Will they learn anyway?
HORSE SOLDIERS:
The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan
By Doug Stanton
416 pp. Scribner $28
Reviewed by Carter Jefferson
After 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted action—fast. And he got it. Between mid-October and mid-December 2001, some 300 CIA agents and U.S. Special Forces soldiers, working with Afghan warlords, nearly annihilated the Taliban forces that had helped Al Qaeda prepare the attacks on New York and Washington. Doug Stanton’s book, published last month and already a bestseller, tells the story in great detail.
Most Americans, still in shock after 9/11, learned little about the battle then or later, partly because the CIA and the U.S. Army’s Special Forces preferred to keep the information vague. A veteran writer for top U.S. periodicals and author of another bestseller about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis during World War II, Stanton interviewed more than a hundred of the participants in the war against the Taliban, pored over thousands of public documents and private journals, and travelled to Afghanistan to visit the scenes of the battles he writes about.
Two groups dominate the story—the four CIA agents who successfully persuaded tribal factions that usually fought each other to band together to attack the Taliban, and several small Special Forces patrols who joined the Afghans of the loosely co-ordinated Northern Alliance, largely to call down air strikes against the enemy.
Afghanistan, a state haphazardly glued together by a series of conquerors, has been a scene of chaos of one sort or another since ancient times. The Taliban leadership, made up of Muslims who want to build an Islamic nation that can conquer the world for Allah, came to power not because they were popular, but because they stopped at nothing to build their armies. They murdered thousands of men and women who refused to follow ancient Muslim laws, and forced thousands more into their army by threatening to kill the wives and families of reluctant recruits. Vast numbers of their subjects viewed the tiny groups of Special Forces soldiers as liberators. Taliban soldiers switched sides in droves, but the hard core welcomed death rather than surrender. American pilots, guided by the small bands of troops on the ground, rained bombs or strafed those holdouts until the Taliban simply melted away.
The Special Forces had been trained to work with local fighters on the ground, rather than to conquer by using thousands of troops. With the soldiers of the Northern Alliance, they rode horses into battle; that was something almost none of them knew how to do, but they learned. They asked Afghan commanders where they wanted bombs to drop, and did what they were asked to do. Their tasks were never easy—they struggled up mountainsides to be able to pinpoint the locations of enemy battalions that needed to be bombed, and they rode their horses into battle along with Afghan soldiers. Some were killed, but their missions succeeded.
Stanton’s prologue tells how the last holdouts, prisoners who surrendered only to rebel and take over the prison where they were held, tried to undo those successes. One of the CIA agents, Mike Spann, died attempting to stem that rebellion. As the book unfolds, the author follows a number of small groups from the beginning to the end, rapidly skipping from one to the next as the battles progress.
Stanton writes well, but by piling up detail he makes the book hard to read. Too many names and short personal stories clutter the pages; only the most careful reader will be able to remember which is which. One of the quotes among the cover blurbs calls the book “as gripping as the most intricately plotted thriller.” But it is nothing like the traditional thriller, which features one hero, or only a few, that a reader can get to know and love. Stanton tries to remedy this, I think, by employing a technique no professional historian could get away with: he uses dialogue in quotes, implying that these speeches are what actually was said. In a few scenes based on videos this may be true; most of the time it clearly is not. He also tells us the thoughts of the soldiers as they fight—but at best these are memories, which are notoriously faulty. Here’s Mike Spann running to his death:
The firefight probably wouldn’t last long, but he could take a lot of the prisoners along with him. And maybe he could hold out long enough for fire support to arrive by air, or by ground, from the Special Forces soldiers back at the Turkish schoolhouse. It had all gone so wrong so quickly.
Were those really Spann’s thoughts? We’ll never know.
In his epilogue, Stanton tells us Rumsfeld suddenly yanked the Special Forces teams out of Afghanistan on Dec. 10, 2001. Though he doesn’t mention it, hordes of troops replaced them. We now instead have 55,000 UN forces there, of which 23,000 are U.S. soldiers—and much of the populace considers those troops not friends and liberators, but an occupying force. The Taliban once more controls most of the countryside and threatens Kabul, the capital.
Eighteen months after the Special Forces left, the day after Ambassador Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army, one of the men Stanton had interviewed telephoned him:
We just lost Iraq. . . . [Bremer] has sent 500,000 young men home with their weapons, after we’ve bombed their country. They’re angry. In the end they won’t be on our side.
Many of them still aren’t.
Says Stanton:
By entering Afghanistan with a small force, and by aligning themselves with groups that had once been battling each other and pointing them in the direction of the Taliban, U.S. forces found robust support among the Afghans. They proved the usefulness of understanding and heeding the “wants and needs” of an enemy, and the local population that may support it. Awareness is the soldier’s number one tool in his kit, beside his M-4 rifle. To win wars against enemies like the Taliban, which are often stateless in their affiliation, you adapt.
Whatever the shortcomings of this book, it should teach our politicians, diplomats, and generals something. Do you think it will?
Carter Jefferson, Ph.D., editor of The Internet Review of Books, taught history in major state universities for twenty years.
