Author tells of U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — Shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks ignited the first U.S. war of the new millennium, a couple dozen Army Special Forces personnel and CIA operatives slipped quietly into Afghanistan and, seemingly, back in time.

As outraged Americans waited for a full-scale invasion of the country giving refuge to Osama bin Laden, the Green Berets teamed with Afghan warlords and their militias struggling to overthrow the Taliban regime.

Conditions were so primitive that U.S. fighters schooled in modern warfare and high-tech weaponry galloped into battle on horseback, like 19th-century cavalrymen.

“It was like a time warp,” said Col. Mark Mitchell, a key figure in “Horse Soldiers,” a new book by Michigan author Doug Stanton that tells their story. “You’re living in caves, watching these [Afghan] guys with rifles so old they could have been out of museums. You’re transported back into this era that few people in the United States and the Western world really can imagine.”

As Sgt. 1st Class Ben Milo told Stanton: “It’s as if the Jetsons had met the Flintstones.”

Against the odds, the horse soldiers’ mission was accomplished within two months, as the oppressive Afghan rulers were swept from power.

Now, with the Taliban bidding for a comeback, Stanton says U.S. policymakers should heed lessons from the earlier success story.

“Instead of large-scale occupations, we should rely on small units of Special Forces who have proved it’s infinitely more effective to work with a country’s soldiers and citizens at eye level,” he writes in the book, just published by Scribner.

Special Forces are more adaptable than regular military personnel and more sensitive to the culture they’re entering, Stanton said in an interview at his Traverse City home. “They’re trained to land, fight, negotiate peace and then rebuild the environment that they’ve just been fighting in.”

Military analyst Daniel Goure said the way Special Forces and support units were deployed in Afghanistan represented a new approach to warfare and worked so well, “it’s now enshrined in our doctrine and planning.”

Still, the delayed arrival of regular troops may have enabled bin Laden to escape during the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, added Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. The experience, he said, “taught us the use of Special Forces but also taught us what the limits were.”

Stanton, whose 2001 New York Times best-seller “In Harm’s Way” recounted the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II, spent five years researching and writing “Horse Soldiers.” Movie rights have been sold to Jerry Bruckheimer Productions (“Black Hawk Down”).

The 46-year-old author retraced part of the soldiers’ route in Afghanistan and tracked down most for interviews, including Mitchell, now a national security fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Mitchell told the AP by telephone that respecting the Afghans’ culture and treating them as equals proved crucial to the horse soldiers’ success. So was another distinctive characteristic of Green Berets: adaptability.

Whether giving themselves crash courses in Afghan language and tribal politics, using satellite technology to coordinate precision bomb strikes from planes 20,000 feet above the desert, or surviving a revolt by hundreds of die-hard Taliban prisoners, they improvised constantly to deal with the unexpected.

Nothing illustrated their flexibility more than the startling realization that engaging the enemy would require long horseback rides — sometimes along narrow mountain paths where one false move could mean a fatal plunge.

Few of the Americans had riding experience, Stanton writes: “No one in Washington, D.C., had imagined that modern American soldiers would be riding horses to war.”