The Unit

THE MISSION, THE MEN, and ME

A Book by The Unit consultant Pete Blaber

By late December, the situation in the main Afghan cities of Kandahar, Kabul, and Mazer - e - Sharif was settling into normalcy, if normalcy were possible where none had existed for over twenty years. As for the rest of the country, no one had a clue. No Westerner had been out in the frontier areas of Afghanistan where the enemy was now hiding since the late ’70s. To find the enemy and figure things out, the United States needed to get people on the ground in the unexplored frontier areas; that’s where the concept of AFO entered the picture.

AFO stood for advanced force operations. More a verb than a noun, prior to Afghanistan, advanced force operations described what small special operations teams were supposed to do in a hostile country in preparation for potential future missions. If necessity is the mother of invention, then in the case of AFO in Afghanistan, serendipity was the father, because AFO, the organization that was about to make the biggest impact on the Afghan battlefield, wasn’t planned; it just happened. There was no charter; no organizational structure; no budget; and best of all for me, no real constraints or limitations on creating any of the above. The operational sweetspot was still open.

“Get some men out into the frontier to figure out what’s going on,” General Tommy Franks told us. As commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, General Franks commanded all American military forces in Afghanistan. “Find the enemy, then kill or capture ’em,” he added. That was more than sufficient guidance for me; it was a blank canvas on which I could paint whatever was required to accomplish the mission. Whether I created a masterpiece or piece of crap would depend on my ability to apply all the guiding principle lessons I had learned over the years as an artisan of the art of war.

My plane landed at Bagram Air Base (see Map 3), thirty miles north of Kabul, and taxied to a parking spot between two rusting Soviet MIGs that had long since seen better days. With the engines still screaming at ear-splitting decibel levels, the hydraulic ramp on the back of the aircraft lowered slowly, revealing the bone-chilling blackness of the Afghan winter night. The only thing I could see was a blinking red light twirling in circles from a few hundred meters away. That would be Jimmy.