Tuesday, April 01, 2008 4:53:56 AM
Taking the Fight to the Taliban
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Looking for the enemy in Zabul Province, 6,500 square miles of desert and 9,000-foot mountain peaks with hardly a paved road.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Sgt. Jeff Griffin, left, and some of his comrades in Charlie Company await action in a village in Zabul Province.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
By ELIZABETH RUBIN
Published: October 29, 2006
Correction Appended
One morning this summer, I headed out with a U.S. Army convoy of Humvees, a truck called a wrecker and a packed supply truck into the Afghan mountains. I was among some two dozen American and Afghan soldiers from Task Force Warrior, an infantry battalion based in Zabul Province, just north of Kandahar. We trundled up a path fit for goats because the nearby riverbed was perfect for concealing improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s. Soon enough, the truck keeled over into the riverbed anyway. To hoist it up, the wrecker had to crash through wheat fields, and within minutes a gray-bearded farmer appeared brandishing his stick. “Are you Afghan?” he shouted at Farooq, my interpreter. “I have 30 members in my family. Why did you destroy my wheat?” The old farmer then clasped my wrist with his ancient garden tool of a hand. “You Americans are all friends of Bush the persecutor. You see this area” — he swept his other arm in every direction — “these are all Taliban. But they don’t have power. As soon as we find power, I will kill all of you.”
Farooq tried to calm him, but the farmer was fixated on his crushed wheat stalks until he spotted First Sgt. Ruel Robbins, a red-cheeked, chest-first sort. Robbins looked the farmer over, then said, “Tell him I’m real sorry to drive over his wheat, but I had to ’cause my vehicle turned over.” The farmer eyed the sacks in the supply truck; Robbins gave him one of rice and two of flour.
The farmer watched us take off in a swirl of dust, and Specialist Melissa Elliot, who was driving our Humvee, said to Farooq: “We’re not trying to hurt them. We’re trying to protect their security. Why’d he get so upset with us? Is their wheat part of their religion or something?”
“It’s the food for his family, ma’am,” Farooq said patiently.
And so began our mission into the mountains of Zabul Province, 6,500 square miles of desert, farmland and 9,000-foot peaks with almost no paved roads to link one patch to the next. It’s a place where, just decades ago, families lived as nomads, until King Mohammad Zahir Shah gave them government land to settle on, and where national politics is superseded by Pashtunwali — the Pashtun codes for tribal coexistence, based on retaliation, mediation and hospitality. In 1994, when the Taliban movement of young religious students swept into Zabul offering an end to illegal road taxes and warlord rule, Zabul’s leaders simply joined hands with their Pashtun brothers. After the Taliban’s fall, President Hamid Karzai’s nephew was dispatched to head the Zabul Police; in July 2002, I found him besieged by locals, who put feces in his food and threatened to kill him. For five years now American forces have been chasing the Taliban in Zabul and attempting reconstruction. The police buildings have improved. A new hospital (financed by the United Arab Emirates) was finished. Roads were being laid in terrain so remote that when the Americans turned up, the villagers thought they must be Russians. The Americans opened a trade school in Qalat, the capital. But the pace of progress has been painfully slow. These remain the Taliban’s mountains.
There are 42,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan today, trying to secure a country that is a third again the size of Iraq, where there are almost 150,000 U.S.-led troops. In the past two years, more than 300 American and NATO soldiers have died trying to stave off a resurgent Taliban. Already this year, some 1,500 Afghans have been killed. And while there were just two suicide bombings in 2002, there is now one about every five days.
With the Taliban’s alarming offensive, which began last spring, American generals began speaking of a different war — not a war against terror but a war of ideas. In military jargon this meant balancing kinetic and nonkinetic activity. Or, in plain speech, fighting the Taliban versus nation-building, two goals often at odds. “This is the war for the people,” Lt. Col. Frank Sturek, the battalion commander of Task Force Warrior, told me. Sturek served in Iraq under Lt. Gen. David Petraeus — one of the military’s leading thinkers on counterinsurgency — in Mosul, a city with 50,000 university students. In Zabul, by contrast, the literacy rate is 15 percent, at best. Sometimes Sturek couldn’t tell if people wanted to be catapulted to the 21st century or just left alone. On that he deferred to Delbar Jan Arman, the governor of Zabul Province and a former anti-Soviet mujahedeen, who mentored him on local ways — distinguishing a Taliban killing from a tribal feud or a quarrel over a boy lover. Arman explained cultural sensitivities: how pulling off a man’s turban or opening the clothing box of a woman could set off a revolt. Sturek would nod. “The standard military play is, Land in, round up the men, find someone who is nasty and mean and arrest him, drop off supplies and split,” Sturek told me. “We’re trying to humanize ourselves. It’s uncomfortable. You train an infantry battalion to kill the enemy, and it’s hard to tone it down.” The governor’s response was always: “The people are simple. We can win this war if the Army stays nice with the people and if we embrace them.”
After many sweaty hours, we rumbled into the Alamo Bar and Grill in Kharnay, elevation 8,000 feet. It was a fitting name for an outpost fashioned from a mud schoolhouse — dusty, waterless and powerless except for what the soldiers slurped off a Humvee battery. Charlie Company, Fourth Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, had been based here for nine weeks already when we arrived. They had been living on meals ready to eat, or M.R.E.’s, patrolling the mountains with packs weighing 60 pounds or more, befriending locals and being mortared and ambushed once or twice a week. Their skin was burned, their uniforms ripped. But for this evening, all suffering was suspended for barbecue night. The Humvees had brought frozen slabs of beef from the United States.
In downtime, the soldiers of Charlie Company would cram into a mud room to imbibe American culture — “Shark Tale,” “The Bourne Supremacy,” Lil Wayne, Toby Keith singing his “Taliban Song” — all courtesy of Pvt. Dennis Taylor and his DVD and CD collection. A teenager from Tampa’s housing projects, Taylor grew up with the Bloods. The Army has set him straight, even if his buddies teased him because they couldn’t decipher his lingo and he wasn’t sure what continent he was on or what the Koran was. “It’s Islam’s holy book,” said one soldier. “Man, how can you be fighting here and not know that,” another teased. Taylor laughed and shrugged.
At the other end of the spectrum was Cpl. Kyle Hayes, who had made Taylor his project and, like Sgt. Jon Terry, a sentimental tough guy from Louisiana, often shared meals with the Afghan soldiers accompanying their unit to taste their culture and to bond. Hayes owned a Web design company in New York City and until two years ago was touring with his band, “Half Left.” The band had a revelation while producing a record near ground zero in Manhattan, and they all joined the Army. Hayes’s family was stunned. “I was the only guy at basic training who voted for Kerry,” he told me. Sometimes he felt weird on leave in New York City, where people gawk at uniforms, though a few older people thanked him. His life plan, as inscribed in his diary, is to be a rock star, business mogul and founder of a Texan city by 35, governor of Texas by 45 and president by 55.
Anticipation hung over the Alamo. Charlie Company’s next mission was a bit of deceptive theater intended to lure the Taliban into ambushing the soldiers so they could counterattack. Part of the strategy involved Lt. Nathan Shields — a smiling, easygoing officer from Rochester — posing as a gullible new commander. Meanwhile, units hiding in the mountains would block the Taliban’s escape. That night, a few squads hiked up a thousand feet, each soldier hauling water (temperatures in the day are usually in the 100’s), food, rifle, knife, flashlight and first-aid kit, all atop 35 pounds of armor and ammunition. The Afghan soldiers carried little besides a rifle and ammunition. The American infantryman’s burden is the Taliban’s biggest advantage. Fleet-footed, carrying little more than an AK and a walkie-talkie, Taliban fighters could sail over the mountains.
The next morning we headed toward Solan, a village so unfriendly that when American soldiers airlifted in a bridge months earlier, it was burned down the next day. “We don’t know if the Taliban burnt it or the villagers,” Lt. David Patton, a tall, circumspect Texan with Task Force Warrior, said of the bridge in Solan. “Everyone believes in the mission,” he added, “but there’s an underlying thought that when we leave, it’ll go back to the way it was.” As Zabul’s governor, Arman, had told me, Zabul’s religious leaders all supported the Taliban, and in Afghanistan the most powerful platform is the minbar, a pulpit where the mullah delivers his Friday sermon. So although villagers were friendly when the Americans patrolled, they refused to help rebuild a school and a bazaar, for example, fearing retaliation from the Taliban who had destroyed them.
Shortly after we left the first village on our route to Solan, the Afghan soldiers began picking up Taliban radio chatter about the new Americans. Robbins was pleased. We were the bait, and the plan was working. We spread out along the gorge for a long, edgy march. Outside Solan, we met Sayed Ali Sheikh, an elder of the area, in whose compound the Americans had stayed before. He said he couldn’t guarantee that the place wasn’t rigged with explosives, but nevertheless he handed Robbins the key, showed us shrapnel the size of a skateboard that had ricocheted off a mountain when American planes dropped a 500-pound bomb — and vanished. In no time, the soldiers transformed Ali Sheikh’s compound into a base of operations: satellite hookup to call the Air Force for cover, mortar base near the well, sniper positions.
Ten lean men in turbans came to meet Shields, who played his role as new commander somewhat awkwardly. A strange dialogue ensued, led by one of the 10 men, Haji Gailani, whose oversize glasses, gabardine vest and cane denoted authority. He said that they didn’t deny Taliban fighters were nearby. “If you can catch those people, thank you,” he said. “If you want to slaughter my neck, please do.” There was a little nervous laughter. No, no, Shields said, of course not. Then Gailani said: “You have planes. You can hear the Taliban on your radios. And still you cannot force them out of here. How can we?”
Others began to speak up. Planes had attacked the mountains the night before, the men said. They had heard about the bombing of civilians in Kandahar. They wanted to know if they were about to be bombed. Robbins advised them to stay near the thickest walls and shut off the lights. Then they left.
And the waiting began. Pvt. Andrew Richards pulled out photos of his family, who lived in Colombia. Specialist Jonathon Routledge, whose voice still cracked and who couldn’t believe he was roped into the Army by some cool recruitment videos, poked at a chick that was pecking at spilled tea. Shields and the medic climbed onto the compound roof to give coordinates in case of a medevac. Pvt. Jason Belford was so itchy that he played can-you-down-a-pack-of-crackers-in-two-minutes.
The radio began sputtering with Taliban voices. An Afghan policeman, who went by the code name No. 5, had found their frequency. He heard them discussing our compound. They knew everything: how many Americans and Afghans, the location of the mortar, the sniper positions, the satellite and the flower (code for me, the woman in the group). Presumably one of our earlier visitors was an informant. No. 5 seemed a little dodgy, too — perhaps working only for the troops, perhaps the Taliban, perhaps both.
Shields, Sgt. Jeff Griffin, Belford and a few others moved out to check the area around the compound for mines. Just as we neared the rock garden, a detonation jolted us. A deafening sound. A black smoke squall. Amazingly, no one was hurt. But something was wrong. They had been out to that rock garden twice and found nothing. Suspicion fell on No. 5.
“Fire a mortar,” shouted one of the soldiers. Dan Guenther, a sniper from Texas, spotted something. Everyone assumed an imminent showdown. Someone threw a grenade into an outcropping to see if it was booby-trapped.
“If you’re gonna come to the party, come already!” shouted Guenther. Then he suggested they should all run out in front of the house, smack their butts and provoke a fight. It was 6:42 p.m., and the light was fading. Shields and a few others popped out of the compound’s shelter, hoping to draw fire. As darkness fell, I climbed up to talk to Specialist Tommy Glasgow, who was perched on the roof. He said that there was no way the Taliban would pick a fight after seeing all the U.S. fire power and listening to the bombers occasionally buzzing overhead. We talked about the mission in Zabul, and Glasgow said: “As bad as I don’t want to be here, we should be. The Romanians are coming to take over from us, and the Taliban are just gonna cream ’em.”
The fight never did come, and when we got back to the Alamo, the Americans were packing, and the Afghan police and soldiers appeared bewildered, convinced they would be dead in 24 hours. One policeman had already defected to the Taliban, I was told. “We’ll be bombing this compound in a few weeks ’cause it’ll be filled with Taliban,” Hayes told me. He tried to find an hour every day to write in his diary. On May 12, for example, he had written: “I killed some people last night. Second squad is out looking for corpses right now. We got mortared right around dark ... when I was getting all the last stuff done for the day, and I got a hypoglycemic attack when I was doing sit-ups. It was still a good day, though. I got a lot done. Everyday I grow stronger.”
A few days later, the Alamo was indeed abandoned by the Afghan forces.
The final draft of the U.S. military’s latest counterinsurgency manual, written under the direction of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. James Mattis, emphasizes that if you skimp on resources, endurance and meeting the population’s security requirements, you lose. Yet for the past five years, the Pashtun provinces have been plagued by a lack of troops and resources. James Dobbins, President George W. Bush’s former special envoy to Afghanistan, blames the White House, which he said had a predisposition against nation-building and international peacekeeping. The Bush administration rejected Afghan and State Department appeals to deploy a peacekeeping force in the provinces, dismissed European offers of troops and had already begun shifting military resources to Iraq, Dobbins told me, while U.S. troops in Afghanistan were to be limited to counterterrorism. “In manpower and money,” he added, “this was the least resourced American nation-building effort in our history.” In Afghanistan, the White House spent 25 times less per capita than in Bosnia and deployed one-fiftieth the troops. Much of the money that was pledged didn’t show up for years. “The main lesson of Afghanistan is low input, low output,” Dobbins said. “If you commit low levels of military manpower and economic assistance, what you get are low levels of security and economic growth.”
The draft counterinsurgency manual is thoughtful, full of details and warnings like these: losing moral legitimacy means losing the war; the more force is used, the less effective it is; provoking combat usually plays into the enemy’s hands; and building a government through illegitimate actions like unlawful detention and torture is self-defeating, even against fighters who conceal themselves among noncombatants.
Yet while I was in the south, I saw how readily vicious practices are condoned. An Afghan security official who insisted that I not use his name but who was an aide to a prominent southern governor, told of an instance when they couldn’t find a boy suspected of plotting an attack. “We sent out a command — arrest all his brothers, uncles, cousins, relatives, all of them,” he said. “When we arrested the relatives, no one knew what that boy was doing. Still we beat them all until they would shout, ‘Write that we killed 5 or 10 people, whatever you want, and I will say anything.’ ” In Zabul’s provincial capital, Qalat, the police proudly showed me three “Taliban” they had just captured. One of them had been beaten so badly he could hardly walk, and his feet were oozing puss. His eyes were mere wrinkles in swollen tissue. An American intelligence officer looked slightly embarrassed when he walked into the police station.
With a corrupt justice system, young Afghan men on the receiving end of injustice have often felt their honor could only be restored through acts of revenge. One night, a doctor introduced me to a young farmer who asked me not to use his name. He had been shot by U.S. forces in a gunfight a year earlier. Seven metal clamps were holding his leg in place. Though deeply religious, he never liked the Taliban regime. His family was relieved when Mullah Omar and the “Afghan Arabs” who first came to fight the Soviets in the 1980’s fled Kandahar. He believed that Karzai and the international community would help build the country. “But they didn’t,” he said in the dark little flat where we met. “They just came to arrest the people.” His father was a tribal leader with pomegranate orchards, and relatives often appealed to him to get their family members out of Afghan and American prisons. He would urge the Americans not to be fooled by false reports naming “Taliban.” The real Taliban had mostly fled to Pakistan.
About a year and a half ago, he told me, a mine exploded next to an American convoy. His father was sitting in a mosque when he was rounded up by coalition troops. Twenty days later, his father’s body was dropped off at a hospital. “I couldn’t control myself,” the young man said, nearly knocking over the gas lamp with his awkward, pogo-stick leg. “I wanted to avenge. I knew where the Taliban operated, because they would come at night, and so I found the commander of a small group. He welcomed me warmly and told me: ‘It is the time of jihad. You are a lion and a hero.’ ”
Colonel Sturek, a powerfully built, blue-eyed Maryland man so cleanshaven that he appeared bald, and Governor Arman, a heavily bearded engineer, made an unlikely team. They shared a meal of sheep, rice and melon four times a week to talk strategy. Sturek loved Arman’s vision of a network of roads by 2008, linking up Zabul’s remote districts, where they would build schools and markets. Zabul straddled the most dangerous stretch of highway in Afghanistan. After 3 each afternoon, Taliban blocked the roads, looking for foreigners, money, spies, satellite phones. Sometimes they would just burn up buses or trucks. They even set loose a donkey on the path to an American base, rigged with rockets, mortars and a detonation card.
Across Afghanistan’s southern provinces, American and Afghan troops were responding to the Taliban resurgence with Operation Mountain Thrust. In Zabul, the focus was on Taliban fighters in the Day Chopan mountains. Sturek’s goal was to disable the Taliban leadership, allow the Americans to find weapons caches, bring in aid and persuade people that they had no intention of interfering with their religion. As the full moon moved into place last May, enabling a predawn landing, Afghan and American soldiers with Charlie Company, Special Forces and U.S. doctors air-assaulted into the Day Chopan mountains, taking scattered gunfire, and descended on the tiny village of Hazarbuz. Special Forces soldiers with goggled sniffer dogs rounded up the men, numbered their hands with markers and interrogated them. Some were arrested and flown back to base camp. I followed Jeff Griffin and his squad, who were dispatched to the villagers’ homes with a message: Governor Arman is coming here to find out what you need, and a medical team has come to treat sick people and animals. This was typical of the American balancing act in Afghanistan. The Village Medical Outreach unit consists of reservist doctors who bring chests full of hygiene kits and medicine to villages that have just been raided by fighting forces.
We climbed up a hill through apricot and almond orchards to reach the scattered homes. We found a woman in a red velvet dress, who had beaded necklaces and a pair of scissors dangling from her neck. She said that the men were all sleeping. Then she said that they had left when we came. Griffin told her about the doctors, but she seemed frightened and said that she didn’t want medical attention. We wandered from house to house until a radio call came in from an observation unit. They had seen a boy wearing black, possibly an informant, running toward one of the houses.
More climbing, more rocks, until we reached a wind-swept mountain top where an old crippled man emerged to hug Griffin, who hugged him back, uncomfortably — after all, he had come to search his house. He then ordered the boy in black to move to a clearing so the observation unit, on a nearby mountain, could see if he was the runner. The soldiers rummaged through the house, turning up small piles of paper and boxes that seemed suspect. It turned out that the boxes were full of snuff and the house was just a shop. As we were about to leave, the radio blared out to Griffin: Don’t forget to tell them about the Village Medical Outreach.
As we rambled back down under the noonday sun, exhausted and thirsty, plucking apricots, almonds and mulberries off the trees, I remembered the Afghans I’d met complaining about Americans pillaging their harvest. It wasn’t hard to see how a few apricots could transmute into theft or how speaking to a woman after you have rounded up all the men could transmute into “Americans are abusing our women.” One afternoon, I had a car accident in Zabul. Within minutes, some 100 men pulled over and began heaving the wreck out of the ditch. As I crouched in the dirt wrapped in a tentlike Kuchi shawl, not a single man glanced my way. Rather, they asked my wounded translator if his wife was O.K. Someone must have sensed a foreigner, however, because 10 minutes after we left for the hospital, the Taliban showed up. They pummeled the driver, demanding to know what happened to the foreigner. He lied and saved his life. But that moment, when not one person glanced my way, offered a window into how seriously they abide by rules that are utterly alien to a 19-year-old American soldier. Sturek constantly struggled with pushing “cultural sensitivity” down the chain of command. It was nearly impossible.
On our long walk back down the mountain, two privates were trying to grapple with the contingencies of their lives, free will, U.S. history and America’s intangible objectives. They were having an existential moment and craving a meal at Red Lobster. This valley in Zabul reminded one of them, Specialist Joshua Pete, of canyons where the U.S. Army once fought his Navajo ancestors. Pete thought he had had a calling, that his country needed him. But because of Afghanistan, he had lost both his scholarship to Dartmouth and his fiancée. He didn’t believe in “this” anymore. Half the Afghans, he said, didn’t even want “our billions to build this country.” He wanted to be home fighting drug gangs in downtown L.A. or helping impoverished people in Flagstaff.
Back in the village of Hazarbuz, I found Governor Arman in his white robes, blazer and turban, sipping tea with Colonel Sturek. After one week, the governor said, once we were all gone, the Taliban would punish the people for sitting with Americans and the governor. Sturek agreed, but added that if the Americans didn’t come, the people would have no idea there was an alternative.
Men and boys filtered down to meet the governor. They sat cross-legged, skeptical, nervous. Arman was an earthy man, and while kind (“Tell anyone who has run to the mountains to come talk, there’ll be no trouble. I am your governor. Why am I here? To hear your problems.”), he also let them have it.
“Look at your kids,” he said, pointing to the boys. The men did, and he winced. “Look at their hands and feet, the infections on their skin, their bad education. Everyone looks sick. Don’t they have the right to be educated?
“Are the Punjabi kids in this situation?” he then asked, referring to the children of the ruling ethnic group in Pakistan. “Why do people call it jihad here in Afghanistan? Why don’t they fight this jihad in Quetta and Pakistan? We need to defend our country from the Punjabis.”
He told them that this war was a Pakistani drama. The Pakistanis were sending Taliban to burn Afghan schools while their own children were being educated. If America leaves, he warned, you will all be slaves of Pakistan.
Over the three days we stayed, Arman’s speeches grew harsher, and the men who visited him and Sturek grew more numerous and more attentive. The governor and the colonel could pick out the Taliban informants — like the young man with good sneakers whom everyone deferred to. Jin Kong radios, which work with solar power, batteries or a hand crank, were handed out by the U.S. military to the locals. The elders got bicycles; kids, school bags with pencils and other supplies.
Why did these Americans come here, the governor bellowed? Because the Taliban had not been nice with the people of this country. The Taliban beat the women, cut the heads off people, went to the north and made tribal enmity for Afghan people. How many Hazara, he asked, were killed in Shajoy (a district of Zabul)? Taliban had slaughtered hundreds of Hazara, an ethnic group descended from the Mongols and primarily Shiite. Arman repeated the accounts of Taliban cutting the throat of a little girl in front of her mother, then killing the mother, of the Taliban putting a gun in the mouth of a boy, who began to suck it and then they shot him. “Don’t you have sons?” he asked. Some of the men averted their eyes, fidgeting in the dust.
On one occasion, Arman asked the men who had come if any among them could read and write. He held up a paper with the word God written on it. None of them could read. “If you can’t read the name of God, you are blind,” he said. Trying to raise their Pashtun pride, he pointed to one of the interpreters, a Hazara from the neighboring district of Jaghori. “What is your district like?” he asked the interpreter, who dutifully reported it had 72 schools, 32 of them high schools, and that all boys and girls were educated. They had electricity, radio stations, lawyers and engineers. “Why are we Pashtuns always fighting?” asked the governor. “You will all be laborers to the Jaghori people because you are illiterate and uneducated.”
Perhaps, but the men wanted to know when their relatives would be let out of U.S. prisons in Kandahar and Bagram. And then a rocket exploded, then another, then gunfire began to echo back and forth between the valley walls. I trekked up to where snipers were perched on a small slope in front of a boulder. On the radio, we could hear Shields, who had taken some men and gone to patrol a valley. He was amazingly calm. “We’re under fire,” he said. “We’re in a riverbed on the side of a hill.” In fact, they were pinned down in an irrigation ditch with bullets throwing up dust and rocks all around them. An A-10 Warthog screeched across the sky as a 500-pound bomb smacked the side of the mountain.
We could still hear Shields breathing as he walked up the mountain. And that oddly calm voice: “We’re definitely putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Pretty much anywhere I’m standing they could take us out.”
A donkey began braying as the full moon drifted up above the mountains. Capt. Craig Johnson told Lieutenant Shields to watch out because shadows would cast long with that moon.
The Taliban, judging from the radio communications we were monitoring, seemed to be wounded and out of ammunition. One of them invited another to prayer. The other demurred, saying he was worried that he would be spotted. “O.K., then pray there, and I’ll pray here,” the first man said. Later, when I met a Taliban commander in Pakistan, he told me that they knew the Americans listened to their radios, so that the five daily prayers were often used as code to signal anything from “I’ve run out of food” to “Ambush them.”
The next afternoon, we flew by helicopter to Andar, a nearby village. I sat in the fields with a former teacher named Anwarjan. The governor had appointed him district chief for all of Day Chopan, but Anwarjan could barely travel. The entire province, he said, was Taliban. Still, he was busy with Shields getting hundreds of kids to school in the central town. He had convinced the parents that Pakistan wants their children to stay wild and uneducated. “I have 300 students now,” he said. “They’re changed. They are polite, greet people, treat their mothers well. One man can change a generation.”
But his efforts, he said, were being undermined by the constant incursions of Taliiban from Pakistan. “The leader of Day Chopan, Mullah Kahar, lives in Quetta,” in Pakistan, Anwarjan said. “All the heads are there. So why don’t you do anything?”
U.S. intelligence knows the same thing. As Seth Jones, an analyst with Rand, told The New York Times earlier this year, Pakistani intelligence agents are advising the Taliban about coalition plans and tactical operations and provide housing, support and security for Taliban leaders. Sturek told me that the U.S. is well aware that the Taliban heads are in Quetta. On one side, he said, most U.S. policy makers argue that the Pakistanis are our friends. On the other side are those, including some in the military, who say, “Let’s just drive into Quetta.”
I often received updates from Charlie Company soldiers after leaving Afghanistan. One of their platoon was killed heading up to an observation post in Day Chopan. After they pulled out of Day Chopan, one of the soldiers told me, they heard that things weren’t going so well and that the Taliban were using the fact that the Romanians had taken over to claim the Russians were back. And another soldier wrote: “Our platoon got sent to a National Guard unit to help them out. They’ve lost like six people in the last week, but none of them were from our platoon.We were in Kandahar for a little while to get resupplied, and you’re notkidding about the Canadians going down.We kept having to go to the big ceremonies for their bodies to get loaded on the plane.It seemed like they were getting messed up pretty bad. I definitely don’t get the whole ‘success story’ thing.”
Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the magazine, has reported extensively about Afghanistan. This is the second of two articles.
Correction: December 17, 2006
An article on Oct. 29 about the war in Afghanistan referred imprecisely to the educational opportunities of a U.S. soldier before he joined the front. Specialist Joshua Pete did not lose a scholarship to Dartmouth because of the war. He was ruminating about what might have been possible if in fact he had applied to the college. This correction was delayed by efforts to reach Specialist Pete in Afghanistan.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/magazine/29taliban.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/magazine/29taliban.html?pagewanted=all ]
F6 note -- in addition to (items linked in) the post to which this post is a reply (the first part of the story) and preceding, see also (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=27423458 and preceding and following -- and the NYT source link for the first part of the story is http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/magazine/22afghanistan.html ( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/magazine/22afghanistan.html?pagewanted=all ) -- and the 2 pix and correction appended at that source:
Taliban fighters about to do battle in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, on July 9.
Veronique de Viguerie/WPN
Battle Ready Taliban fighters washing their feet before saying the prayers that will precede the attack.
Veronique de Viguerie/WPN
Correction: Nov. 5, 2006
An article on Oct. 22 about the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan referred imprecisely to an Afghan warlord and general. Abdul Rashid Dostum is chief of staff to the commander of the armed forces, not the army chief of staff.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Looking for the enemy in Zabul Province, 6,500 square miles of desert and 9,000-foot mountain peaks with hardly a paved road.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Sgt. Jeff Griffin, left, and some of his comrades in Charlie Company await action in a village in Zabul Province.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
By ELIZABETH RUBIN
Published: October 29, 2006
Correction Appended
One morning this summer, I headed out with a U.S. Army convoy of Humvees, a truck called a wrecker and a packed supply truck into the Afghan mountains. I was among some two dozen American and Afghan soldiers from Task Force Warrior, an infantry battalion based in Zabul Province, just north of Kandahar. We trundled up a path fit for goats because the nearby riverbed was perfect for concealing improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s. Soon enough, the truck keeled over into the riverbed anyway. To hoist it up, the wrecker had to crash through wheat fields, and within minutes a gray-bearded farmer appeared brandishing his stick. “Are you Afghan?” he shouted at Farooq, my interpreter. “I have 30 members in my family. Why did you destroy my wheat?” The old farmer then clasped my wrist with his ancient garden tool of a hand. “You Americans are all friends of Bush the persecutor. You see this area” — he swept his other arm in every direction — “these are all Taliban. But they don’t have power. As soon as we find power, I will kill all of you.”
Farooq tried to calm him, but the farmer was fixated on his crushed wheat stalks until he spotted First Sgt. Ruel Robbins, a red-cheeked, chest-first sort. Robbins looked the farmer over, then said, “Tell him I’m real sorry to drive over his wheat, but I had to ’cause my vehicle turned over.” The farmer eyed the sacks in the supply truck; Robbins gave him one of rice and two of flour.
The farmer watched us take off in a swirl of dust, and Specialist Melissa Elliot, who was driving our Humvee, said to Farooq: “We’re not trying to hurt them. We’re trying to protect their security. Why’d he get so upset with us? Is their wheat part of their religion or something?”
“It’s the food for his family, ma’am,” Farooq said patiently.
And so began our mission into the mountains of Zabul Province, 6,500 square miles of desert, farmland and 9,000-foot peaks with almost no paved roads to link one patch to the next. It’s a place where, just decades ago, families lived as nomads, until King Mohammad Zahir Shah gave them government land to settle on, and where national politics is superseded by Pashtunwali — the Pashtun codes for tribal coexistence, based on retaliation, mediation and hospitality. In 1994, when the Taliban movement of young religious students swept into Zabul offering an end to illegal road taxes and warlord rule, Zabul’s leaders simply joined hands with their Pashtun brothers. After the Taliban’s fall, President Hamid Karzai’s nephew was dispatched to head the Zabul Police; in July 2002, I found him besieged by locals, who put feces in his food and threatened to kill him. For five years now American forces have been chasing the Taliban in Zabul and attempting reconstruction. The police buildings have improved. A new hospital (financed by the United Arab Emirates) was finished. Roads were being laid in terrain so remote that when the Americans turned up, the villagers thought they must be Russians. The Americans opened a trade school in Qalat, the capital. But the pace of progress has been painfully slow. These remain the Taliban’s mountains.
There are 42,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan today, trying to secure a country that is a third again the size of Iraq, where there are almost 150,000 U.S.-led troops. In the past two years, more than 300 American and NATO soldiers have died trying to stave off a resurgent Taliban. Already this year, some 1,500 Afghans have been killed. And while there were just two suicide bombings in 2002, there is now one about every five days.
With the Taliban’s alarming offensive, which began last spring, American generals began speaking of a different war — not a war against terror but a war of ideas. In military jargon this meant balancing kinetic and nonkinetic activity. Or, in plain speech, fighting the Taliban versus nation-building, two goals often at odds. “This is the war for the people,” Lt. Col. Frank Sturek, the battalion commander of Task Force Warrior, told me. Sturek served in Iraq under Lt. Gen. David Petraeus — one of the military’s leading thinkers on counterinsurgency — in Mosul, a city with 50,000 university students. In Zabul, by contrast, the literacy rate is 15 percent, at best. Sometimes Sturek couldn’t tell if people wanted to be catapulted to the 21st century or just left alone. On that he deferred to Delbar Jan Arman, the governor of Zabul Province and a former anti-Soviet mujahedeen, who mentored him on local ways — distinguishing a Taliban killing from a tribal feud or a quarrel over a boy lover. Arman explained cultural sensitivities: how pulling off a man’s turban or opening the clothing box of a woman could set off a revolt. Sturek would nod. “The standard military play is, Land in, round up the men, find someone who is nasty and mean and arrest him, drop off supplies and split,” Sturek told me. “We’re trying to humanize ourselves. It’s uncomfortable. You train an infantry battalion to kill the enemy, and it’s hard to tone it down.” The governor’s response was always: “The people are simple. We can win this war if the Army stays nice with the people and if we embrace them.”
After many sweaty hours, we rumbled into the Alamo Bar and Grill in Kharnay, elevation 8,000 feet. It was a fitting name for an outpost fashioned from a mud schoolhouse — dusty, waterless and powerless except for what the soldiers slurped off a Humvee battery. Charlie Company, Fourth Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, had been based here for nine weeks already when we arrived. They had been living on meals ready to eat, or M.R.E.’s, patrolling the mountains with packs weighing 60 pounds or more, befriending locals and being mortared and ambushed once or twice a week. Their skin was burned, their uniforms ripped. But for this evening, all suffering was suspended for barbecue night. The Humvees had brought frozen slabs of beef from the United States.
In downtime, the soldiers of Charlie Company would cram into a mud room to imbibe American culture — “Shark Tale,” “The Bourne Supremacy,” Lil Wayne, Toby Keith singing his “Taliban Song” — all courtesy of Pvt. Dennis Taylor and his DVD and CD collection. A teenager from Tampa’s housing projects, Taylor grew up with the Bloods. The Army has set him straight, even if his buddies teased him because they couldn’t decipher his lingo and he wasn’t sure what continent he was on or what the Koran was. “It’s Islam’s holy book,” said one soldier. “Man, how can you be fighting here and not know that,” another teased. Taylor laughed and shrugged.
At the other end of the spectrum was Cpl. Kyle Hayes, who had made Taylor his project and, like Sgt. Jon Terry, a sentimental tough guy from Louisiana, often shared meals with the Afghan soldiers accompanying their unit to taste their culture and to bond. Hayes owned a Web design company in New York City and until two years ago was touring with his band, “Half Left.” The band had a revelation while producing a record near ground zero in Manhattan, and they all joined the Army. Hayes’s family was stunned. “I was the only guy at basic training who voted for Kerry,” he told me. Sometimes he felt weird on leave in New York City, where people gawk at uniforms, though a few older people thanked him. His life plan, as inscribed in his diary, is to be a rock star, business mogul and founder of a Texan city by 35, governor of Texas by 45 and president by 55.
Anticipation hung over the Alamo. Charlie Company’s next mission was a bit of deceptive theater intended to lure the Taliban into ambushing the soldiers so they could counterattack. Part of the strategy involved Lt. Nathan Shields — a smiling, easygoing officer from Rochester — posing as a gullible new commander. Meanwhile, units hiding in the mountains would block the Taliban’s escape. That night, a few squads hiked up a thousand feet, each soldier hauling water (temperatures in the day are usually in the 100’s), food, rifle, knife, flashlight and first-aid kit, all atop 35 pounds of armor and ammunition. The Afghan soldiers carried little besides a rifle and ammunition. The American infantryman’s burden is the Taliban’s biggest advantage. Fleet-footed, carrying little more than an AK and a walkie-talkie, Taliban fighters could sail over the mountains.
The next morning we headed toward Solan, a village so unfriendly that when American soldiers airlifted in a bridge months earlier, it was burned down the next day. “We don’t know if the Taliban burnt it or the villagers,” Lt. David Patton, a tall, circumspect Texan with Task Force Warrior, said of the bridge in Solan. “Everyone believes in the mission,” he added, “but there’s an underlying thought that when we leave, it’ll go back to the way it was.” As Zabul’s governor, Arman, had told me, Zabul’s religious leaders all supported the Taliban, and in Afghanistan the most powerful platform is the minbar, a pulpit where the mullah delivers his Friday sermon. So although villagers were friendly when the Americans patrolled, they refused to help rebuild a school and a bazaar, for example, fearing retaliation from the Taliban who had destroyed them.
Shortly after we left the first village on our route to Solan, the Afghan soldiers began picking up Taliban radio chatter about the new Americans. Robbins was pleased. We were the bait, and the plan was working. We spread out along the gorge for a long, edgy march. Outside Solan, we met Sayed Ali Sheikh, an elder of the area, in whose compound the Americans had stayed before. He said he couldn’t guarantee that the place wasn’t rigged with explosives, but nevertheless he handed Robbins the key, showed us shrapnel the size of a skateboard that had ricocheted off a mountain when American planes dropped a 500-pound bomb — and vanished. In no time, the soldiers transformed Ali Sheikh’s compound into a base of operations: satellite hookup to call the Air Force for cover, mortar base near the well, sniper positions.
Ten lean men in turbans came to meet Shields, who played his role as new commander somewhat awkwardly. A strange dialogue ensued, led by one of the 10 men, Haji Gailani, whose oversize glasses, gabardine vest and cane denoted authority. He said that they didn’t deny Taliban fighters were nearby. “If you can catch those people, thank you,” he said. “If you want to slaughter my neck, please do.” There was a little nervous laughter. No, no, Shields said, of course not. Then Gailani said: “You have planes. You can hear the Taliban on your radios. And still you cannot force them out of here. How can we?”
Others began to speak up. Planes had attacked the mountains the night before, the men said. They had heard about the bombing of civilians in Kandahar. They wanted to know if they were about to be bombed. Robbins advised them to stay near the thickest walls and shut off the lights. Then they left.
And the waiting began. Pvt. Andrew Richards pulled out photos of his family, who lived in Colombia. Specialist Jonathon Routledge, whose voice still cracked and who couldn’t believe he was roped into the Army by some cool recruitment videos, poked at a chick that was pecking at spilled tea. Shields and the medic climbed onto the compound roof to give coordinates in case of a medevac. Pvt. Jason Belford was so itchy that he played can-you-down-a-pack-of-crackers-in-two-minutes.
The radio began sputtering with Taliban voices. An Afghan policeman, who went by the code name No. 5, had found their frequency. He heard them discussing our compound. They knew everything: how many Americans and Afghans, the location of the mortar, the sniper positions, the satellite and the flower (code for me, the woman in the group). Presumably one of our earlier visitors was an informant. No. 5 seemed a little dodgy, too — perhaps working only for the troops, perhaps the Taliban, perhaps both.
Shields, Sgt. Jeff Griffin, Belford and a few others moved out to check the area around the compound for mines. Just as we neared the rock garden, a detonation jolted us. A deafening sound. A black smoke squall. Amazingly, no one was hurt. But something was wrong. They had been out to that rock garden twice and found nothing. Suspicion fell on No. 5.
“Fire a mortar,” shouted one of the soldiers. Dan Guenther, a sniper from Texas, spotted something. Everyone assumed an imminent showdown. Someone threw a grenade into an outcropping to see if it was booby-trapped.
“If you’re gonna come to the party, come already!” shouted Guenther. Then he suggested they should all run out in front of the house, smack their butts and provoke a fight. It was 6:42 p.m., and the light was fading. Shields and a few others popped out of the compound’s shelter, hoping to draw fire. As darkness fell, I climbed up to talk to Specialist Tommy Glasgow, who was perched on the roof. He said that there was no way the Taliban would pick a fight after seeing all the U.S. fire power and listening to the bombers occasionally buzzing overhead. We talked about the mission in Zabul, and Glasgow said: “As bad as I don’t want to be here, we should be. The Romanians are coming to take over from us, and the Taliban are just gonna cream ’em.”
The fight never did come, and when we got back to the Alamo, the Americans were packing, and the Afghan police and soldiers appeared bewildered, convinced they would be dead in 24 hours. One policeman had already defected to the Taliban, I was told. “We’ll be bombing this compound in a few weeks ’cause it’ll be filled with Taliban,” Hayes told me. He tried to find an hour every day to write in his diary. On May 12, for example, he had written: “I killed some people last night. Second squad is out looking for corpses right now. We got mortared right around dark ... when I was getting all the last stuff done for the day, and I got a hypoglycemic attack when I was doing sit-ups. It was still a good day, though. I got a lot done. Everyday I grow stronger.”
A few days later, the Alamo was indeed abandoned by the Afghan forces.
The final draft of the U.S. military’s latest counterinsurgency manual, written under the direction of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. James Mattis, emphasizes that if you skimp on resources, endurance and meeting the population’s security requirements, you lose. Yet for the past five years, the Pashtun provinces have been plagued by a lack of troops and resources. James Dobbins, President George W. Bush’s former special envoy to Afghanistan, blames the White House, which he said had a predisposition against nation-building and international peacekeeping. The Bush administration rejected Afghan and State Department appeals to deploy a peacekeeping force in the provinces, dismissed European offers of troops and had already begun shifting military resources to Iraq, Dobbins told me, while U.S. troops in Afghanistan were to be limited to counterterrorism. “In manpower and money,” he added, “this was the least resourced American nation-building effort in our history.” In Afghanistan, the White House spent 25 times less per capita than in Bosnia and deployed one-fiftieth the troops. Much of the money that was pledged didn’t show up for years. “The main lesson of Afghanistan is low input, low output,” Dobbins said. “If you commit low levels of military manpower and economic assistance, what you get are low levels of security and economic growth.”
The draft counterinsurgency manual is thoughtful, full of details and warnings like these: losing moral legitimacy means losing the war; the more force is used, the less effective it is; provoking combat usually plays into the enemy’s hands; and building a government through illegitimate actions like unlawful detention and torture is self-defeating, even against fighters who conceal themselves among noncombatants.
Yet while I was in the south, I saw how readily vicious practices are condoned. An Afghan security official who insisted that I not use his name but who was an aide to a prominent southern governor, told of an instance when they couldn’t find a boy suspected of plotting an attack. “We sent out a command — arrest all his brothers, uncles, cousins, relatives, all of them,” he said. “When we arrested the relatives, no one knew what that boy was doing. Still we beat them all until they would shout, ‘Write that we killed 5 or 10 people, whatever you want, and I will say anything.’ ” In Zabul’s provincial capital, Qalat, the police proudly showed me three “Taliban” they had just captured. One of them had been beaten so badly he could hardly walk, and his feet were oozing puss. His eyes were mere wrinkles in swollen tissue. An American intelligence officer looked slightly embarrassed when he walked into the police station.
With a corrupt justice system, young Afghan men on the receiving end of injustice have often felt their honor could only be restored through acts of revenge. One night, a doctor introduced me to a young farmer who asked me not to use his name. He had been shot by U.S. forces in a gunfight a year earlier. Seven metal clamps were holding his leg in place. Though deeply religious, he never liked the Taliban regime. His family was relieved when Mullah Omar and the “Afghan Arabs” who first came to fight the Soviets in the 1980’s fled Kandahar. He believed that Karzai and the international community would help build the country. “But they didn’t,” he said in the dark little flat where we met. “They just came to arrest the people.” His father was a tribal leader with pomegranate orchards, and relatives often appealed to him to get their family members out of Afghan and American prisons. He would urge the Americans not to be fooled by false reports naming “Taliban.” The real Taliban had mostly fled to Pakistan.
About a year and a half ago, he told me, a mine exploded next to an American convoy. His father was sitting in a mosque when he was rounded up by coalition troops. Twenty days later, his father’s body was dropped off at a hospital. “I couldn’t control myself,” the young man said, nearly knocking over the gas lamp with his awkward, pogo-stick leg. “I wanted to avenge. I knew where the Taliban operated, because they would come at night, and so I found the commander of a small group. He welcomed me warmly and told me: ‘It is the time of jihad. You are a lion and a hero.’ ”
Colonel Sturek, a powerfully built, blue-eyed Maryland man so cleanshaven that he appeared bald, and Governor Arman, a heavily bearded engineer, made an unlikely team. They shared a meal of sheep, rice and melon four times a week to talk strategy. Sturek loved Arman’s vision of a network of roads by 2008, linking up Zabul’s remote districts, where they would build schools and markets. Zabul straddled the most dangerous stretch of highway in Afghanistan. After 3 each afternoon, Taliban blocked the roads, looking for foreigners, money, spies, satellite phones. Sometimes they would just burn up buses or trucks. They even set loose a donkey on the path to an American base, rigged with rockets, mortars and a detonation card.
Across Afghanistan’s southern provinces, American and Afghan troops were responding to the Taliban resurgence with Operation Mountain Thrust. In Zabul, the focus was on Taliban fighters in the Day Chopan mountains. Sturek’s goal was to disable the Taliban leadership, allow the Americans to find weapons caches, bring in aid and persuade people that they had no intention of interfering with their religion. As the full moon moved into place last May, enabling a predawn landing, Afghan and American soldiers with Charlie Company, Special Forces and U.S. doctors air-assaulted into the Day Chopan mountains, taking scattered gunfire, and descended on the tiny village of Hazarbuz. Special Forces soldiers with goggled sniffer dogs rounded up the men, numbered their hands with markers and interrogated them. Some were arrested and flown back to base camp. I followed Jeff Griffin and his squad, who were dispatched to the villagers’ homes with a message: Governor Arman is coming here to find out what you need, and a medical team has come to treat sick people and animals. This was typical of the American balancing act in Afghanistan. The Village Medical Outreach unit consists of reservist doctors who bring chests full of hygiene kits and medicine to villages that have just been raided by fighting forces.
We climbed up a hill through apricot and almond orchards to reach the scattered homes. We found a woman in a red velvet dress, who had beaded necklaces and a pair of scissors dangling from her neck. She said that the men were all sleeping. Then she said that they had left when we came. Griffin told her about the doctors, but she seemed frightened and said that she didn’t want medical attention. We wandered from house to house until a radio call came in from an observation unit. They had seen a boy wearing black, possibly an informant, running toward one of the houses.
More climbing, more rocks, until we reached a wind-swept mountain top where an old crippled man emerged to hug Griffin, who hugged him back, uncomfortably — after all, he had come to search his house. He then ordered the boy in black to move to a clearing so the observation unit, on a nearby mountain, could see if he was the runner. The soldiers rummaged through the house, turning up small piles of paper and boxes that seemed suspect. It turned out that the boxes were full of snuff and the house was just a shop. As we were about to leave, the radio blared out to Griffin: Don’t forget to tell them about the Village Medical Outreach.
As we rambled back down under the noonday sun, exhausted and thirsty, plucking apricots, almonds and mulberries off the trees, I remembered the Afghans I’d met complaining about Americans pillaging their harvest. It wasn’t hard to see how a few apricots could transmute into theft or how speaking to a woman after you have rounded up all the men could transmute into “Americans are abusing our women.” One afternoon, I had a car accident in Zabul. Within minutes, some 100 men pulled over and began heaving the wreck out of the ditch. As I crouched in the dirt wrapped in a tentlike Kuchi shawl, not a single man glanced my way. Rather, they asked my wounded translator if his wife was O.K. Someone must have sensed a foreigner, however, because 10 minutes after we left for the hospital, the Taliban showed up. They pummeled the driver, demanding to know what happened to the foreigner. He lied and saved his life. But that moment, when not one person glanced my way, offered a window into how seriously they abide by rules that are utterly alien to a 19-year-old American soldier. Sturek constantly struggled with pushing “cultural sensitivity” down the chain of command. It was nearly impossible.
On our long walk back down the mountain, two privates were trying to grapple with the contingencies of their lives, free will, U.S. history and America’s intangible objectives. They were having an existential moment and craving a meal at Red Lobster. This valley in Zabul reminded one of them, Specialist Joshua Pete, of canyons where the U.S. Army once fought his Navajo ancestors. Pete thought he had had a calling, that his country needed him. But because of Afghanistan, he had lost both his scholarship to Dartmouth and his fiancée. He didn’t believe in “this” anymore. Half the Afghans, he said, didn’t even want “our billions to build this country.” He wanted to be home fighting drug gangs in downtown L.A. or helping impoverished people in Flagstaff.
Back in the village of Hazarbuz, I found Governor Arman in his white robes, blazer and turban, sipping tea with Colonel Sturek. After one week, the governor said, once we were all gone, the Taliban would punish the people for sitting with Americans and the governor. Sturek agreed, but added that if the Americans didn’t come, the people would have no idea there was an alternative.
Men and boys filtered down to meet the governor. They sat cross-legged, skeptical, nervous. Arman was an earthy man, and while kind (“Tell anyone who has run to the mountains to come talk, there’ll be no trouble. I am your governor. Why am I here? To hear your problems.”), he also let them have it.
“Look at your kids,” he said, pointing to the boys. The men did, and he winced. “Look at their hands and feet, the infections on their skin, their bad education. Everyone looks sick. Don’t they have the right to be educated?
“Are the Punjabi kids in this situation?” he then asked, referring to the children of the ruling ethnic group in Pakistan. “Why do people call it jihad here in Afghanistan? Why don’t they fight this jihad in Quetta and Pakistan? We need to defend our country from the Punjabis.”
He told them that this war was a Pakistani drama. The Pakistanis were sending Taliban to burn Afghan schools while their own children were being educated. If America leaves, he warned, you will all be slaves of Pakistan.
Over the three days we stayed, Arman’s speeches grew harsher, and the men who visited him and Sturek grew more numerous and more attentive. The governor and the colonel could pick out the Taliban informants — like the young man with good sneakers whom everyone deferred to. Jin Kong radios, which work with solar power, batteries or a hand crank, were handed out by the U.S. military to the locals. The elders got bicycles; kids, school bags with pencils and other supplies.
Why did these Americans come here, the governor bellowed? Because the Taliban had not been nice with the people of this country. The Taliban beat the women, cut the heads off people, went to the north and made tribal enmity for Afghan people. How many Hazara, he asked, were killed in Shajoy (a district of Zabul)? Taliban had slaughtered hundreds of Hazara, an ethnic group descended from the Mongols and primarily Shiite. Arman repeated the accounts of Taliban cutting the throat of a little girl in front of her mother, then killing the mother, of the Taliban putting a gun in the mouth of a boy, who began to suck it and then they shot him. “Don’t you have sons?” he asked. Some of the men averted their eyes, fidgeting in the dust.
On one occasion, Arman asked the men who had come if any among them could read and write. He held up a paper with the word God written on it. None of them could read. “If you can’t read the name of God, you are blind,” he said. Trying to raise their Pashtun pride, he pointed to one of the interpreters, a Hazara from the neighboring district of Jaghori. “What is your district like?” he asked the interpreter, who dutifully reported it had 72 schools, 32 of them high schools, and that all boys and girls were educated. They had electricity, radio stations, lawyers and engineers. “Why are we Pashtuns always fighting?” asked the governor. “You will all be laborers to the Jaghori people because you are illiterate and uneducated.”
Perhaps, but the men wanted to know when their relatives would be let out of U.S. prisons in Kandahar and Bagram. And then a rocket exploded, then another, then gunfire began to echo back and forth between the valley walls. I trekked up to where snipers were perched on a small slope in front of a boulder. On the radio, we could hear Shields, who had taken some men and gone to patrol a valley. He was amazingly calm. “We’re under fire,” he said. “We’re in a riverbed on the side of a hill.” In fact, they were pinned down in an irrigation ditch with bullets throwing up dust and rocks all around them. An A-10 Warthog screeched across the sky as a 500-pound bomb smacked the side of the mountain.
We could still hear Shields breathing as he walked up the mountain. And that oddly calm voice: “We’re definitely putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Pretty much anywhere I’m standing they could take us out.”
A donkey began braying as the full moon drifted up above the mountains. Capt. Craig Johnson told Lieutenant Shields to watch out because shadows would cast long with that moon.
The Taliban, judging from the radio communications we were monitoring, seemed to be wounded and out of ammunition. One of them invited another to prayer. The other demurred, saying he was worried that he would be spotted. “O.K., then pray there, and I’ll pray here,” the first man said. Later, when I met a Taliban commander in Pakistan, he told me that they knew the Americans listened to their radios, so that the five daily prayers were often used as code to signal anything from “I’ve run out of food” to “Ambush them.”
The next afternoon, we flew by helicopter to Andar, a nearby village. I sat in the fields with a former teacher named Anwarjan. The governor had appointed him district chief for all of Day Chopan, but Anwarjan could barely travel. The entire province, he said, was Taliban. Still, he was busy with Shields getting hundreds of kids to school in the central town. He had convinced the parents that Pakistan wants their children to stay wild and uneducated. “I have 300 students now,” he said. “They’re changed. They are polite, greet people, treat their mothers well. One man can change a generation.”
But his efforts, he said, were being undermined by the constant incursions of Taliiban from Pakistan. “The leader of Day Chopan, Mullah Kahar, lives in Quetta,” in Pakistan, Anwarjan said. “All the heads are there. So why don’t you do anything?”
U.S. intelligence knows the same thing. As Seth Jones, an analyst with Rand, told The New York Times earlier this year, Pakistani intelligence agents are advising the Taliban about coalition plans and tactical operations and provide housing, support and security for Taliban leaders. Sturek told me that the U.S. is well aware that the Taliban heads are in Quetta. On one side, he said, most U.S. policy makers argue that the Pakistanis are our friends. On the other side are those, including some in the military, who say, “Let’s just drive into Quetta.”
I often received updates from Charlie Company soldiers after leaving Afghanistan. One of their platoon was killed heading up to an observation post in Day Chopan. After they pulled out of Day Chopan, one of the soldiers told me, they heard that things weren’t going so well and that the Taliban were using the fact that the Romanians had taken over to claim the Russians were back. And another soldier wrote: “Our platoon got sent to a National Guard unit to help them out. They’ve lost like six people in the last week, but none of them were from our platoon.We were in Kandahar for a little while to get resupplied, and you’re notkidding about the Canadians going down.We kept having to go to the big ceremonies for their bodies to get loaded on the plane.It seemed like they were getting messed up pretty bad. I definitely don’t get the whole ‘success story’ thing.”
Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the magazine, has reported extensively about Afghanistan. This is the second of two articles.
Correction: December 17, 2006
An article on Oct. 29 about the war in Afghanistan referred imprecisely to the educational opportunities of a U.S. soldier before he joined the front. Specialist Joshua Pete did not lose a scholarship to Dartmouth because of the war. He was ruminating about what might have been possible if in fact he had applied to the college. This correction was delayed by efforts to reach Specialist Pete in Afghanistan.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/magazine/29taliban.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/magazine/29taliban.html?pagewanted=all ]
F6 note -- in addition to (items linked in) the post to which this post is a reply (the first part of the story) and preceding, see also (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=27423458 and preceding and following -- and the NYT source link for the first part of the story is http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/magazine/22afghanistan.html ( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/magazine/22afghanistan.html?pagewanted=all ) -- and the 2 pix and correction appended at that source:
Taliban fighters about to do battle in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, on July 9.
Veronique de Viguerie/WPN
Battle Ready Taliban fighters washing their feet before saying the prayers that will precede the attack.
Veronique de Viguerie/WPN
Correction: Nov. 5, 2006
An article on Oct. 22 about the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan referred imprecisely to an Afghan warlord and general. Abdul Rashid Dostum is chief of staff to the commander of the armed forces, not the army chief of staff.
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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