of CJTF-76 in mid-March, seemed to favor an operational balance weighed less heavily on the counterinsurgency fight and more on aggressive counterterror missions. Further influencing the way 3/3 (and soon thereafter ⅔) would be able to plan and undertake operations, a new CJSOTF-A commander took over—one who sought strict adherence to USSOCOM doctrine—doctrine stating that SOF teams could operate with complete independence of conventional forces—and never “for” them (or their operations)—although SOF could be supported by conventional units. And while Olson had praised the operational model in which 3/3 and SOF worked together—and the SOF units themselves found the arrangement to work excellently for them—Kamiya seemed to agree with the new CJSOTF-A commander. Furthermore, and of equal significance, Kamiya sought a greater focus on the Tora Bora region (roughly seventy miles to the southwest of the Pech and Korangal Valley areas), where he felt that forces under his control should pursue direct-action counterterror campaigns, necessitating that 3/3 Marines reduce their presence in the Korangal in order to push into the Tora Boras—at the likely cost of allowing extremist forces to more aggressively move into and around the important corner of the Hindu Kush, virtually assuring a retrogression of the stability 3/3 had worked so hard to achieve in that area.

In mid-March, 3/3 kicked off Operation
Mavericks,
which the battalion planned and executed as an analogue of
Spurs
. Utilizing Navy SEALs, the Marines focused on villages in northern Laghman province, destroying an extensive al-Qaeda cave network, capturing eighteen suspected insurgents and terrorists, and undertaking extensive humanitarian relief efforts to help locals during a spate of devastating floods.
Mavericks
once again proved that operations planned with careful, detailed SOF-conventional-forces integration could yield outcomes often greater than the sum of the participating units’ capabilities. Operation
Celtics
followed in May, its latter phases focusing Marines on the Tora Bora region—as Kamiya had ordered. But no targets could be found—and no confirmed target list had been passed to 3/3 from their higher command levels. Meanwhile, enemy activity in the Korangal Valley steadily burgeoned as the Marines reduced their presence there to support
Celtics
and winter gave way to summer.

And while 3/3 continued their run of successes throughout the spring of 2005—killing, capturing, and forcing the surrender of numerous insurgent leaders and their henchmen—other, lower-level operators who aspired to regional and global Islamic extremist notoriety sought to fill the voids. Mortar, rocket, and IED attacks (most inaccurate and ineffective, but menacing nonetheless) grew in frequency in the spring throughout the Pech Valley region, undertaken by a few of what intel revealed to be small-time operators based out of the Korangal Valley area. Having been apprised by 3/3’s intel officer of a series of target individuals through both HUMINT and signals intelligence (SIGINT), Drew Priddy set out to develop another operation of the
Spurs
model in which 3/3 would work with Navy SOF to capture or kill the insurgents responsible for the recent “spring thaw” attacks and henceforth work to further stabilize the Korangal, the hypocenter of insurgent and terrorist activity in the Kunar province.

In developing the mission’s foundation, Priddy contacted Navy SOF (NAVSOF), known in RC-East as Task Force Blue, aka the SEALs and their direct, organic support—in this case members of SEAL Team 10 and their attached units. With the successes 3/3 had attained by working with NAVSOF in
Spurs
and
Mavericks
in mind, Priddy felt confident that he and TF Blue’s chief planner could formulate an op that would clear the Korangal of the identified targets and stabilize the region with Marine presence, interdicting other budding extremist elements from establishing new toeholds there. Priddy’s Task Force Blue equivalent, Lieutenant Commander Erik Kristensen—who hadn’t yet worked with Priddy but who coincidentally graduated with him in the same Naval Academy class in 1995—seized the opportunity to work with 3/3, and he and Priddy, communicating by phone and secure e-mail, immediately began to build a ‘shell’ of an operation that at that point had the tentative working name of
Stars,
after the Dallas Stars professional hockey team. The two planned
Stars
in the same vein as
Spurs
and
Mavericks
: share intel, vet a specific target list, kick off with NAVSOF “shaping” the objective through reconnaissance and surveillance; then, as Marines conduct a wide cordon of the area of interest, a SEAL direct-action team takes down those targets that NAVSOF has positively identified in the first phase of the mission. NAVSOF then exfils, and Marines continue “presence operations,” undertaking humanitarian assistance and MEDCAP missions.

On 14 May, ⅔’s advanced echelon (ADVON) arrived in Afghanistan; one hundred strong, the ADVON preceded the arrival of the battalion’s main element by just a few weeks. And as the newly on-deck Marines jumped into the faraway world of eastern Afghanistan, Cooling, MacMannis, and Donahue agreed that having Marines of ⅔ participate in
Stars
would help transition them from training to real-world combat operations in one clean sweep—and keep with MacMannis’ desire to maintain a consistent op tempo for the region during the turnover period. Furthermore, the Marines knew that during the spring thaw, fresh fighters would begin flowing into the region from Pakistan through the porous border, necessitating an even more vigilant presence. They would unleash
Stars
in early June of 2005, just as the main element of ⅔ would begin rolling into Afghanistan.

But in late May, the ongoing intel feed that drove the
Stars
concept and defined its specifics fell off the map—just disappeared. “The ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] in the Korangal is just unmatched, just amazing,” Drew Priddy told Tom Wood shortly after Wood’s arrival. “As soon as a single Marine enters the valley—or even passes by its mouth—every bad guy knows what’s going on, all the way up to the highest reaches of the Korangal. And then they just scatter, just vanish, probably back into Pakistan—and the intel hits die.” Tom quickly grasped the operational situation in the region once he was in-country, being thoroughly briefed by Priddy on the most effective methods of developing missions.
Stars
was out as a formal operation, but the quick-thinking and determined operations officer resolved to formulate a new mission—⅔’s first battalion-level op—that would use the
Stars
shell as a foundation. The battalion just needed specific intel on the whos, the wheres, and the whens to snap the plan into shape and merge the Marines of ⅔ into the fluid, uninterrupted op cycle Cooling and 3/3 had established and that MacMannis looked to have ⅔ seamlessly maintain.

That job fell squarely on Westerfield’s shoulders. Having absorbed the intel that 3/3 had been feeding him in the months prior to ⅔’s arrival, the boyishly enthusiastic intel officer knew that determining even the most basic targeting attribute—the
who
—had proven to be more complex than any that the United States had ever faced. The enemy throughout Afghanistan—in particular in the Pech, Korangal, and surrounding valleys—couldn’t be defined in monolithic terms like the Nazis, or the Imperial Japanese, or even Saddam Hussein’s forces. Westerfield knew the enemy of the region not as broad-based and cohesive, but as an amorphous patchwork of “bad guys”—leftover Taliban, Taliban aspirants, al-Qaeda foreign fighters, a multitude of flavors of independent Islamic extremists (primarily foreign, but some domestic), and even some semiorganized criminals. All, however, shared two common threads: pursuit of regional instability for their own gain, and extremist Islamic beliefs—beliefs, Westerfield understood, that the bad guys could use to manipulate the deeply pious local populace in such places as the Korangal, coercing villagers to join their ranks, or at the very least, provide a base of support for their insurgent and terrorist efforts. But to know this enemy required that Westerfield not just glean everything relevant from classified intel reports, but
see
that intel through the lens of Afghanistan’s history, in particular, through those historical elements most relevant to ⅔’s fight: the Soviet-Afghan War and its aftermath, which shaped contemporary Afghanistan and the enemy that American forces would face head-on during the invasion of 2001 and subsequent years.

Destitute, depopulated in many places—crushed throughout—Afghanistan could hardly be called a country by the time the last Soviet military convoy rumbled across the Amu Darya. The greatest losers of the war, of course, weren’t the Soviets, but the Afghan people, many of whom weren’t even living in Afghanistan anymore, but in squalid refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan’s mosaic of humanity had been shattered, not just by the inhumane Soviets, but after the war by those factions that had beaten the Russian Bear into retreat. Ever-more-extreme waves of influence ebbed, flowed, and sometimes crashed upon the region as the country spiraled into civil war—and Westerfield knew that these external forces influenced the Kunar perhaps more than any other part of Afghanistan, because of the province’s location along the Pakistani border near Peshawar—an influence that sustained the insurgent stronghold of the Korangal and surrounding valleys that the Marines faced.

The ISI had waged a masterpiece of a shadow war in the 1980s, coordinating the seven mujahideen parties to achieve the strategic short-term aims of Pakistan, the Saudi Arabian government, and the United States without allowing restive party leaders and their power-hungry commanders on the ground to tear at one another’s throat (not too much, at least). But as tight a lasso as the ISI held around the mujahideen, the Pakistanis didn’t command a total monopoly on the anti-Soviet efforts in Afghanistan. “Freelancers,” hailing primarily from Saudi Arabia, but also from Kuwait and other Arab states, set up shop in Peshawar, looking to influence the region through an array of mechanisms, from recruiting mujahideen aspirants and training them to fight the Red Bear, to funding hard-line Salafist madrassas. Well financed, either by their families or by benefactors in their home countries, those at the helms of these groups commanded small numbers of foot soldiers, many of whom had been prisoners in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and were conveniently released early to fight (and die) for the jihad in Afghanistan—a place about which many of these ex-prisoners and general miscreants knew nothing, even its location on a world map. Afghan Arab leaders easily manipulated those of the lower ranks, who were often impoverished and uneducated (save for their extremist indoctrination), emotionally leveraging their ignorance—a standard and very effective practice for terror and insurgent ringleaders.