Bagram Airfield buzzed with activity as the nights grew cold at the end of October 2003.

For
days, cargo jet after cargo jet had been churning through the main American military hub in
Afghanistan. Descending steeply, unloading their cargo on the tarmac at the foot of the Salang
mountains, and taking off again, the huge gray C-17s disgorged Humvees, helicopters, and
hundreds of Army Rangers.

From the airfield’s flight line, the newcomers headed to Bagram’s Joint Special Operations
Command compound, filling up rows of plywood huts that engineers were building near two
huge, connected green tents that would soon house the counterterrorism command’s operations
center. For now, JSOC leaders were working out of a smaller, squat, Russian- built structure in
the compound that SEAL Team 6 had been using as its forward headquarters.

The operations center in the little building was crammed with new arrivals from Fort Bragg,
JSOC’s stateside home, many of them staring up at a wall-mounted screen showing the slowly
rotating video feed from a Predator drone. In the middle of the crowd was JSOC’s new
commander, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The 49-year-old McChrystal, who had previously
commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment, had been at JSOC’s helm for less than a month, but he
was already shaking up the counterterrorism command. Nearly half of his old regiment was
getting ready to launch by helicopter, Humvee, and pickup truck into the valleys of Nuristan,
north of the Pech, in search of a set of former mujahidin commanders suspected of having
harbored or otherwise aided Osama bin Laden after his 2001 escape from Tora Bora. The
operation was called Winter Strike.

But on the night before Halloween, with Rangers and helicopters still flowing into Bagram, news
arrived that threatened to upset the plans that had brought them to Afghanistan.1 CIA officials
were saying they had a target ready to go, based on a rare piece of specific intelligence: a cluster
of houses on the side of a mountain in the Waygal valley twenty straight-line miles northwest of
Asadabad, outside a steeply sloping town called Aranas that was famous for its blacksmiths and
silversmiths.

In one of the houses on the mountain, an Afghan source working for the CIA claimed, was an
Afghan warlord near the top of the agency’s and JSOC’s target lists: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who
had briefly been the country’s prime minister before the Taliban seized Kabul in 1997. A former
U.S. ally during the jihad against the Soviets, Hekmatyar had once accused the CIA’s Islamabad
station chief of plotting to assassinate him. Now the agency was trying to do exactly that, using
military resources. Hekmatyar was a longtime associate of bin Laden’s, arguably closer to him
than anyone in the Taliban.

The Predator circled, feeding video back to Bagram and the United States. At Langley, the CIA’s
director, George Tenet, wanted the cluster of buildings struck—ideally raided by SEALs or
Rangers, but bombed if necessary. The memory of Tora Bora was a powerful incentive against
inaction.

McChrystal received the CIA’s request from his own superiors at the Tampa, Florida,
headquarters of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, the military organization that oversaw
the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. McChrystal was inclined to wait, according to a
subordinate who was with him at Bagram at the time. His forces would be ready to move in a
few days, and the military wanted to confirm the agency’s tip with one of its own sources, an
Afghan informant handled by the Defense Intelligence Agency. “I’d be lying if I told you we
were sure it was Hekmatyar, and because of the terrain we couldn’t get our source up there to
confirm,” the JSOC officer who was with McChrystal at Bagram remembered.

But the CIA source’s information was tantalizingly specific, and top officials at Langley had
much greater confidence in it. Tenet asked CENTCOM to strike right away, Rangers or no
Rangers. Armed aircraft headed toward the Waygal: a B-1 bomber high above with a weapons
bay full of bombs, and, behind and below it, a slower-moving AC-130 Spectre gunship.

At the settlement on the mountainside, the hum of surveillance aircraft had been audible all day.
The cluster of buildings consisted of several small houses, a guesthouse, a mosque, and a
religious school. Late on October 30, most of the school’s students left for their homes, because
there wouldn’t be any classes the next morning, Friday. That left the members of a wealthy
extended family, the Rabbanis, and their guests—among whom, according to the CIA’s source,
was Hekmatyar.

After an evening Ramadan prayer at the mosque, the family members dispersed to their houses,
according to one brother then in his thirties, Zabiullah Rabbani—except for another brother,
Ahmad, their mother’s favorite, who slept in the mosque.

“It was before midnight and everyone was getting ready for sleep when there was a big
explosion,” Zabiullah remembered. “All the windows and doors were knocked down.” A
satellite-guided bomb, dropped by the high-flying B-1, had struck the mosque, and when the dust
settled, a raging fire illuminated the mountainside. A third brother, Mohammad—who had spent
much of the day in the woods trying to lure back a herd of goats the circling surveillance planes
had spooked—climbed to the roof of an intact building and shouted at the confused people
spilling out of their houses to flee into the forest.

The next set of bombs struck a few minutes after the first, according to Zabiullah. One hit the
house belonging to an uncle, Niamatullah, and flattened it. As Zabiullah himself headed for the
woods, he could see trees on fire, and he discerned a new, lower, growling sound overhead. It
was the propellers of the AC-130, a gray cargo plane retrofitted as a gunship. Manned by a crew
of more than a dozen special operations airmen, with a howitzer and a variety of smaller guns
bristling from its left side, an AC-130 would orbit a target, spitting shells at a central point. A
secret 2002 report by al-Qaida fighters about their early encounters with Americans had warned
of the AC-130 and the “evil sound” of its guns. That was the next sound Zabiullah and his
relatives heard.

Among the various headquarters monitoring the strike’s progress was CENTCOM’s air
operations center in Qatar. “They struck the target as planned, but then a lot of people went
running from the buildings, and that’s where the AC-130 came in,” recalled Maj. Gen. Bob
Elder, the Air Force officer overseeing the Qatar operations center—going after what the military
called “squirters,” people running from the target area. At that point, the preplanned strike was
over, and the gunship was on the hunt, using night-vision sensors that could pick out the heat of
human forms.

The AC-130 circled the area, the flow of shells from its guns stretching down like a laser beam,
visible because of the tracers. A young woman was cut down outside, running for the forest.
Other people, including children, died in the woods as they tried to hide in caves and crevices. It
went on long enough, according to a Rabbani family member from the nearest town, Aranas, for
him and his neighbors to wake up and hike two miles, through a gorge and over a mountain
ridge, to find that the cannon fire was still too heavy for them to get close.

“When the planes went away at three or four in the morning, it was quiet again and we were all
hiding on our own, not knowing who was dead or alive,” said Zabiullah. The mosque, school,
guesthouse, and at least one house were in ruins, and dead livestock littered the ground. “It
looked like doomsday,” said the family member from Aranas who finally reached the scene at
dawn.

Within hours of the strike’s end on the morning of October 31, phones were ringing in Kabul as
people from Aranas contacted government officials. The reports said that six or more Rabbani
family members and guests had died, including several young children. “We did collateral
damage calculations for every operation, and this one caused a lot of civilian casualties,” said
Elder, the Air Force general tracking the strike from Qatar. “I thought it was much worse than
six people, frankly.”

There was no immediate suggestion—no radio traffic, phone call, or jihadist press release—that
the strike had hit its mark and killed Hekmatyar. But neither was it possible for U.S. intelligence
to conclude, based on the reports, that he hadn’t been there. There was no way to know one way
or the other without putting boots on the ground at the scene. With Stan McChrystal’s Rangers
still getting ready for their mission at Bagram, CENTCOM looked next to a unit of the 10,000-
strong U.S. military force already in Afghanistan, the 1st Brigade, 10th Mountain Division.

Spread across several bases from Bagram to Kandahar, the infantry brigade was already
preparing for a supporting role in the movement into Nuristan when orders arrived to speed
things up, get to Asadabad and then the Waygal, and figure out whom the Air Force planes had
killed.