I know, it seems like every few months somebody writes a lengthy piece on how we've forgotten Afghanistan. But it obviously needs even more attention, and if you wanted to know my biggest criticism with the invasion of iraq, it's the fact that we have utterly failed to finish the job in Afghanistan.
Vanity Fair
America's Forgotten War
By SEBASTIAN JUNGER
More than four years after the invasion of Afghanistan, 20,000 U.S. soldiers are still there, pitting their diplomatic skills—and massive airpower—against the Taliban's terror tactics
This now, too, is war: an American colonel striding through the market of a mud-walled Afghan town, scanning the produce. There's lots of it—fresh tomatoes, peppers, carrots—which one vegetable seller attributes to a new storage facility in nearby Kandahar functioning as it should. Otherwise, the produce would be overpriced and imported from Pakistan. All this, in some indirect way, is good news for the American military, which for four years has been fighting an infuriatingly low-level war in the mountains of Afghanistan. If there's plenty of food, according to this line of thought, the locals are doing well and will support President Hamid Karzai's fragile coalition government in Kabul. And if they support the government, they won't help the insurgents, who have kept 20,000 American soldiers pinned down in an almost forgotten war.
As a result, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Stammer walks through town every week or so to take the pulse of the community. Minutes earlier he finished up a visit to a local girls' school—built with American money—where he had knelt down in front of the headmistress and knifed open several boxes of school supplies for the children. The supplies had been sent by his wife, and included soccerballs bought by the women's soccer team at the University of Texas. The schoolmistress thanked him, and another person added that if he "heard anything" he would let Stammer know. By that, he meant that he would call if he got word of Taliban activity in the area—which, in turn, might allow Stammer to pre-empt an attack on American soldiers.
By all measures the situation in Afghanistan may be skidding dangerously off the rails. American military deaths in the past year—nearly a hundred—almost equal those for the three preceding years combined. According to a recent internal report for the American Special Forces, opium production has gone from 74 metric tons a year under the Taliban to an astronomical 3,600 metric tons, an amount which is equal to 90 percent of the world's supply. The profit from Afghanistan's drug trade—roughly $2 billion a year—competes with the amount of international aid flowing into the country and helps fund the insurgency. And assassinations and suicide bombings have suddenly taken hold in parts of Afghanistan, leading people to fear that the country is headed toward Iraq-style anarchy.
None of this dulls the enthusiasm of Colonel Stammer, who has exactly one year to make a difference in one of the poorest and most ravaged countries in the world. Back on the street, the inevitable crowd of curious young boys gathers around him as he moves through the market. He's a big man, and even bigger in body armor, and his head never stops swiveling from side to side as he walks. His slate-blue eyes seem to take in everything: the butcher shop that has plenty of meat, the pharmacy that still has medicine on the shelves, the townspeople who seem relatively at ease despite the Humvees at the end of the market. Two soldiers walk ahead of Stammer, and two walk behind, casually keeping an eye on things. Halfway through town, a car pulls up and the elderly Afghan man at the wheel honks so that he can get by.
"That's good!" Stammer says as he steps aside. "That's a good sign! The guy's got balls, honking at me like that—it means he's not scared! We're coming together here, I think!"
Stammer is waging war by every possible means: with children's books, with cheap vegetables, and, of course, with guns. He is the commanding officer for, primarily, the 700 or so soldiers of the 2nd Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry Regiment, based in the dusty town of Qalat, in southeast Afghanistan. He is energy personified: every sentence ends in an exclamation point; every greeting turns into a hearty back thump or headlock; every idea is acted upon as fast as possible.
"I always carry a hand grenade because once I really, really needed one!" Stammer informs me at one point, in his typically rapid-fire way. We were suiting up for a trip off-base and he was, I suppose, explaining all the armaments he was draped with. "I went one-on-one with an ACM at about 20 meters. He was in a hole, and I didn't have a hand grenade, so I shot him with my Beretta when he stood up! Dude, what a horrible time to stand up!"
ACM means "anti-coalition militia," which is military terminology for the Taliban fighters America is at war with. They are for the most part young Afghans who have been lured into the movement by cash salaries and the fierce rhetoric of hard-core Islamist mullahs. (Since Afghan soldiers and police are paid only around $70 a month, Taliban leaders—many of whom work hand in hand with the opium growers—don't have to spend much to outbid the Afghan military.) Taliban forces are believed to number around 3,000 or 4,000 fighters in total, and they are led mainly by former commanders from the Taliban's brief, humorless reign.
Colonel Stammer estimates that in Zabol Province—his "battle space"—there are probably fewer than 300 active Taliban, and half that many during the winter. As a military power they are insignificant, but therein lies the problem. Because of the way the U.S. military is designed, the larger the army they are fighting, the faster it will be destroyed—a large army simply offers a broader target for America's superior weapons. The one force the U.S. cannot seem to defeat, however, is a small-scale insurgency that is not supported by a central government. The U.S. is effectively trying to weed a garden with a backhoe, and its success may well depend on the ability of men such as Colonel Stammer to re-invent, on the fly, the way America wages war.
To that end, America has spent a total of $1.3 billion on reconstruction projects in Afghanistan over the past four years. They have built or refurbished 312 schools. They have built or refurbished 338 medical clinics. They and other coalition forces have trained 82,000 Afghan soldiers and police. They have helped stage two national elections. They have increased by a factor of five the number of children in school, a figure that includes 1.6 million girls. They have helped pave a new highway from Kandahar to Kabul, which was formerly a dirt road. Colonel Stammer directed a village medical-outreach program that has treated 4,000 Afghans in Zabol Province alone, many of whom would otherwise have had to walk or ride for days to reach help. There is a new school in Qalat, the roads have been re-surfaced, and, stunningly, more than 50 percent of the civilian population turned out to vote in the last election.
This being Afghanistan—and this being the U.S. government—the development efforts have been tarnished by disturbing incidents of graft, inefficiency, and scandal. The American government has also been criticized for awarding development contracts to non-Afghans; the Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, for example, was built by a New Jersey company using Turkish and Indian workers. And yet, the post-9/11 era is doubtless the best thing to have happened to this poor, bullet-riddled country in the past 30 years.
Helping matters still further is the fact that, from the beginning, Afghan support for American involvement was exceptionally high. The last time I was in Afghanistan was in late 2001, when I watched Northern Alliance militias take Kabul after a mercifully brief battle across the Shomali Plains. As the battle progressed, Afghan children climbed onto the roofs of their mud houses and cheered as they watched American bombers drop ordnance on the Taliban positions. A few days later, an Afghan man hugged me on the streets of Kabul simply because I was American.
The American military has a way of squandering that kind of goodwill, of course, and stories of American soldiers' torturing Afghans at Bagram Air Base and mistakenly bombing wedding parties have obviously not made Colonel Stammer's mission any easier. But to the extent that such things can be measured, Afghan support for the American presence in their country seems relatively undiminished. An opinion poll late last year by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that—four years after the "invasion"—a full 83 percent of Afghans had a favorable view of the American military in their country. Roughly the same percentage also approved the overthrow of the Taliban and American attempts to kill or capture al-Qaeda fighters. Far from objecting to the presence of the American military, most Afghans seem terrified they will leave. This fear is most apparent around the southern city of Kandahar, where the Taliban still have the ability to carry out attacks at will.
The only thing keeping the Taliban from overrunning this place is American airpower," one elderly Afghan man in Kandahar told me. This man had fought the Soviets in the 1980s, and he said that the Taliban were using the same tactics that he remembers from his days with the mujahideen. He went on: "The Russians organized local militias with village leaders, and we took the village leaders and killed them. We made it difficult for anyone working for the government to move around. Gradually we got closer and closer to Kandahar, and finally we took the governor."
It was from Kandahar—not Kabul—that the Taliban ruled the country until 2001; it was from Kandahar that Osama bin Laden orchestrated the attacks of September 11. Kandahar was the last major city to fall to Americans, and even after it did, a dozen or so wounded Arabs held out in the city hospital for weeks. Since then, troubles have pulsed out of that area like a dark tide. In 2005 a beloved police chief and 19 other people were killed in a horrific bombing at a mosque. A month before I arrived in the city late last fall, the Taliban ambushed and killed a district chief from nearby Oruzgan; a few weeks later they killed another district chief and two police officers; and the day after I arrived, a suicide bomber blew himself up against a Canadian military convoy. He didn't kill any Canadians, but a month later another suicide bomber managed to kill a senior Canadian diplomat in a nearly identical attack. In early February, a suicide bomber killed 13 people—most of them policemen—at the Kandahar police station.
Perhaps more devastating than the high-profile attacks, though, are the continual threats to common people. To understand how deep the poverty is in that area, consider that local women will spend all day shelling almonds without pay, just to take the husks home to burn in their cooking fires at night. Obviously, a government job is not something that many people can afford to turn down, yet working for the government may also put them on a death list. Unable to lure the population over to their side through political persuasion, Taliban operatives have started leaving "night letters" in mosques that threaten people with execution unless they quit their government jobs. There is little that the police can do about it.
Late last November, for example, a night watchman at a children's school outside Kandahar was found hanged with his own turban because he had ignored such a warning. A night letter was pinned to his body that named 13 other teachers—all of whom quit. "I put a checkpoint at the school, but they were not willing to keep working," the district police chief told me sadly when I asked about the murder. "The school has been closed ever since."
This sort of ruthlessness is in many ways due to the fact that the Taliban cannot hope to confront the Americans head-on. In a country like Afghanistan, the destructive ability of even one fighter plane is so absolute that it almost attains the power of God. An A-10 Warthog, for example, carries a 30-mm. Gatling gun that can fire up to 66 rounds a second. The sound of this gun in use cannot even be identified as gunfire; it's just a deep, evil belch that comes from somewhere up in the night sky and can make entire mountainsides glow. There is no way for a foot soldier to counter something like that. In several major battles in Zabol Province last year, groups of a hundred or so Taliban fighters managed to ambush small American and Afghan patrols. Not only were the Taliban unable to wipe out the badly outnumbered coalition soldiers, they were ultimately decimated by planes that came streaking in from air bases outside Kandahar and Kabul. According to the U.S. military, Taliban casualties in these battles were on the order of 60 or 70 percent (American losses were zero). In the space of several months, an estimated 250 Taliban were killed in Zabol Province alone.
Faced with such odds, the Taliban adopted a strategy of avoiding pitched battles and relying instead on a campaign of civil terror. The logic is brutal but sound: since the public wouldn't support the Taliban willingly, it would have to be terrorized into it. If enough people were terrorized into quitting their jobs, the government would cease functioning. If the government ceased functioning, the economy would suffer, and it would be that much easier to hire unemployed young men to fight the Americans. And if you threw enough of those young men into battle, eventually the Americans would leave.
"The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose," as Henry Kissinger famously said. More than one million Afghans were killed during the Soviet occupation, and the mujahideen weren't even close to giving up. By that standard, what is going on with the Americans can hardly even be called war.
These tactics have worked particularly well in the south. A childhood friend and former National Public Radio reporter named Sarah Chayes, who has lived in Kandahar since 2001, showed me around the city for several days. She told me that zones of Taliban influence—where Westerners cannot travel safely and locals don't dare cooperate with the government—have crept to within 10 kilometers of the city center. That is almost the high-water mark of mujahideen control before they overran the city in the early 90s. It is an area of quiet mud-walled villages and irrigated orchards and busy little markets and sudden, obscene acts of violence. I was told about one man whom the Taliban skinned alive and left in a field to die. I was told about another man who was forced to watch as his wife was gang-raped in front of him; his eyes were then stabbed out so that it would be the last thing he ever saw.
It was against this grim backdrop that I drove from Kandahar to an American firebase in Qalat to view the war—not from the perspective of the Afghans, but from behind the steel sights of an American gun.
'GET DOWN!" I mainly remember someone yelling.
The thing about violence is that later you can recall almost none of it. Photographer Teun Voeten and I had gotten a ride into the mountains north of Qalat on a Black Hawk helicopter called Evil Monkey, which had dropped us off along with four body bags filled with food for a unit of Army Rangers. That was 20 minutes ago; now I'm prone beside a soldier whose weapon has jammed, and I'm watching another soldier take aim from behind a rock wall and fire. I remember him firing exactly one round when in reality—I later learned—he emptied three and a half magazines. No memory. I was plugged in for a long, unpleasant burst of gunfire from Taliban gunmen up in the rocks above us, but I completely missed the rocket-propelled grenade (R.P.G.) that exploded 50 yards away.
We've hooked up with the third squad of the third platoon of Battle Company, which is one of the companies that comprise Colonel Stammer's command in Qalat. Battle 3-3, as the squad is known, had flown in a week earlier to help out a unit of army scouts that had taken casualties when their Humvee was destroyed by an anti-tank mine. The scouts had driven down a dirt road with no exit, and the Taliban—knowing that they had to come back the same way—dug the mine into the tire ruts and waited. The turret gunner was blown entirely out of the vehicle and then lost both legs after the Humvee rolled back over him, and his two companions were badly burned but managed to get out alive. The Humvee was just a couple of hundred yards from the mud-walled house where the scouts and Rangers had set up their camp, and the first thing Teun and I had done was to walk down with a couple of soldiers to take a look. The Humvee was a charred, cockeyed hulk sitting on four bare rims by the edge of the Hazarbus River, and it was while we were down there contemplating its sad remains that we got hit.
While I'm lying behind the rock it dawns on me that my leg is getting wet from seepwater coming up through the sand, and I shift my notebook out of my pocket so the ink doesn't run. There's a lot of shooting, but it's hard to tell where it's coming from. Little gouts of dust from a grenade machine gun operated by the scouts stitch their way along the ridgeline across from us, and tracer rounds pulse out of the Ranger camp and skitter into the jumble of rocks where the Taliban are shooting from. Tracers are inserted into ammo belts every four rounds, which means that a steady torrent of invisible lead is hosing down the ridgeline. The grenade machine gun goes bang-schlack-BOOM very rapidly and over and over in a reassuring way. A mortar impact blossoms silently on the ridge, followed by a thud.
Ten minutes later it's all over and we are back at the Ranger camp. A cold, blue dusk settles over the mountains, and the temperature starts its nightly plunge into the teens. Four scouts have crossed the river and moved up the ridge to the Taliban positions, but by then the enemy is long gone. All the scouts find is a pile of shell casings in the rocks, the 80 or so rounds that the Taliban fired at us.
American soldiers call getting shot at "contact." The rules of engagement for American soldiers in Afghanistan are so strict that getting shot at is virtually the only situation in which an American soldier can fire his weapon without giving a warning. The alternative—spotting a man with a radio or a weapon—is extraordinarily hard to do in the terrain where the Taliban operate. Once contact is made, American forces almost never break it voluntarily; they keep fighting until the enemy is dead or on the run. An enemy on the run can usually be destroyed by airpower, which is how the American military has inflicted most of its casualties since Vietnam. Shooting at American soldiers generally has such severe and immediate consequences that Taliban fighters will do almost anything—including not fighting—to avoid it.
As a result, many battles start when American patrols draw fire from unseen Taliban fighters. As soon as American forces come under attack, the radio operator for that unit gets on his set and says something like "Break, break, break, we're in contact and this is our grid." The grid number is the exact location of American personnel on the ground so that they don't get bombed or mortared by their own side; "break" means that everyone not involved in that fight should stay off the network. In our case, that call was received by Colonel Stammer's operations room in Qalat, and Stammer approved a request for air assets to be dispatched or diverted to our location. Within half an hour we had a total of five aircraft circling overhead at various altitudes, including a Predator drone flown remotely by a pilot at Kandahar airfield.
Predators carry infra-red optics that can pick out a man's body heat from 25,000 feet, and the one keeping watch over us quickly spotted a group of 10 men a mile to the south. Since no one here leaves his home after dark, these men were almost certainly connected to the attack. Captain Josh McGary, the commanding officer on the ground, listened in as information about the 10 men bounced back and forth across the net. "Show a weapon, bitch," I heard someone say under his breath. One weapon—just one AK-47—and all those guys would be dead.
There are consequences to omnipotence—practical consequences, not just moral ones. The enemy is forced to wage war while avoiding actual combat, which becomes—for a conventional army, at any rate—a much harder problem to solve. In this case, the Taliban have tried—and to some extent succeeded in—reshaping the war as an American logistical problem. Modern armies have to transport massive amounts of food, fuel, and ammunition in order to function, and insurgencies don't. If you can paralyze the logistics of a conventional army, you're winning the war. An attack last year provides a perfect example.
On August 21, four of McGary's men died when their Humvee hit an improvised explosive device (I.E.D.) while they were protecting a supply convoy returning from the Baylough Bowl. The supplies were brought in by truck rather than by helicopter because helicopters are inefficient at moving large amounts of equipment. (They're also vulnerable to ground attack. Every time a helicopter goes down in Afghanistan, the consequences ripple through the logistics web for days.) The decision to use a convoy solved one logistical problem but created another one. Because convoys are forced to travel on tortuous mountain roads, they run the risk of being hit by ambushes and I.E.D.'s. The road from Qalat to Baylough is only 25 miles, for example, but takes two days to drive; ambushing convoys on a road like that is not particularly hard to do.
There are countermeasures, though. The Americans can try to foster a strong relationship with the locals so that they'll report any suspicious activity by the Taliban, but that takes time and manpower—and even more supplies. The alternative is hyper-vigilance. Locals know everything that happens in their area, so if the Taliban put an I.E.D. in the road, locals won't drive until someone else has hit it. (In general, anything out of the ordinary in Afghanistan—a village with no children, a field with no farmers—means that something bad is about to happen.) When they see that locals aren't using the roads, American soldiers move on foot. But that engenders yet more problems. At his lightest, the American soldier carries more than 60 pounds of body armor, ammunition, and weaponry. In summer, the weight increases his risk of dehydration; in winter, it makes him sweat so heavily that he risks hypothermia when he stops. He won't get hypothermia if he has food and a sleeping bag, but that means taking a combat pack that, fully loaded, weighs another 100 pounds. "It's like having a dude on your back," one soldier told me.
You can't hope to outmaneuver the Taliban at 10,000 feet with a dude on your back, and that puts you right where you started: with airpower. All this becomes part of a very elaborate chess game that Captain McGary finds himself playing with a mid-level Taliban commander in the Hazarbus Valley named Mullah Kabir. Kabir generally spends the winter in Pakistan, but attempts by American soldiers to move into his area of influence have kept him pinned down until late in the season this year.
"Kabir has remnant fighters in the valleys," McGary says. "My take is he's running a delaying action until he can negotiate a deal with the governor of Zabol. He moves around on a motorcycle—but then again, these guys can cover distances that are unimaginable to an infantryman. They can go 20 clicks in a day."
Kabir's fighters are village boys who hide their weapons up in the mountains at night and retrieve them in the morning. They're generally home by dark. Most years the fighting would be over by November, but this winter the American strategy has been to establish a presence in areas that the Taliban have long considered to be a winter sanctuary. Colonel Stammer ordered several hundred pairs of snowshoes and told his men to be prepared to patrol all year in the high valleys. The idea is to keep enough Americans in remote areas for the locals to feel it is safe to reject the Taliban and come over to the government side. It's as if America were courting a woman who didn't quite dare leave her violent husband.
"It's intimidation—straight-up guerrilla tactics," McGary says about the Taliban methods. "Whoever controls the population controls the war. This war is the first time that at my level and below—at the platoon level—soldiers are addressing all the elements of national power. Every time my men address a village, they know they are addressing them as diplomats. The hardest thing about a counter-insurgency to grasp is that it lasts 30 years. The commitment that the American public has to understand is that fighting radical Islam and ignorance will be the fight of the century."
On this particular occasion—having been shot at four out of the past five nights while freezing his ass off at 7,000 feet—McGary decides that the fight against radical Islam is about to require some drastic measures.
Dawn: Four scouts are belly-down on a ridge with their rifles leveled at a cluster of mud houses. The houses show up on a U.S. military map as the village of Kockay. Downslope, a squad of Afghan National Army soldiers moves through an apple orchard, setting the dogs to barking. It takes five minutes to round up the men of the village and walk them down the hill toward the next village, where the process is repeated. A gray light touches the moonscape where these people scratch out their living. Dead grass twitches in the wind.
By the time the sun has hoisted itself over the last frozen ridges of the Shamali Kortke, three or four villages have been cordoned off and swept by the A.N.A., and several dozen men of all ages have been arranged in two lines in another orchard halfway down the valley. They squat silently with their shawls wrapped around their thin shoulders, not talking, not looking up. This is the first time that McGary's interpreter hasn't picked up any radio chatter in the morning, which means that some of the men in these lines are probably Taliban; one of them may even have had us in his gunsight 12 hours earlier.
McGary and his squad walk up through the broken sunlight of the orchard 20 minutes later, unnoticed until the last moment because of their camouflage. The scouts have settled behind some rocks to watch the perimeter, and his "terp" (interpreter), Mike, is walking between the lines of village men, looking for anyone who seems too nervous—or not nervous enough—or who just strikes him as wrong. Hands without calluses are a giveaway. Sunglasses are a giveaway. Disdain is a giveaway.
"Look at that guy," one of the soldiers says, pointing out one young man, who refuses to look at us. "He's shot so many R.P.G.'s his damn eyes are sideways."
McGary is five feet four, impeccably shaved, and moves with the balanced precision of the wrestler he once was. He has a tendency to start speaking a moment or two after you expect him to, which gives him an aura of thoughtfulness. Four years ago he kicked out a window during training and fell at the wrong moment, severing most of his right leg. His femoral artery retracted into his groin, and McGary only survived because a fellow soldier—who had just received E.M.T. training—managed to pull the femoral back out and apply an improvised tourniquet. He then carried McGary to the nearest road and drove him to the hospital at a hundred miles an hour. By the time they got there, McGary had lost so much blood that he had gone into cardiac arrest.
McGary sits down on a rock under an apple tree and tells Mike to gather the village men around him. As usual, McGary lets a moment pass, and then another, and then he begins to speak. "My name is Captain McGary. I'm the coalition commander in Daychopan District," he begins quietly. Mike translates every few sentences. "And for all you hardworking honest men here, I apologize for what happened this morning; it brings me no pleasure to pull you from your beds in the morning. But unfortunately as we drove in here to check on your village the enemy blew up one of our trucks, so our mission of peace and help became a mission of war. I apologize for bringing war to your valley."
The men sit cross-legged on the grass, rapt.
"Your government has sent me food and supplies to feed this valley for five years. It sits in Baylough, but I can't get it here, because they shoot at us. Do they not want you to eat? I can bring the food here, but I need you to talk to these men in the mountains. Ask them what they fight for—why? If they want us to leave Afghanistan, the fastest way is to stop fighting. Believe me, we're ready to go home. I have a four-year-old son, and he asked me if he can go to Afghanistan sometime. I want to bring him here to see a strong Afghanistan, all the tribes united under Islamic law. That's what's in my heart. So please, if you see those men in the mountains, tell them what's in my heart."
McGary takes off his helmet and puts it on the ground next to him. "The men in the mountains are getting paid by Pakistan," he says. Mike translates; heads nod. "Pakistan wants to see Afghanistan remain weak. So fight for Afghanistan and don't be a puppet of Pakistan!"
If you want to make an American intelligence officer blanch, ask him whether the Pakistani military is supporting the Taliban. Officers like McGary seem willing to talk about it all day long—it's their men who are dying, after all—but intelligence officers inhabit that awkward world where politics and war intersect, and the wrong question can literally set them to stammering.
On the one hand, Washington considers Pakistan a staunch American ally in the War on Terror, and for a mid-level intelligence officer to suggest otherwise would be professional suicide. On the other hand, suspicions about Pakistani involvement in the Taliban are so commonplace that a blanket denial would almost serve to confirm that it is true. When the topic comes up, American intelligence officers invariably slip into a question-and-answer format that seems intended to impart a message of reasonableness: "Do Pakistanis slip across the border to join the Taliban? Of course. Is the government of Pakistan aware of this? Undoubtedly. But can they put a stop to it … ?"
Pakistan's relationship with militant groups in Afghanistan goes back to the early 80s, when the C.I.A. went through Pakistani intelligence to funnel $2 billion to $3 billion in weapons and cash to mujahideen groups fighting the Soviet Army. It was up to the ISI, as the Pakistani intelligence service is known, to decide which commanders would receive the aid, and they invariably chose Islamic radicals, who could be counted on to fight not only the Russians but also the Indian Army in the disputed region of Kashmir. In addition, the Pakistani government fostered the creation of thousands of religious schools, called madrassas, which were strung along the Afghan border like coils of razor wire. The most extreme of these madrassas indoctrinated tens of thousands of young Afghans and Pakistanis with radical Islam, and it was in these theological furnaces that the Taliban militias were forged.
A cooperative Taliban regime in Kabul was part of Pakistan's plan to build "strategic depth" in the region, but unfortunately Osama bin Laden became part of that plan as well, and after 9/11, Pakistan watched in dismay as the United States bombed their wayward creation out of existence. Surviving Taliban and al-Qaeda forces fled across the border into Pakistan and sought refuge in the supposedly "lawless" tribal areas along the Afghan border. Their presence in his country forced Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to make a choice: he could either round up all the Taliban and al-Qaeda elements and provoke the ire of religious extremists at home or leave them alone and provoke the ire of the United States. In a brilliant move, he decided to do both.
Every few months, it seems, the ISI catches some al-Qaeda figure—Ramzi bin al Shibh, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah—and hands him over to the United States. These operations don't cost Musharraf much politically, because the foreign jihadists are not particularly beloved in Pakistan. In return, the ISI seems to receive some degree of indulgence from the United States when it comes to the Taliban. Since 9/11, not a single mid- or high-ranking commander of the Taliban has been turned over to the United States. The official explanation for this—one repeated by both Washington and Islamabad—is that the Pakistani military is simply not powerful enough to control the scattered Pashtun tribes of the border area where the Taliban are located. And if they did attempt it, President Musharraf would be quickly toppled by an uprising of Islamic radicals.
This vision of a Pakistan teetering on the brink of anarchy simply doesn't square with reality, however. In recent parliamentary elections, no candidate, including Islamic radicals, got more than 11 percent of the vote—hardly a threat to a military dictator. And the Pakistani military is configured to repulse a land invasion from India that would involve airpower, armored divisions, and hundreds of thousands of men; the idea that they cannot control Pashtun tribal areas that start a few hours' drive from Islamabad is laughable. And even if that were true, Taliban commanders are hardly hiding in caves up in the mountains; they live in villas in the suburbs of Quetta. They use cell phones, they drive cars, they go to mosques—they are easy to find, in other words. The Pakistani government is simply choosing not to.
Meanwhile, an average of nearly two American soldiers now die every week in Afghanistan—proportionally almost the same casualty rate as in Iraq, where there are seven times as many troops. They are being killed by Taliban fighters who are recruited, financed, and trained in Pakistan and whose commanders have ongoing relationships with elements of the Pakistani military. To put this in context, consider that in 1983 Hezbollah agents with links to the Iranian government drove a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, and killed 241 servicemen. Now imagine that same scenario but with Iran as an American ally rather than as her sworn enemy. You have just imagined the current situation with Pakistan.
"The cost of not pressuring Pakistan is that it really hurts our efforts in Afghanistan, and in my view the security environment is moving in the wrong direction," says Seth Jones, a Rand Corporation analyst who advises the U.S. government on Afghanistan. "If you look at the number of insurgent attacks, in the proliferation of I.E.D.'s, in their sophistication, in the use of suicide attacks, it's very clear to me that not only is the insurgency not being defeated, but in many ways it's increasingly able to cause violence."
If I had had any doubts about the depth of Pakistan's role in the resurgent Taliban, those were gone by the time I left Afghanistan. In a situation that I can say almost nothing about because of risks to the people involved, I was able to interview a former member of the Taliban government who said that after 9/11 he was recruited by the Pakistani military to fight the Americans. He says that he turned the job down, but that the Taliban still consider him to be "one of them." Since then, Afghan intelligence has looked into his claims and decided that he was, in fact, telling me the truth when we met. They believe he did not approach American intelligence agents with his information out of fear that they would just send him to Guantánamo.
Not only is the Pakistani military allowing the Taliban to operate freely in Pakistani territory, this man said, but they themselves are training some of the Taliban recruits. He gave me the name, home address, phone numbers, and code name of the ISI major who had tried to recruit him after 9/11. ("You can tell his house because of the razor wire around the wall," he said about the man's residence, on a certain street in Quetta.) He also gave me the name and phone number of another ISI agent, who brings recruits from a certain region of Afghanistan and places them in training camps in western Pakistan, then sends them back across the border to fight. Then he gave me the names of 10 Afghans who are currently part of a larger group working for the ISI as a sort of government-in-exile. (In February, President Karzai submitted a similar list of known Taliban leaders—many with addresses—to the Pakistani government, demanding that they be arrested.) He said that bin Laden was not working closely with the ISI, but neither were they entirely separate. Then he made this surprising claim: "However much money Pakistan is taking from the United States to catch bin Laden, they are also taking from bin Laden to not capture him."
I had only about half an hour with this man, and most of it I spent just scribbling down names and addresses. I did notice something odd about him, though. The whole time we were talking he never once looked at me; he just stared straight ahead while his hands worked through his prayer beads.
'At 12 Z [Greenwich Mean Time] we're probably going to take some small-arms fire, so stay close to the walls. Once it gets dark the Apaches will come in and there'll be no problem. Get ready for rockets—the radios just picked up radio chatter that they got one rocket on a self-timer and they'll adjust with the second one. What's the burnout rate for an R.P.G. with plunging fire?"
The afternoon light is dying in the Hazarbus Valley, and Captain McGary has his men around him in the courtyard of the mud house where they've been living for the past week. His terp has picked up radio chatter that the Taliban have what they refer to as "the big machine" up on the mountain above us, and he's worried about it. If it's a Dishka machine gun—which can easily shoot down aircraft—then Task Force Storm won't send helicopters anywhere near this valley. If it's a 107-mm. rocket—which is more likely—then the only thing McGary has to worry about is a lucky shot that hits the compound. The Taliban shoot rockets out of PVC pipe using a primitive timer that relies on water dripping out of holes in a bucket. One wire is attached to a sponge that floats on the surface of the water, and another wire is attached to the bottom of the bucket; when all the water drips out and the two wires touch, the rocket ignites. By that time the Taliban are back home eating dinner.
The plan for tonight is to sling out the destroyed Humvee on a Chinook helicopter and then move 10 kilometers on foot into the next valley. (Colonel Stammer has a policy of not leaving destroyed vehicles behind—in part out of respect for the men who may have been killed or wounded in them, in part so that the Taliban can't use them as propaganda trophies.) The sling operation goes smoothly. The Apaches arrive soon after dark, clattering around us in the night, and then an A-10 comes in and lights up the mountainside with a burst from its gun. The Taliban are terrified of airpower, and the military finds that painting a mountainside with 4,000 rounds a minute has a way of discouraging enemy activity.
A few minutes later the Chinook comes in and settles awkwardly over the wrecked Humvee. The pilot descends so low that the belly of the Chinook taps the helmet of a Ranger who is on the hood trying to hook up the load slings. Mineral dust from the rotor wash hits the blades and produces two circles of fire that wobble oddly in the dark and then dissolve as the Chinook pulls and tilts and rushes on up the valley with its strange load. The temperature is probably 20 degrees. We've been up since dawn. We're going to have to walk all night. The soldiers burrow into their sleeping bags for a couple of hours' rest and then claw their way back out around midnight to start their move.
It's a gruesome display of endurance that lasts until dawn. The men are carrying a full load—160 pounds or so, and even more for the mortar squad—and we have to cross over a mountain pass at nearly 10,000 feet. The air is so cold—10 degrees? 15 degrees?—that the water freezes in our CamelBaks. The soldiers don't dare use the hip belts on their rucksacks in case they have to get rid of them quickly, which means they carry the entire 160 pounds on their shoulders. Because we're going straight through Mullah Kabir's territory, two A-10s babysit us for most of the movement, and a Global Hawk peers down from 65,000 feet to make sure no one's waiting for us in the rocks up ahead. Global Hawks are flown remotely by pilots at Edwards Air Force Base, in California, and from 12 miles up they can tell if a man on the ground is holding an American weapon or an AK-47. If it's the latter, artillery units 20 or 30 miles away can—almost literally—drop a round into his lap.
By the time we stagger over the pass, I have the feeling that the men are almost hoping for contact just so they can lie down for a while. Despite the cold we're all in our shirtsleeves and sweating like horses, and whenever we stop—once because a man's legs cramp up—hypothermia seems to introduce itself around the group like some oversolicitous party guest. We finally wobble into the village of Andar just as the eastern sky is starting to lighten. The scouts maintain a safe house in Andar, and in their courtyard we drop our gear and shake out our sleeping bags and zip ourselves in. One minute we're marching, the next minute we're asleep. I think the mortar team might have set up the mortar but I'm not even sure.
I wake up a few hours later to the voices of soldiers next to me. The sun is high and strong and starting to cook us in our bags. The soldiers don't know that I'm awake, and I just lie there for a while listening to them. They talk about music. They talk about women. They talk about their weapons. One guy asks a mortarman named McJunkin if it would be possible to hold a mortar sideways and fire it like a gun.
"No, it would tear you in half," McJunkin answers.
We happen to be sleeping a few hundred yards from the house of the main Taliban leader in the village, but of course he's up in the mountains; he won't be back until we're gone. After that, this particular village won't see another American until the spring. By then, the guy who rented his house to the scouts could be dead and the guy who sold them firewood to keep warm could be dead and the old man in the next village who whispered information about Mullah Kabir could be dead. They could all be dead, murdered by Taliban fighters who will start trickling in from Pakistan as soon as the snows melt. The locals call the Taliban Piranaye, or "ghosts," because of their ability to appear and disappear at will.
I eventually get up and wander over to the scouts' camp to get some food. As soon as the sun comes up it's 70 degrees and the soldiers are all sunbathing in their T-shirts. Through the compound gate I can see the village children watching our every move. We have a few days to kill before the helicopters come to get us, and McGary says that we'll use the time patrolling and trying to do something good for the village. We'll distribute Western clothes that we have to the children—some of whom don't have any shoes. We'll blow up some tree stumps that the villagers have been plowing around. We'll talk to the elders about Taliban activity in the area.
It's not war, exactly, but it's something. It's a great, powerful nation down on one knee trying to coax—once and for all—these war-ruined people over to our side.
Sebastian Junger is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His book A Death in Belmont will be published in April by Norton.
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