First Casualty

In the weeks after the September 11 attacks, America had no ready strategy for Afghanistan, the country that sheltered Osama bin Laden under Taliban protection. The CIA moved to lead the war. On October 17, 2001, eight of its officers were placed in the mountains of northern Afghanistan. Known as Team Alpha, they were a mix of linguists, tribal specialists and elite fighters, and they were the first Americans to operate inside Taliban-controlled territory. Their secret task was to find Al-Qaeda and keep its members from reaching the United States again.

The book follows the team as CIA officers ride into battle on horseback beside the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Back in Washington, many doubted that the agency, the Green Berets and a smaller force of Afghan allies could win before winter. Meanwhile, the Taliban was driven back but began planning a counterattack with Al-Qaeda.

Hundreds of committed fighters, many with weapons hidden on them, pretended to surrender and were taken to Qala-i Jangi, a fortress whose name means Fort of War. There Mike Spann, a former Marine, and David Tyson, a linguist who had studied Central Asia as an academic, tried to question men trained by bin Laden, one of them a young Muslim convert from California. The prisoners rose up, and one CIA officer was killed, the first casualty of a war that would last twenty years. The surviving officer had to fight his way out against overwhelming odds.

Toby Harnden was given rare access to every living member of Team Alpha and to many levels of the CIA. The account draws on extensive interviews, classified documents and firsthand reporting from Afghanistan. Harnden argues that the United States found a workable strategy early on and then abandoned it. The warning signs of that early phase, including unreliable allies, ethnic rivalries, suicide attacks and misdirected American bombs, were overlooked, and he contends that this neglect helped fuel the long conflict that followed.