Victory Point - Ed Darack [42]
⅔, known in-country as Task Force Koa (after a Hawaiian god of war), would work with a wide range of indigenous combatants and local support, many of whom had fought not just the Soviets, but the Taliban and other extremist groups. While some former Afghan mujahideen joined forces with contemporary extremist groups, a far greater number would align themselves with the new Afghan government. Known as “combined” operations (as opposed to “joint,” where different units of American forces work with one another), ⅔, like 3/3 before them, would conduct a number of missions side by side with Afghan National Army soldiers, Afghan National Police officers, Afghan Border Security agents, and the highly skilled and little-known Afghan Security Forces (ASF) personnel. The Marines would have Pashto interpreters attached to their units as well, whose intimate familiarity with local customs and supply chains would prove vital to ⅔ by identifying friend from known or potential foe—a key advantage in their fight against the mysterious enemy. Westerfield knew that he’d have to lean hard on these sources, but furthermore, he’d have to carefully integrate information streams derived from them with others at his disposal, learning along the way to determine trustworthy information from “noise.”
Long before Westerfield would include in-country intel gleaned by ⅔ in his workflow, the intel officer had been vexed by one particular individual whose name he’d seen on numerous classified reports. Westerfield didn’t know where he was from, or what organizations he’d been aligned or was now aligned with. He didn’t even know if he’d planned or taken part in any large insurgent operations—almost certainly he hadn’t, just some small ambushes. Faceless to Westerfield, the insurgent could easily be overlooked, seeming, at that point in early June of 2005, to be just a two-bit operator. But what tugged at Westerfield’s attention wasn’t what this small-timer had done, or what the intel officer thought he was capable of doing, but what Westerfield surmised the insurgent aspired to be.
“Why go after old real estate?” he asked Tom Wood during an intel briefing one early June afternoon. “We already know who the HVTs and MVTs [High and Medium Value Targets] are. And more importantly, they know that we know who they are. I’m sure of it. We need to identify the hungry ones, the ones at the bottom who want to claw their way up to fill any real or perceived insurgent power vacuums. They’re the guys who’ll cause us the biggest problems. They’ll do anything. He’ll do anything.” Westerfield used an “investment” metaphor to define his strategy. “We should buy low. Get in at the bottom before he has a chance of proving himself of medium or high value,” he said with a sarcastic grin, vowing to uncover everything about the target—a target about which he, at that time, knew little. But that little included the target’s name: Ahmad Shah. While ⅔ would have some of the world’s most advanced SIGINT and imagery intel (IMINT) made available to them by Task Force Devil, Westerfield knew that the only way to glean positive, actionable intelligence on Shah would be through time-tested, boots-on-the-ground HUMINT work. He needed a solid lead . . .
The 720 Marines and their attachments of ⅔’s main element began departing Hawaii on the first of June 2005, leaving behind the breezy, cloud-dotted summer skies of Oahu and the friends and family who had come to see them roar away on chartered jumbo jets bound for the other side