The Only Thing Worth Dying For (10 page)

“That’s where a Pakistani general keeps regular office hours,” Hadley said, referring to a smaller building standing by itself fifty yards to the west. “He’s watching over us—making sure we’re not mounting an invasion.” He winked.

“Do the Pakistanis know Karzai is here?” asked Amerine.

“Negative. Besides you guys and the spooks, only four people at this base know Karzai is here. The Agency wants to keep it that way. The general over there—he
definitely
doesn’t know.”

Mag asked Hadley about the base’s security.

“There are two hundred and fifty Marines living in holes out there in the dirt, providing security for the base. Bless their hearts—we barely know they’re here. I’ll just ask that you guys stick to the roads in the neighborhood of your safe house.”

Hadley opened the door, and the Green Berets followed him down a hallway of white-painted bricks and cracked tile floors to the only open doorway. Inside, two scruffily bearded men dressed in khaki pants, fleece jackets, and hiking boots straight out of an L.L. Bean catalog sat talking together on metal-framed beds topped with thin mattresses and sleeping bags.
Spooks,
thought Mag as Rosengard introduced Amerine as the military adviser who would be working with Karzai.

“Good to meet you, skipper,” said the more muscular man, “Casper,” who looked to be about forty-five. The leader of the CIA’s only Pakistan-based Jawbreaker team with the intent to operate in southern Afghanistan, Casper had accompanied the Navy SEALs who’d evacuated Karzai from Afghanistan only hours before. Casper introduced the other, older, spook, “Charlie,” then told the men about the rescue and Karzai’s current status: asleep, with his seven supporters, at the other end of the safe house. “We’re here to facilitate your work with Karzai,” Casper concluded. “We’ve scheduled for you to meet him and his men tomorrow morning at ten.”

Facilitate?
thought Amerine.
What the hell does
that
mean?

It was still dark when Amerine awoke the following morning, put on desert camouflage pants and a brown T-shirt, and wandered down
the long hall of the safe house to orient himself, take a peek outside, maybe find the kitchen. A door suddenly opened up ahead and a thin, balding, middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed beard and a blanket wrapped around his shoulders stepped into the hallway and began to head in Amerine’s direction, seemingly deep in thought. As soon as he realized he wasn’t alone, the man straightened his posture, smiled, and continued toward Amerine, his hand outstretched. “Hello,” he said. “I am Hamid Karzai.”

“Good morning, I’m Jason Amerine,” said the captain, surprised at the Afghan’s appearance. In fact, Karzai looked more like Ben Kingsley in his movie role as Mahatma Gandhi than Amerine’s notion of an Afghan warlord.

“Very nice to meet you, Jason. We will be meeting again later this morning, I suspect?”

“Yes, ten
A.M.
I’ll see you then.”

With a smile and a slight bow, Karzai continued down the hall.

Amerine watched him walk away, thinking about the Big Fucking Knife in his rucksack and sensing that Hamid Karzai was not the kind of man to whom you would present a BFK.

Back in ODA 574’s room, Mag had just woken up when Amerine returned.

“How’s it going, sir?” asked Mag, shoving his sleeping bag into a stuff sack.

“Good,” said Amerine. “I just met our guerrilla leader.”

“Is he a badass?”

“Well…not exactly.”

Standing together in the conference room of the safe house, the Green Berets were a wall of camouflage and big smiles as the Afghans, led by Karzai, filed into the room. Each wore a well-tailored robe of a different color—tan, gray, midnight blue, burnt orange—while their feet were bare or strapped into severely worn sandals. To Mag they looked like biblical characters.

One had hennaed hair, the rusty color accentuating streaks of
gray at his temples. One was heavyset and exuberant, grinning cheerfully at everyone. Another handled a string of beads and stared at the ground. The youngest man and the last to enter stood out to Amerine: His jaw was set, his arms were crossed, his eyes were penetrating and fierce. He appeared to be in his late thirties, with a slender physique that wasn’t commanding, but Amerine suspected that in this group of tribal leaders, he was the one warrior.

The eight Afghans and six Green Berets settled onto plastic and metal chairs arranged in a circle while Rosengard remained in the background with Casper and two other spooks. Karzai introduced “Captain Jason” to his men in Pashto—the language of the Pashtun tribe—and Amerine greeted the Afghans, nodding to each, then directed his attention to Karzai and said, “We’re here to learn what it is that you want to accomplish in southern Afghanistan and how we can support you.”

Closing his eyes, Karzai raised his chin, drew in a deep breath, and exhaled. “That,” he said, opening his eyes, “is something I have waited a long, long time to hear. I am honored.” He nodded to each American in the room, coming back to Amerine.

“I would like to begin by telling you that without these men”—Karzai motioned to the tribal leaders—“I very likely would not have survived my journey from exile back into Afghanistan. I would not be here to humbly tell my story and convey to you some of the great hardships my country has suffered under the Taliban and the foreign terrorists who have made our country their home.

“There were four of us on two motorbikes, and none of us had a gun, or any weapons.” He described how they had pulled over to the side of the road as they neared the border and prayed. “We all knew the dangers, but I was the reason they were there, and so I felt that I needed to ask them if they were ready to be captured or killed. I told them that our chances to survive were much less than our chances for death.

“And these men, all of these men”—he again indicated the assembled Afghans—“watched their elders die and spent their own youth fighting the Russians for a land that no longer exists.”

Karzai spoke of his childhood memories: riding horses, flying
kites, playing games, eating grapes—“oh, the grapes in Kandahar are like no other grapes in the world”—then, coming out of his reverie, said, “These have been troubling times for Afghanistan: the foreigners, the terrorists, and the bad Taliban…. You have to understand that not all the people in the Taliban are bad. There are good men still among them, many who were forced to join the regime out of fear. If a young man refused recruitment, his family was killed, their bodies hung in trees on the streets where they lived. It did not take many examples like this to grow their army. These young men will be the first to lay down their weapons and join us.

“The Taliban began as a Pashtun movement in Afghanistan, then spread into Pakistan. Now the Pakistani Taliban have earned the reputation as the most cruel in the Afghan villages I visited. In Afghanistan, they are away from their own homes and villages and seem to carry out their atrocities more readily. They are trained to be terrorists in the most fundamental sense of the word: to become legendary for the creativity of the horrors they’re able to commit.”

Lowering his voice, Karzai said, “The Pakistani Taliban will be the last to lay down their arms, along with the foreign terrorists—they would all rather die.”

For nearly two hours Karzai recounted the story of his recent weeks in Afghanistan, evading the Taliban as he moved from the border town of Chaman northwest to Kandahar, then farther north to Tarin Kowt, stopping in villages along the way to hold secret meetings with tribal leaders and mullahs. In Tarin Kowt, the capital of Uruzgan Province, just north of Kandahar Province, he had stayed at the home of a mullah he knew from their years spent fighting the Soviets. The mullah had gathered four influential tribal leaders, one of whom asked, “Do you have the Americans with you? Are they behind you, as they are behind the Northern Alliance?” Karzai had shown him the satellite phone and said he had been promised support, though whether that meant ground forces or just supplies and weapons, he did not know.

Another tribal chief had held up leaflets dropped by American planes across Afghanistan, urging the populace to rise up. One was a cartoon of an Arab walking a mullah on a chain as if he were a dog,
with the caption: “Who really runs the Taliban? Expel the foreign rulers and live in peace.”

“You have a phone,” the leader had said. “Have the Americans bomb the Taliban command here in Tarin Kowt—we can tell them which buildings.”

“I cannot do that,” said Karzai.

“Then you will never win,” retorted the leader.

The mullah told Karzai that the Pashtun needed proof that the United States was behind them before they would rebel. “The people are sick of the Taliban; they will stand behind you. But the Taliban will fire their cannons, crush our homes, and send the flesh of our women and children into the trees. Our lives are not good—it is not the Afghanistan we remember—but it is still
life
. Get the Americans to come, and we will fight.”

The word of a mullah could be trusted, Karzai informed the Green Berets. “But pieces of paper do not stop bullets and rockets. Paper promises that fall from the sky cannot be trusted.” He explained that the Afghans were well aware of what happened in Iraq during the Gulf War, when the Shiites and Kurds believed the leaflets the Americans dropped urging them to rise up against Saddam Hussein. They did, and the Americans did not come. Saddam’s forces had retaliated by massacring the insurgents. “The Afghans in the south fear the same fate—they need to be assured that a powerful friend will stand with them and fight.”

Karzai spoke in English, translating his words into Pashto as he went around the circle, praising each of his countrymen. When he reached the man Amerine had pegged as a warrior, Karzai said, “Bari Gul is the youngster in this group, but do not consider his age a reflection of his experience or bravery. This man saved my life. As the Taliban pursued us into the mountains north of Tarin Kowt, it was Bari Gul, with just a few men, who covered our escape. When I called and you sent your helicopters to pick us up, he did not wish to leave the mountains of Uruzgan—he felt that he and his men could have kept fighting the Taliban off. He is the lion here, stuck in his cage, but he represents the Pashtun population.”

Karzai paused, as if catching his breath.

“Tarin Kowt is the capital of Uruzgan Province,” he said at last. “It is very remote but is considered the heart of the Taliban movement. Liberating Tarin Kowt will strike a demoralizing blow to the Taliban. If they cannot control Uruzgan, their credibility will unravel all the way to Kandahar. If we take Tarin Kowt, we rip out the heart of the Taliban.”

As Karzai spoke, Amerine began to wonder why the man had not received more support from the United States from the beginning. Osama bin Laden had been identified as the greatest threat to the United States years before 9/11, so it seemed that the CIA should have been laying the groundwork for an insurgency in anticipation of war, then stepping aside for the Special Forces teams to do their job as the combatants running the revolution. Unable to establish effective contacts inside the Pashtun tribal belt, however, the CIA had focused almost exclusively on the Northern Alliance. Now, out of desperation, the Agency had essentially procured a warm Pashtun body and was passing him off to the Green Berets to create a revolution from scratch.

For the first time, Amerine fully understood the magnitude of his mission: There was no master plan for Afghanistan. The entire military campaign for the southern half of the country had to be shaped by the first Americans to infiltrate the region—he and his fellow Green Berets from 5th Special Forces Group.

Two days after Amerine, Mag, and Alex left for Pakistan, the rest of ODA 574 was in purgatory at K2, having heard nothing from the captain. All Conrad would tell them was that Amerine and the others were still in Pakistan, which meant that JD, sick with a bad cold, was in charge. He was feeling nostalgic for home when Conrad offered him and the other men on the team a “morale call”: two minutes for a personal phone call, under supervision in order to protect operational security.

Since meeting his wife, Mi Kyong, in 1985, when he was on his first overseas assignment as an Army medical specialist at Camp Howze in South Korea, JD had been deployed an average of seven months out of the year. For the two years before ODA 574’s most recent deployment to Kazakhstan, however, he had taught at the Special Forces Selection and Qualifications Course at Fort Bragg, working normal hours and living in the nearby town of Hope Mills, North Carolina, with his family. He was able to coach his seven-year-old son Jesse’s flag football team and bonded with his eleven-year-old daughter, Cristina, over long talks on their porch. For the first time the Davis family experienced what life would be like once JD retired from the military.

Still, Mi Kyong was used to being alone with the kids for long stretches. She wasn’t used to receiving calls from her husband while he was deployed, even in peacetime, so she was shocked to hear his voice after she picked up the phone.

She immediately gave the phone to Jesse, beginning to cry when she saw how happy he was to hear his father on the line. When Jesse handed the phone back, she tried to suppress the trembling in her voice as she asked JD if there was anything he needed.

“Besides you,” he said, “I sure would love some Rice Krispies Treats.”

Mi Kyong spent the morning making the bars, wrapping them in wax paper, foil, and plastic, and packing them into a box with beef jerky, cold medicine, a Harley-Davidson magazine, and the most recent family photo she could find. Then she drove the package to Fort Campbell and hand-delivered it to a warrant officer at 5th Group, who promised her that it would be shipped to JD as soon as possible.

In Uzbekistan, JD returned to the team’s tent and finally wrote his death letter to his wife and children.

For two days the Green Berets holed up in the safe house in Pakistan, learning from Karzai about southern Afghanistan and formulating a workable plan to take Tarin Kowt—a town of 10,000 located approximately seventy-five miles north of Kandahar.