Posted on 02/12/2004 6:00:38 PM PST by mylife
US brings the Great Game up to date with helicopters in the Afghan hills
(Filed: 13/02/2004)
Isambard Wilkinson reports on life with US paratroopers high in the Afghan mountains, on forgotten frontline of the war on terrorism
Up on the snow-capped ridge, the men of Alpha Company deployed silently above the cluster of mud-walled houses, only their radio antennae and M14 rifles visible against the pale pre-dawn sky.
Down below, a sleeping village was just visible as the first spokes of sunlight broke across the remote fastness. Then, without warning, platoons of the 1st Battalion 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment swarmed into the village, covered by Cobra helicopter gunships making low passes from the skies above.
The soldiers raced into the houses, separating the veiled women into one room while they searched for weaponry. Outside, eight men were bound with plastic handcuffs, their robes thrown over their heads, while another suspect was questioned.
"Do you know Khalim Gul? No? You're lying. Your neighbours say he's your cousin," said Lt Stephen Tegge, a burly former marine. "What's the Pashto for bullshit?" he asked an interpreter.
As the troops withdrew down the mountain paths with their captives, the ground shook as a series of deafening explosions threw up rock and dust where the Americans had blown up weapon caches found hidden in trees and caves near the village.
The objective of the dawn raid according to the young company commander, Capt Anthony Gibbs, was "to capture or kill one of the US's most wanted", Jalalludin Haqqani, a former senior Taliban leader, and his sub-commanders.
But there is also the ever-present possibility of a huge bonus, an encounter with Osama bin Laden. "The hunt for Osama could be resolved by a routine patrol. Look how they found Saddam - it was a regular unit," said the 501st's commanding officer.
Capt Gibbs summarised the morning's work. "We have removed some local bad guys and a lot of firepower. Rockets, recoilless rifles and mines," he said.
Two years after the fall of the Taliban, the largely forgotten war on terrorism in Afghanistan, where 11,000 US troops are deployed, is gaining momentum.
As shadowy groups of Taliban and al-Qa'eda fighters regroup in lairs in Afghanistan and across the border in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, American soldiers such as those of the 501st are in the vanguard of operations to eliminate insurgents and disrupt their planned spring offensive.
It is hard to remember now the days before September 11, when American troops were stationed in well-guarded barracks far from harm's way by politicians fearful of a popular backlash.
Now American boys, affable GIs from rural states such as Oklahoma and Maine, are sent to risk their lives daily on far-flung frontiers peopled by tribes notorious for treachery and blood feuds.
The Americans are finding it a struggle to come to grips with the local ways. The 501st needs to find Haqqani, but tracking a guerrilla leader in these mountains is a fearsomely difficult process for foreigners. Haqqani is a fox, said by intelligence reports to move regularly through his area of Zadran clad as a woman in a burqa.
One of the most celebrated commanders in anti-Soviet war, he is now believed by the US to be organising attacks against coalition forces in alliance with al-Qa'eda.
But useful intelligence, a large part of the 501st mission, is hard to come by. "We know they are out there. You can feel the fear of people," said Capt Gibbs. "We have to work more as detectives and we have adapted well to it. It is not just firefights all the time."
Yet the Americans are struggling to identify the enemy. The chief source of information is prisoners, known as Persons Under Control or "Pucs". "The guys like to 'puck' people," said Sergeant Jeff Troth, referring to the cuffs, blindfolds and "tactical questioning" suspects face. But interpreters or "Terps" are thin on the ground.
Intimidation also stems the flow of information from villagers caught in a wretched no-man's land between the Americans and the Islamist militants. "The Taliban drop leaflets and tell people not to co-operate. Sometimes they come and fire rockets from behind the village. Then the Americans come and search our houses," said one villager, Ghani Khan, 20, a mechanic.
Another villager explained that his son had been a soldier with the pro-coalition militia. He believes it was a group of Haqqani's men who killed him two months ago for working with the Americans.
The ageing father tugged the interpreter's beard between thumb and forefinger, the traditional request for a pledge, and asked for a guarantee not to divulge that he was helping the Americans.
He then held up a gnarled finger in front of his hennaed beard and pointed furtively across the valley to a neighbour's home. "Talk to him. He is al-Qa'eda," he said.
"They are more afraid of each other than of us," observed Capt Ned Marsh, 25. Blood feuds are common among the Pathan villagers and the young officers labour to divine the treacherous shifting sands of local alliances.
One of the interpreters said: "Most people in our country have personal enmity and if they want to take revenge they plant weapons on their enemies."
The Afghan militiamen working with the Americans have far more success in sniffing out the "bad guys", an issue for every foreign army which has entered these mountains. As Kipling's Pathan, Mahbub Ali, noted: "The jackal that lives in the wilds of Mazanderan can only be caught by the hounds of Mazanderan." Capt Marsh puts it rather less poetically: "They [Afghan militia] see things, signs, that we would not have a chance of spotting."
As the soldiers progressed through the hostile villages, the "Terps" point to signs that may be very well be innocent. They may also be laden with meaning to the guerrilla eye. They note cassette tape unravelled on trees, dense smoke fires and mirror flashes they suspect are Taliban signals.
It is all redolent of an earlier time, when British and Russian soldiers and adventurers played the Great Game in Afghanistan's wild and often incomprehensible mountain culture.
There are still echoes of that imperial past for the newcomer to this strange land. In one of the biggest American bases, a lieutenant-colonel confided that he was reading Kipling and Winston Churchill's compilation of dispatches for The Daily Telegraph on the British campaign in the border regions in 1898.
Some of the tactics, too, are unchanged. Two weeks ago, a platoon stationed at Urgun was ambushed from above in the age-old Pathan fashion as the patrol passed through a ravine.
It is now American soldiers' turn to observe Kipling's cautionary verse:
A scrimmage in a Border station, A canter down some dark defile, Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail, The Crammers boast, the Squadron's pride, Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
Fortunately for the Americans, they can now deploy something faster than cavalry and far better protected. Today's force moves in convoys of up 25 armoured vehicles, mounted with 50-calibre machineguns and Mk IV grenade launchers, a fearsome force that few gunmen have the ambition to attack.
There is an echo of an earlier era, too, in the summary given by US officers of their objectives in Afghanistan. In words that would surely resonate with any officer from the days of the Raj, Colonel Harry C Glenn III, the commanding officer of the 501st, said: "We are the farthest from the flagpole. We are here to promote stability and to extend the influence of the government in the region and from an infantry perspective to find, capture and kill [enemy] forces."
It is going to be a long war. There is no sense of the temporary any longer, no sense from the paratroopers that they will be home by Christmas. When asked how long his tour in Afghanistan would last Pte Joe Travesi spat out a brown wad of tobacco juice and quoted from the musical Guys and Dolls: "The 12th of Never. We just take one day at a time. We were deployed for six months and now it's nine."
The soldiers have been lucky so far, a testament to the importance in American eyes of "force protection". When earlier foreign armies came they suffered terribly.
The 44th Foot died to a man when attacked by Afghans in 1842, part of Maj-Gen Elphinstone's column of 4,500 troops and 12,000 camp followers wiped out by Afghans. Only one man survived. The Russians lost 15,000 dead in their war from 1979-1989. Yet the Americans so far have lost only 100 men,
This is a small, scrappy war, where even finding an opportunity to fire in anger is an achievement. The infrequency with which they meet the enemy frustrates the men of the 501st. Three weeks ago however, they were lucky. A patrol met a heavily armed four-man Taliban assassination squad that had just ambushed and killed a local security official.
"It was part of the effort to destabilise President Hamid Karzai's government and was related to a recent haul of drugs that these guys make money from," said Sgt Don Thomas, the platoon leader who found the assassins.
"I told them to halt and they ran off firing over their shoulder. They had Koranic inscriptions around their necks and fought to the last. One who was heavily wounded tried to throw a grenade as he died," said Sgt Kelly Rogne, who shot one of the Taliban.
"Two were put out of their misery by 50-cal rounds. One had his brains blown out and the other his guts. Locals cheered us on the roadside for three days afterwards," he added. The four dead Taliban were later linked to a cell of Haqqani's men working in the Khost-Gardez pass.
The battle was a pay-off for the American decision to campaign through the usual Afghan winter lull. Although the airborne unit is stationed in a tented camp near the border town of Khost, the 501st have spent more than half their time since being deployed last October patrolling from makeshift camps among the ravines and wadis.
"We are concentrating on building intelligence from the ground up but I'm a hammer, not a scalpel," said Col Glenn. "What the enemy fears is meeting an infantry platoon."
The Americans are out in all weathers, sending small units high into the hills looking for the enemy. Waking up in snow-covered trenches beside Humvee vehicles in "hooches"(bivouacs) 8,000ft up in the Zadran Valley is the speciality of one unit normally based in Alaska, where they are used to operating at minus 60°F.
In Afghanistan it is cold at night but in daytime the air is thick with grit. It is a land of soaring mountains, dust and rock.
In one such camp at night as the boom of US mortars warned off a hidden enemy from launching rocket attacks Capt Gibbs said: "The enemy has set checkpoints, stashed weapons ahead of springtime, RPG-ed our convoys, planted IEDs [improvised explosive devices] on the roads and ambushed other US units. They are also harassing the local population, telling them not to co-operate with us."
In theory the Americans are not alone. Over the mountainous border, the Pakistani army says it is doing everything possible to crack down on terrorists and to seal the border.
But the paratroopers are sceptical, regarding their Pakistani allies with something approaching open contempt. They note that usually, after attackers strike, they slip away towards Pakistan.
"Everyone is paid off here. We would like to get over that side of the border. The Pakistanis tell us that they are doing the right thing, but they aren't," said one officer, who asked not to be named.
Sitting in the back of a Humvee as the convoy passes through fly-infested bazaars peopled by fierce, bearded Pathans, the Americans offer the sort of commentary probably common to all armies in foreign lands. "The sheep are f—ing weird," says one soldier laconically, fixing his gaze on one of Afghanistan's favoured animals.
The convoy looked like an army of occupation and that is how the Americans are treated. Grubby-faced children beg for pens and water and then shout "fackyoo" as the soldiers pass.
Yet most soldiers are optimistic. "The Afghans have had 30 years of war and now they just want to live in peace. The Taliban kept a certain amount of order here and now there is a power vacuum that has to be filled," said Capt Marsh.
And Osama bin Laden? The Rumint, short for Rumour Intelligence, the gossip of special forces, says he will be nabbed before November's presidential elections.
It reads like an adventure novel - you will be amazed at the bravery and skills of 20 year old British officers passing as Afghans. And Britain suffering one of its greatest military defeats in a retreat from Kabul. Great read!
"The United States Marine Corps (USMC) Designated Marksman Rifle (DMR) uses the new enhanced M14 rifle. The M14 rifle has recently seen action with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Kandahar, Afghanistan."
M14 Rifle and M14A1 Rifles
"Already field-tested in Afghanistan, the DMR version of the 7.62mm M14 is just one of the new tools being used in America's war on terrorism by the U.S. Marine Corps' 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade Antiterrorism unit."
United States Marines Antiterrorism Force
Considering the type of firefights these guys are getting into (small skirmishes against slippery enemies) this seems to make sense- accuracy is probably more important than rate of fire.
Ah, well, the Romans spent centuries pacifying some of their more unruly provinces. Such is the burden of Imperium.
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