'Friendly' fire
Under the moonless sky in Logar Province, at just before two o’clock in the morning local time, 30 Americans, including 17 members of the elite SEAL team that had killed Osama bin Laden three months earlier, were scrambled aboard a Vietnamera US Army National Guard Chinook helicopter, code name Extortion 17.
It was Aug. 6, 2011. Their destination: a place called Tangi Valley, where, intelligence indicated, a Taliban chief by the name of Qari Tahir was hiding.
The Americans ranged in age from the youngest, 21yearold Specialist Spencer C. Duncan of Olathe, Kan., to the oldest of the group, 47yearold Chief Warrant Officer David Carter of Aurora, Colo.
Sixteen of the men had wives back home in the United States, and 32 American children called these men “Daddy.”
Seven mysterious Afghan commandos, along with one Afghan interpreter, joined these remarkable Americans on the helicopter that night.
They would all die from a rocketpropelled grenade at the hands of the Taliban. It was the deadliest single loss in the 11yearold Afghan war, and the singlelargest loss in the history of US Special Forces. Was it also a setup? In the days following the attack, Afghan officials thought so.
On Aug. 8, 2011, the Agence FrancePresse quoted an unnamed Afghan government official saying that the chopper was lured to the area with the promise of finding Tahir — who wasn’t there.
“Now it’s confirmed that the helicopter was shot down, and it was a trap that was set by a Taliban commander,” the official told the AFP. He added that the government, led then by Hamid Karzai, “thinks this was a retaliation attack for the killing of Osama bin Laden.”
The report was lent credence by the fact that it was the first to name Qari Tahir, whose name was only confirmed by US officials as the target much later.
“Citing intelligence ‘gathered from the area,’ ” the AFP said, “the official blamed Qari Tahir, a Taliban commander, for masterminding the at tack. He alleged that four Pakistani nationals helped Tahir carry out the strike.”
“The Taliban knew which route the helicopter would take,” he added. “That’s the only route, so they took position on the either side of the valley on mountains and as the helicopter approached, they attacked it with rockets.”
Bad intelligence could have led Ex tortion 17 to that valley, though it’s as likely that the Americans were intentionally misled by someone claiming to be an Afghan ally.
The phrase “Green on Blue” refers to the dangerously widespread practice of Afghan forces shooting Coalition elements in the back.
In the six months leading up to the shootdown on Extortion 17, there had already been at least 12 reports of such GreenonBlue attacks. In March 19, 2011, to take only one example, an Afghan shot six US soldiers at a base in Kandahar Province, killing two.
Yet Afghan troops and American soldiers still worked together, be cause the Obama administration desperately wanted out of Afghanistan — and the only way to do so, they believed, was to train the Afghan military.
That’s how seven Afghan soldiers ended up on Extortion 17, though investigators are uninterested in exploring who those men were.
The military investigation headed up by Brigadier General Jeffrey Colt, which produced a 1,250page report with testimony, photographs, realtime transcripts of airtraffic control and a plethora of other information, barely even mentions them — except in one testimonial exchange on page 118 of Exhibit 1. No Afghans were even interviewed for the Colt report.
The military says these men were vetted, but so, presumably, were the other Afghans who were involved in GreenonBlue attacks. How easy would it have been for one of these men to tip off the Taliban to their location, perhaps by cellphone?
Neither was the possibility pursued that any of these men interfered with the flight.
Congressional hearings have been held, and the conclusion drawn by them and the military is that this was a tragic loss in war — that the Taliban happened to be in the right place at the right time to fire at the helicopter and bring down so many of our brave men.
But I don’t think anyone was keen on asking too many questions. Who tipped us off that Tahir was there when he wasn’t? What are the backgrounds of the Afghans who were on board?
It’s no secret that many Afghan soldiers hate Americans. But the administration has kept up the “ally” myth for the sake of politics. We deserve answers to the tough questions, not the dismissal of such sacrifice.