It was almost a classic hammer and anvil operational design that works well against large, conventional units who wear uniforms, but against insurgents who work in cells of 2-6 men and do not wear uniforms, it fails to deliver results comparable to the scale involved.  It is like trying to kill a fly by hoping it will land on an anvil so it can be smashed by a sledge hammer.

One of the books on the list of recommended reading for Army Officers is 'The Long Long War: The Emergency in Malaya 1948-1960' by British Brigadier General Richard L. Clutterbuck. Reading Clutterbuck is like reading the history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but written in 1966.

Clutterbuck has clear opinion on large scale operations Oqab Bahar:
"The predilection of some army officers for major operations seems incurable. On arrival in Malaya, they would address themselves with chinagraphs to a map almost wholly green except for one red pin. 'Easy,' they would say. 'Battalion on the left, battalion on the right, battalion blocking the end, and then a fourth battalion to drive through. Can't miss, old boy.' So a thousand long-suffering lieutenants, sergeants and privates would be launched on an operation described by some name as 'hammer and anvil' or 'splitting the disc' or 'rabbit hunt'...or... launch their units into the jungle in battalion strength--either in giant encirclement operations when a[n] [insurgent] camp was known to be in the area, or in wide sweeps based on no information at all. Neither of these types of operations had any success."

In my first conversation with CPT Carter his prediction of the mission was similar to what Clutterbuck would predict with one caveat.  "We are so close to the Pakistan border, it is too easy for them."  Anarchy would be too tempting of a bait to turn down, but to get to their position on the border Anarchy would have to traverse 38 kilometers of  Afghanistan's roughest and most precarious terrain to old COP Spera.

"Only one unit made the trip before, and took them five days," said Carter.  Operation Oqab Bahar was only planned for six days.  Another unit tried to make the run to COP Spera but turned back after getting ambushed in the first narrow gorge.

On the maps hanging in the Squadron operations center, the route from Camp Clark, Anarchy's home base in the densly populated Shembowat area 14 km west of Khowst city, to COP Spera is clearly marked and code named as if it were a normal road.  In reality it is mostly river beds of the Sur Kukh and Mir Tsaper, traveseable only in the dry seasons, and a winding logging trail over a  6,000 foot high pass with 500 foot shear cliff drop offs.

"Just keep looking out the windshield," said PV2 John Boehle.  "When you look out the side window and all you see is tree tops and blue sky, is when you get scared."   Boehle, 20, who grew up in Ohio just joined Anarachy and drives an MRAP All Terrain Vehicle that looks like hybrid of B-movie sci fi and a monster truck rally.  "I've been four wheeling, mudding but never rivers and water falls."
According to the mission design of CJTF-101, Anarchy's movement south and sweeps through villages would push the enemy into Task Force Curahee's kill zone.  The primary enemy in Khowst is the Haqqani network founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani who got his start fighting against the Afghan government in the 1970s and made his name as one of the most effective Mujahideen Commanders fighting the Soviets in the 1980s.

At his war-fighting peak, Haqqani was able to completely blockade the city of Khowst from the Soviets.  During the Soviet's Operation Magistral, Haqqani's fighters held off 28,000 Soviet and Afghan troops in a stand up fight for almost a month and half as they attempted to break though his lines in the mountains and reopen the Khowst/Gardez highway.
Haqqani's network is a shadow of its former self.  It's current strong hold is in Miranshah, Pakistan and only slunks from village to village through Spera, stages the occasional spectacular suicide attack and its only effort on the highway is to extort construction contractors and workers.  US Forces routinely drive the same route the Soviets had to hammer open and can move anywhere, on any road to any village. 

The first village Anarchy moved through was the terrace farming community of Magarah.

"Really, you should try the goat milk chai.  This is the best I've ever had," said Staff Sgt Bunch.

At dawn Anarchy's blue platoon moved into Magarah to search for weapons and explosives and talk to any adult men they could find.  The search went fast, the houses were small and with few furnishings and like most rural areas, the adult men were gone leaving only kids, women and one old man who insisted we have some goat milk chai.

In the Pashto tribal code of hospitality a visitor must be offered tea and the visitor really should drink it, lest he offend the host.  Usually it is black tea with sugar and boiled long enough to be safe for westerners to drink.  The goat milk chai presents a whole new threat level to the gastro intestinal tract of an American used to eating MREs or food from an military chow hall.

The recipe for goat milk chai is pretty simple.  Add just enough water to a kettle to boil tea in and add sugar.  Bring to a boil over an open fire and add more sugar and water.  Milk the goat.  Add fresh goat milk to the tea, mix in cinnamon, a ground clove, ground pine nut and more sugar.  Bring to a boil and serve in an oversized shot glass. It is the fresh squeezed milk that makes it taste so good.

Magarah's economic activity is the terrace farming of wheat, raising small herds of livestock and logging of pine trees.  Most of their work goes to producing enough to feed themselves.  A few of the houses had solar panels given out and installed by western development organizations or military Provisional Reconstruction Teams.  There were a few electric lights, but no TVs, satellite dishes or radios.  If the few electric lines and solar panels were removed, one might not be able guess what century he was in.

The soldiers of Blue platoon sat, drank and smoked with the old man.  It was the typical mud wall they were used to encountering.  The old man says there are no bad guys here now, they all come from Pakistan, they pass through here and make us shelter and feed them, they tax the wheat harvest and lumber.  The usual wikipedia type answers.  The old man was not a malik, just an old man who made some great tasting chai.  It would take repeated contacts over months to find who was really in charge of the family and community.

CPT Carter, who is more than used to the mud-wall routine, was surprised how well some of the discussions went.
"They were very quick to name one of our Troop's top five targets," Carter said.  "[omitted] killed five people who he suspected of working with the coalition."

A lot of information and reports of insurgent activity were old, the villagers talked about insurgents coming through last spring.  Carter and other officers attribute the reduction in enemy activity to a lack of financing.  Turmoil in the Arab countries has a lot of donors holding on to their assets cutting down the size and volume of contributions to the armed jihad movement, but that is just one factor, the other is an unintended positive blowback in the reduction in financing for development projects.

Since 2002 the international community has pumped billions of dollars into development projects in Afghanistan.  Taliban, Haqqani and other enemy networks have been able to tap into that cash by taxing and extorting local contractors and even at times using straw men to get contracts and using the profits to finance insurgent activity.  The most creative insurgent leaders would get cash from the coalition for a project, complete the project and then make sure the Taliban got the credit instead of the Afghan government or ISAF.

The global economic recession has curtailed a lot of aide and development projects and cut into the ability of the insurgents to pay for professional fighters.  CPT Carter says the insurgents are now down to using highway robbery, holding up merchants who go to Gardez or Khowst city to restock their inventory.  The Taliban of the 1990s was known for enforcing law and order and getting rid of the warlords who charged tolls on the roads and extorted local merchants.  The Haqqani network performed a similar of regulating the street criminal activity, while consolidating the upper level rackets for themselves.  The Taliban of today could be evolving into little more than a band of thugs.

The upper level leadership of insurgent groups like the family of Jalaluddin Haqqani is motivated primarily by power and money with Islam coming in a distant second.  The Haqqinis want to control the old Loya Paktia with its timber industry, emerald, ruby, chromite and marble deposits and trading routes. The cadre of professional fighters with technical expertise in bomb making, small unit tactics and using rockets and mortars believe in the cause, but they also believe in getting paid.  Even the lowest level Taliban fighters are paid slightly more than their equivalents in the Afghan Army.  As the funds dry up, the only pool of potentials left are true believers in the cause, but even they have to have cash.

In his book "The Cash Nexus", British historian Niall Ferguson details the importance of money to war and quotes Cicero:  Nervos belli, pecuniam infinitum, the sinews of war are unlimted money.  But the French writer Balzac probably summed it up best, "Most important of all, success in war depends on having enough money to provide whatever the enterprise needs."

The vaunted Mujahideen leaders 1980s like Haqqani were always scrambling for funds to pay for their fighters.  Al Qaida, when it was in the Sudan, had a payroll system.  Freedom fighters and idealouges still need to get paid and in 2008-09 when project financing was at its peak, the number of attacks attributed to Haqqani went up.

It could turn out that doing less development and choking off the Taliban and other insurgent network's finances was the solution all along and that USAID and the Provisional Reconstruction Teams were unwittingly the Taliban's strongest allies.

After the goat milk breakfast, the Soldiers loaded up in the MATVs and moved deeper into the mountains where loyalty is first to ones family and village, then to the tribe.  Afghanistan, as a republic and nation, is merely a vague notion to the people who live in the remote regions of the Hindu Kush.

The Zadran tribe, the tribe of the Haqqini family of insurgents belongs to, dominates the Spera district.  Families of Waziris, relatives of the infamous brigands of Waziristan in the tribal areas of Pakistan, also dot the district.

In 1815 British diplomat Mountstuart Elphinstone wrote of the Zadrans in his massive survey of Afghanistan, "There can be little or no government, since a powerful person can seize the children of a weak one and sell them for slaves.  They are remarkable for their disgusting vices, and indeed there is nothing to praise in their manners...the Moollahs (Mullahs)...have great power, which they do not fail to abuse."  The analysis hasn't changed much in 195 years.

In Afghanistan tribes split and subdivide frequently, but there are two major tribes of Afghan Pashtuns, the Durrani and the Ghazili.  The Zadran and Waziri tribes fall loosely under the Ghazili umbrella.
President Karzai is a member of the Durrani tribe that has almost always ruled Afghanistan.  The Ghazili "were in former times by far the most celebrated of Afghauns," Elphinstone wrote.  "In the beginning of the last century [18th century] this tribe alone conquered all of Persia."  The Ghazilis chafe at playing the second chair and staged major rebellions in 1801 and 1802, 1959 and again in 1975.  The last rebellion was the one Jalaluddin Haqqani cut his teeth in.

The Haqqini network is the primary insurgent group operating in Spera but operating would be the wrong word, mostly they just pass through Spera to more lucrative and target rich areas.  The Timber industry of Spera is easily taxed and though the hills are rich with veins of ruby and emerald and marble could be quarried, there are no large, organized mining operations.  Once COP Spera shut down, there was no real need for the insurgents to have a full time presence in the District, another example of how a war can feed on itself as US Soldiers bring the war with them wherever they go.
"It is a double edged sword," Carter said referring to the situation Afghan villagers find themselves in.  "They like seeing us...we provide security for them...but at the same time they don't because they know if we're around they're in danger.  There is a danger of the insurgents attacking us."  And the villagers being caught in the cross fire.

The mere presence of US Forces in southern Spera was enough to bring the war to a place it hadn't been for months, in the exact way CPT Carter predicted.

When I first met Carter in plywood shack of a command post called a B-Hut he told me what would happen when Anarchy reached the abandoned outpost.

"We'll likely take indirect fire, mortars, rockets, from over the ridge, near the Pakistan border."

A forty-year-old Captain, Carter had been a Sergeant before pursuing his commission as an officer.  To the uninitiated, his command style would seem laid back and unambitious, but his age and experience allow him to be more precise, focusing mainly on the key tasks that determine the success of a mission.

His precise analysis of what would happen when Anarchy rolled into the low ground around the old outpost turned out to be correct. 

White Platoon was sent in to clear the abandoned outpost and do an assessment on the feasibility of using it as an Afghan Army outpost.  On approaching the stone and mud walled compound Captain Carter said the place looked "too abandoned."

One of the indicators of an ambush is the local villagers clearing out of an area or staying indoors.  An indicator of a land mine is the locals vearing off a path or trail or avoiding a road.  That no squatters had taken over the outpost was an indicator of its own.

"Trip wire," came the radio traffic.  White platoon carefully backed out and an explosive ordinance disposal team brought in their robot to "interrogate" the trip wire.

The building bomb or wall IED is a rare, but lethal technique used by the enemy.  The interior portion of a compund's mud wall is chipped away and filled with explosives then covered back up with mud.  Other patch work is done on the structure to make it look like the Afghan version of remodeling.  When a sqaud of US soldiers comes by 40 pounds of explosives are detonated with catastrophic effect.

In the six months since the COP was closed out, the whole thing could have been rebuilt as a giant bomb.

CPT Carter requested any means possible to blow the whole place to bits--the 105mm howitzer stationed on OP 5 just a few kilometers away, using his own mortar platoon and heavy machine guns to turn the walls into swiss cheese, even a B-1 to drop a daisy cutter.  All were denied because they still fell under the rules of a kinetic strike and a trip wire was not enough to legally fire on a building to destory it.

As the deliberations went back and forth over the radio and satellite transmissions, CPT Carter's prediction of contact with the enemy came to fruition--mortars started landing a few hundred meters away.  The target of the indirect fire was not Anarchy though, but Dog Company 4th Brigade, 101st Airborne, who set up observation posts on the ridge line to the south of the COP.
The mortar fire wasn't very close to any of Dog's positions and within 20 minutes Apache helicopters were on station.  The insurgents, following the long tradition, dropped their AK-47 assualt rifles and started pretending to be lumber jacks cutting down pine trees.

The design of Operation Oqab Bahar by CJTF-101 was for Anarchy and the Afghan Commandos to push insurgents south into Dog's kill zone, but the insurgents were coming from the south across the Pakistan border to attack Dog.

That night Anarchy moved north to a little higher ground, but well within ear shot of the Apaches making what sounded like 100 gun runs south and east of the COP killing 16 insurgents.

Nothing will help soldier on the ground sleep as soundly as the rhythmic rotar chop of Apaches in the air making gun runs in the distance.  And nothing will make him get lower than the sound of .50 caliber machinegun rounds snapping over his head.

On the fourth day of the operation Anarchy's task was to patrol the villages and area around COP Spera.  After talking with the owner of a small shop, they moved back south stopping to check out a rock formation that appeared to have several caves in it.

"We wanted to the clear the area before we stopped down on the low ground," said SSgt Bunch explaining why he initially took Blue platoon's dismount squad up a steep tree and brush covered hill.
During the search Bunch and the squad found numerous hollowed out shrubs that would provide concealment for an ambush and a linear IED aiming point.  When he was radioing up the report on the aiming point he was told to look for a man in black clothes, carrying an AK-47 running toward the caves on a higher ridge.

The Soldiers moved quickly to the top of the hill to find a rock wall and broad terrace field of green wheat between them and a pair of caves.

"This feels like being drawn into an ambush," Bunch said as he looked over the rock wall to scan the area.

At that point it was just Bunch, two Sergeants, a machine gunner and myself on the hill.  Then it started raining and hailing.

"Rock wall, wheat field, rain, possible ambush.  It was so like a World War II movie," one of the Sergeants said later.

Bunch radioed his situation report to CPT Carter who agreed with Bunch.  The old IED aiming point, one guy running across the open terrain into an rock formation with caves on the left and right.  Possible pre-planned ambush.  He requested artillery from the 105mm howitzer on OP 5, two ridges to the west.

"That's a good call.  I'm not fucking around with this goddamn open field," Bunch said when he heard the radio traffic about the howitzer.

Staff Sergeant Bunch, 29, is on his third combat tour and 10th year in the Army.  His previous tour in Afghanistan was in Nuristan province where his unit got into more than 150 fire fights and learned a lot of hard lessons one them being when to stop.

Tactical patience is the hallmark of a seasoned Afghan gunfighter.  A younger, less experienced NCO might have head off across the open wheat field with only a fire team and gotten hit with machine gun fire, sniper fire or command detonated mines.

The 105mm howitzer fire was denied by higher headquarters so Carter dropped down to his next asset, .50 caliber machine guns mounted on the MATVs with a CROW system.  The CROW system is an old fashioned M-2 machine gun than can be operated by remote control from inside the vehicle.  It was first put into service because gunners standing up in vehicles were so vulnerable to IED blasts but fell out of favor because the camera system on the CROW offered such a limited field of view it made the whole truck more vulnerable.  The camera and aiming system of the CROW may not be the best for patrolling, but it was ideal for making a long complicated shot from a river bed, through a stand of pines, over a ridge and over the heads of soldiers to a cave nearly 700 meters away.

"The bullets were 15 or 20 feet over the tops of our heads," Bunch said later, which sounds pretty safe, until your hear the loud the sonic snap of half-inch-diameter bullets.  The snap is loud enough to make you try to bury yourself in the dirt.  Even more distubing is that you hear the sonic snap, snap, snap above your head before the chuga, chuga, chuga of the machine gun firing.
With no response from the .50 cal fire, Bunch and the leader of Red Platoon hatched a quick plan. 

Red would manuever to the right and approach the lower/right cave complex while Blue laid down cover fire with the light machine guns and M-4 carbines. "I want these guns talking," Bunch said the young machine gunners.  "Don't go past your right fire limit."  Red would be running up on the right flank.

On the signal the machine guns opened up firing several hundred rounds across the wheat field into the blind spots of the rock formation as the squad from Red sprinted along the edge of the wheat field.

"Cease fire, cease fire!" Bunch called out when he saw Red had made it across the field safely.  "Reload!"  The machine gunners linked in longer chains of ammunition, the other soldiers scanned the area with their rifles.

Red Platoon set security, the machine gunners set into new fields of fire and a team moved toward the first cave.

"It looks like an old fighting position," came the report over the radio.  There was debris, tracks, some scattered trash and signs of human use, but no man with an AK-47.

Red moved to a vantage point to observe the upper left cave and didn't see anything that merited further attention.  The man with the AK could have been a scout or a spotter and was long gone.

In response to the linear aiming point Bunch found, soldiers fanned out with metal detectors looking for pre-emplaced wires.  Nothing was found.

The mountain thunderstorm continued to roil overhead, the call came down from Brigade that "air was red" meaning the storm was too much for the Apache gunships to fly in.  Anarachy and Dog would have no air support until the storm broke.

"That was when we were very vulnerable," Carter said after the mission.  "If I was the enemy, I would done anything to catch us with out air support."

The chatter being relayed to Anarchy was that the enemy was going to use the cover of the rain to plant IEDs on the Troop's exit routes.  A rainy night is perfect for planting IEDs as the splattering drops smooth over any disturbances in the ground making it less likely the hole the bomb is buried will be seen.

The Troop commander made the decision to split his forces sending Red and Blue platoons to secure the road leading up to some high, flat ground under OP 4 that low-flying cargo planes used to drop fuel, water and MREs by parachute.

No air cover, the forces being split, bad weather.  It was the optimal time to attack.
But the attack didn't come that night--except for those who caught a mild stomache ache form eating the chicken and rice the local villagers prepared for the soldiers.

The fifth day dawned clear and the whole troop reassembled in the flat grass covered resupply area.  The last load of diesel fuel would parachute dropped out the back of a two-propped cargo plane called a Sherpa.

At 1030 white smoked was popped and the pale grey plane swooped in low through the valley disappearing behind the trees at points before reappearing with five black parachutes popping open right behind it.  With the cargo out the hull, the plane climed and banked hard, made another pass and flew back to Bagram Airfield.

They missed the drop zone my almost 700meters, but there was enough fuel for Anarchy to sustain another day and get back to Camp Clark on fumes.
To the untrained eye the menagerie that was Anarchy Troop would have looked like a militarized gypsy camp.  Soldiers caught up on sleep and swapped jokes.  The Afghan soldiers cooked over camp fires.  I even took off my shoes to let me feet air out and read a few chapter of an old Daniel Silva novel.

It all ended when a series of artillery explosions rocked the valley near COP Spera.  Howitzers from Task Force Curahee were traversing fire below Dog's position.  A few minutes later the signal came for Anarchy to strap on the armor and roll into the vulnerable valley one last time.

Many soldiers have a quirk about the last day or night of an operation.  If everything has gone too smoothly, like it had for Anarchy, they expect the worst on the last day and this situation could be the worst.  Dog company would be coming down the mountain at night and boarding Chinook helicopters.  Anarchy would be in the bowl with no cover from the high ground.

"After Dog leaves, be ready.  It is gonna happen tonight," Bunch told the Soldiers in his truck as Nickleback's "Burn it to the Ground" played on the iPod.  (The creation of the iPod has given modern soldiers what they have always wanted, a massive selection of theme songs to fit any occasion at their finger tips.)

"That night I definately thought we were gonna take contact," Bunch said later.  "Just mainly because the O.P.s were gone and we're pretty much sitting out there as bait."

The enemy was ready to comply as well.  The insurgents opened fire on Dog's position.  Dog was ready and responded with a massive volley of machine gun and rifle fire.

The previous night Dog consolidated all their observation posts into one strong point above COP Spera.  As Anarchy Troop did operation "look non-threatening" the insurgents made their way up the mountain to what they thought was the 20-man post they attacked a few days earlier.

But instead of 20, they found 112.

The volley of machine gun and rifle fire from the 112 soldiers of Dog massed on line was followed up by artillery from 155mm howitzers exploding on the side of mountain blocking the insurgent's exit down the mountain.

The chatter of the previous days about attacking the Americans was replaced by, "did you make it?"

The answer was often silence.

###

CODA:  Dog made their exfil down the mountain under the cover of darkness while Anarchy's mounted weapons scanned the ridge.  Anarchy Troop rolled out of the bowl at dawn and made the drive from COP Spera to the Khowst/Gardez highway in three hours.

Big Missions like Operation Oqab Bahar never go as planned and often turn out to be, as Clutterbuck admonishes, total wastes.  CPT Carter and the 6/4 Cav knew that operation would not yield much. Most successful counter insurgencies eschewed major operations and focused on census/ID card operations and population movement control measures to suffocate the ability of the opposition to move.  (TF Duke's leadership wisely has instituted almost a contest to see which units can build out their census database the fastest.)  Anarachy and the Afghan Commandos didn't push anyone into Curahee's kill zone, the insurents came across from Pakistan to attack Dog's Observation posts.  The movement south by Anarchy did cause some Haqqani facilitators and fighters to pop their heads up and communicate producing valuable signals intel that will lead to subsequent missions.

To truly weigh the success of the operation you have to look at the overall costs and opportunity costs of the operation.  For 10 days Anarchy, Cherokee and Dog were not operating in their normal areas providing security to the population, reinforcing relationships with key leaders or developing informants.  Anarchy Troop alone burned through hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel that costs around $200 to get from the wholesale spot market to southern Spera District.  Was Oqab Bahar the best use of man hours and resources?  It is more than a merely academic question, it is the most important question for the leaders of CJTF 101 to ask themselves.  An enterprising Division Commander would have his ORSA cell run a Monte Carlo simulation comparing the various outcomes or use linear programming to plot out the best allocation of resources.  This is not to say that warfare can be reduced to an algorithm, as Caesar said, "much depends on fortune in the art of war" but so many big missions seem to spring from predilection rather than calculation. 

Please help! Hit the tip jar or buy a dvd.

  The logo and motto for Anarchy.  My kind of guys.

JD at Camp Clark, it really is a nice little FOB

Mrap All Terrain Vehicle on the Khowst/Gardez highway.

Down in the wadi (riverbed)

A river gorge Anarchy drove through.

Three cups of Tea.  Sergeants Shaffer, Hansen and Bunch have tea in the village of Magarah.

  Your humble correspondent enjoying goat milk chai and cigarette.  The breakfast of a man who just doesn't care anymore.

Kanda Kelay village or the Ponderosa.  Much of southern Khowst is high-desert pine forest.

Old Combat Outpost Spera.  Dog Company was set up in Observation Posts on the ridge.

  Luxurious accomodations.

The low, tundra like grass of the mountains.

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