My Share of the Task(160)
That summer, one of our top targets was one such hard-line Taliban leader: a cruel, one-legged mullah named Dadullah Lang, or Dadullah the Lame, who drove the movement’s regeneration and lent it a particular bent. His life trajectory tracked the Taliban’s own rebirth post–2001. Born in Uruzgan in 1966, as a teenager he joined the first generation of jihadists in the anti-Soviet resistance of the 1980s. When the communists were expelled, Dadullah returned to his studies in Pakistan but quit school to join the gunslinging students across the border as they formed the Taliban movement in 1994.
During the Taliban’s fight to retake the country in the 1990s, he stepped on a mine near Herat and, as one of his Al Qaeda eulogizers put it, “his leg preceded him to Paradise.” After Dadullah’s men massacred hundreds of Shiite Afghan civilians in the Hazarajat, Mullah Omar retired him. Indignant after being fired, Dadullah presented Omar with his AK-47 and prosthetic and declared, “If you no longer need me, I no longer need them.” Omar would indeed need Dadullah again and dispatched him to the bitter fight against the United Front in the north, where his name was cursed for the atrocities he carried out.
As the Taliban regrouped after 2001, Dadullah helped make them into a twenty-first-century insurgency. Unlike their forebears who fought against the Soviets, the post-2001 incarnation of the Taliban relied increasingly on suicide bombs. Arabs provided inspiration and some technical instruction on IEDs, based upon the success of the bombs on the roads of Iraq. Men like Dadullah, who claimed tighter ties with Al Qaeda Arabs and other non-Taliban terrorist groups in Waziristan, often facilitated these exchanges. Dadullah, meanwhile, had a more direct role in the introduction of suicide bombing to the Afghan battlefield. Although some in the Quetta shura—the Taliban’s leadership council—were queasy with the tactic, Dadullah pushed it enthusiastically.
To field the first tranche of “martyrs,” he skimmed from Pakistan’s mental asylums and orphanages, strapped the parentless and infirm with suicide vests, and sent them across the border. The propaganda and mythology surrounding those attacks lured further recruits—madrassa students and refugees. In 2004, only six suicide bomb attacks occurred in Afghanistan. In 2006 there were 141. Dadullah developed a cultlike following through his regular media appearances, and his boasts of global aims and tight ties with Al Qaeda were often to the chagrin of Taliban leaders, who sought to maintain distance from Al Qaeda. He granted regular interviews to Al Jazeera, while the Taliban media arm produced a steady stream of DVDs—hawked in Quetta and in Peshawar for four dollars a disc—that showed Dadullah trekking ridgelines and beheading “spies.”
By 2007, we were aware of Dadullah’s periodic trips into Afghanistan, during which he dispensed funds and guidance and motivated Taliban forces. Like Zarqawi’s, Dadullah’s personal visits were a powerful leadership tool. But they also made the self-styled top Taliban field commander vulnerable to our forces.
Typically we would detect Dadullah’s movements only after he was in Afghanistan, and then it was difficult to obtain pinpoint locations and react with forces fast enough to target him. However, partly by tracking his recently released brother, Mullah Shah Mansoor, we were able to learn about a forthcoming trip into Afghanistan before he traveled. We positioned collection and raid forces in advance.
On Saturday, May 12, 2007, Dadullah crossed the border, and we were able to track his movement to a compound in southern Helmand Province. There, in a raid that included air strikes and both ground- and helicopter-delivered forces, British commandos engaged in a four-hour fight in which we had indications Dadullah was killed. We tracked the enemy’s movement, and in an operation the next evening, Dadullah’s body was found, absent his prosthetic leg.
As when Zarqawi died, Dadullah’s bosses possibly felt some relief when he was disposed of. But his death nonetheless brought eulogies from Al Qaeda bigwigs like Abu Yahya al-Libi and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The hunt for those top leaders had never ceased, even as Zarqawi and Iraq became a higher priority. Later that summer of 2007, our task force in Afghanistan began to collect intelligence that indicated bin Laden might be in or returning to the notorious mountain area of Tora Bora. Known to locals as Spin Ghar, it was famous as bin Laden’s “mountain lair” and the location of the December 2001 battle in which the United States sought, and failed, to corner and capture him and his closest compatriots.