Free Operation Dark Heart by Anthony Shaffer Page B

called for jihad—or holy war—against the Americans and Karzai’s new government. They compared the American “infidel” presence to the Soviet occupation in 1970s and ’80s.
    What was it that Rumsfeld had said a couple of months ago? War’s over, boys. Major combat operations in Afghanistan were complete and the focus would now be on reconstruction. Right.
    I’d once met the SecDef right after 9/11. I ran into him just outside the Pentagon at the end of a workout. He asked me why the highly accessible, unguarded “runner’s entrance” to the Pentagon Athletic Club had been closed permanently. Hmm, I thought at the time, this is a bad sign . Pentagon attacked, security increased … and still the question about the entrance from the man who should know why it had been closed down. There was a pattern developing here.
    Tim, Dave, and I watched the end of the video, as the Taliban celebrated the deaths of the police officers, in grim silence. “What does this mean?” I asked Dave.
    He put down his pen. “Between their religious diatribes, they’re giving indications of what they’re up to and where they’re going.”
    This was more than just a propaganda video. The info on the videotape fit into the intelligence Dave and his folks had been getting—that this operation was a small part of a much larger plan by the Taliban to retake Afghanistan. They had started by overrunning police outposts, but their ambitions were much, much larger. There were signs of coordination between the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the guerrilla group Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was on the LTC’s list. A Taliban rival in the 1990s, Hekmatyar had formed an alliance with them in recent years. One of our theories was that the HIG, as Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin was known, had become the de facto bodyguards of bin Laden when he was in Afghanistan. If you could find the HIG, the thinking went, it could lead you to him.
    Our sources indicated that more than 1,000 ACM (anticoalition militia) combat fighters were moving into Afghanistan, which meant you had thousands more on the Pak side helping plan, equip, train, and organize.
    “In other words,” I said, “they’re coming back, and they have a very detailed plan on how to do it.”
    Dave nodded. “This isn’t just about taking down checkpoints along the border.” Intelligence pointed to a chilling goal: retake Kandahar—second largest city in Afghanistan with more than 300,000 residents—and the surrounding Kandahar province by Ramadan, two months from now. “They are very patient, and they know what they want to do.”
    “Can’t we chase ’em back across the border into Pakistan and let the Paks deal with them?” I asked.
    Dave shook his head impatiently. “Tony, you’re naïve. You think that if we just do that, they’re going to stay there.”
    “I understand that,” I answered, “but my impression is that we are trying to seal off the border.”
    Dave rose and strode over to a wall-size map of Afghanistan and ran his hand along the bumpy eastern border with Pakistan—1,500 miles of mountains, canyons, caverns, and remote smugglers’ trails. “Do you really believe we can close off that?” he asked.
    “I guess not,” I said. Not without the Pakistanis’ help, and I was to learn that we couldn’t rely on them. This was getting kind of alarming. “So what the hell do we do?”
    Our combat forces were strung out all over a country the size of Texas. If these guys wanted to pour over the border, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot we could do to stop them just with conventional warfare. The intel was indicating that 1,000 battle-hardened Taliban insurgents, coming in from the Pakistani border towns of Wana and Quetta, were moving with haste into the interior of Afghanistan. The U.S. and Afghan forces couldn’t shut down that entire border and, under agreements with the Paks, we couldn’t pursue them into Pakistan. We had to be