On the Afghan Front

Two and a half years after the lightning U.S. victory over the radical Islamic Taliban regime that had oppressed this land for more than five years, and despite the expulsion of its al Qaeda paymasters, the United States still has work to do before Afghanistan overcomes its turbulent past.

To be sure, there are signs that the country may be on the road to lasting peace. In the immediate, however, violence is actually rising against Coalition military forces, aid workers, United Nations officials, and Afghan government representatives. The U.S. strategy has been to balance altruism and diplomacy with aggressive counterterrorism. Soldiers can, in one day, arrange for a mosque to be renovated in one village, and assault a neighboring village to capture a suspected terrorist. This “guns and butter” approach has so far served the United States well, in a country whose people are both proud and greatly in need of security. But it is in danger of unraveling, partly because the enemy is granted sanctuary in Pakistan, across the border Major Wahli guards.

One day in late April, some 50 U.S. soldiers walked up a steep rocky path to the village of Zan Shora on a mission that typifies the U.S. strategy here. The cheerful voices of two dozen boys and girls singing Islamic verse in unison wafted through the hot breezy air. Goats wandered lazily between the mud-brick huts, and chickens pecked at the rocky ground. War seemed the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

In the village, U.S. officers sat down alongside the village elder, Mohammad Janil, for some conversation. Talk ranged from the needs of the village and how the coalition could help, to the Afghan presidential elections coming up this September, to tribal rivalries with neighboring villages, to the threat from Taliban and al Qaeda holdouts and the smorgasbord of terrorist malcontents who have entered the region, striking U.S. and Afghan forces from their bastions in Pakistan.

It took a lot of prodding for Janil to accept U.S. help. The soldiers offered to buy some rugs for his madrassa–a favor Major Wahli suggested as an inexpensive way to forge good will–and said they’d send an engineering team to survey the village for a new well. At first Janil demurred. He said he was worried that terrorists from Pakistan would harass his village for receiving help from coalition forces. The soldiers assured him they weren’t going anywhere and that Noor Wahli and his men, with U.S. help, would keep the village safe. He took a lot of convincing–even though he’d participated in the January loya jirga, the national tribal congress that set the stage for the elections. The soldiers were able to calm Janil’s fears and build on their new cooperation to gain helpful intelligence on people filtering through the narrow valleys and along the goat paths that provide ample cover for Pakistan-based terrorists.

That’s one way America is fighting for peace in Afghanistan. Warrior-diplomats like Captain Jonathan Chung, company commander for Blackfoot Company, 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, build ties to local chieftains, using the all-powerful dollar in exchange for intelligence and a sliver of loyalty. Chung regularly eats a dinner of lamb and rice and drinks tea late into the night with Noor Wahli, discussing the needs of each village in the area, which elders can be trusted, and what malcontents might be passing through. The 28-year-old West Point graduate is conducting U.S. foreign policy in the remotest reaches of this country with only limited guidance and no diplomatic training. But with respect, honesty, and a sincere desire to help, Chung is getting the job done–as are senior enlisted officers, special operations forces troops, and even CIA operatives, across the country.

If only it were so easy.

On April 8, Chung got a chance to practice the counterterrorism part of his assignment. Anti-U.S. militants detonated an improvised explosive device in the dirt road that runs along the Afghan-Pakistan border in hopes of luring American troops in to investigate. A week earlier, a similarly placed IED had been detonated without provoking a firefight. This time, however, the bad guys had a sophisticated plan.

Chung sent a small detachment in to see what had happened. Suddenly there was fire. “All elements, we have contact!” Chung shouted into a radio as his Humvee barreled down the impossibly steep and rocky road to the valley floor. Heavy caliber bullets zinged overhead, and the woosh of 107 mm rockets from the Afghan border checkpoint were met with AK-47 fire. It was an ambush.

No Americans were hurt, and the fearsome counterfire from the rest of Chung’s unit was enough to drive the attackers back into Pakistan. The entire ambush occurred within sight of two Pakistani border posts, whose occupants did not lift a finger to help the Americans.

“The Pakistani police are worthless,” Noor Wahli said through a translator. “The private militias control everything over there. The border police are scared of them. The only ones that can do anything are the Army, and they’re not there.”

This ambush was the first major contact Chung’s soldiers had encountered since early December, when they’d disrupted an assassination attempt against the police chief of Khost. The April 8 attack was followed the next day by another ambush as the patrol left its camp near Border Checkpoint Four. Both firefights lasted only a few minutes, and both times the bad guys got away.

Two weeks later, NFL football star Pat Tillman, an Army Ranger, was killed in still another ambush, soon after two Afghan allies had been killed and four wounded in a four-hour gun battle just 20 miles from Border Checkpoint Four. Again, the enemy slipped back over the border into Pakistan–supposedly one of America’s strongest allies in the region.

In other parts of the country, there is violence, too. Two U.N. contract workers were killed in Lagman province while they were making assessments of the security environment for voter registration, and one Marine was killed near Tarin Kowt in central Afghanistan in a nighttime ambush by suspected Taliban holdouts. But nowhere is the situation graver than along Afghanistan’s border with the largely ungoverned Pakistani provinces of North and South Waziristan.

Commanders here say the attacks are coordinated from inside Pakistan. Hardened jihadists from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia are moving freely into the region, recruiting fighters, planning operations, and even commanding attacks from across the border. The commanders and military intelligence officers say so far these recruits have shown little stomach for a sustained fight against the American air and ground assault that inevitably comes with each contact, but there’s evidence the militants are getting bolder.

During an assault on Border Checkpoint Two in mid-April, just one week after the brazen attack on Blackfoot Company, two A-10 Thunderbolt attack jets circled low overhead trying to draw fire so they could pinpoint the attackers and destroy them. Despite that display of American might, the assailants held their position for several hours until Marine gunships swooped in and laid waste their mountaintop hideout.

Clearly, if America is to win the war on terrorism–which began in the hardscrabble hills of Afghanistan–and keep this country on the path toward democracy, the “guns and butter” strategy must be maintained. But it is also critical that when the terrorists attack–even when they attack our Afghan allies–the United States pursue them with dispatch and fury. As long as Major Wahli remains a prisoner in his border post, too fearful of assassination to travel to his home in Khost, America will not have finished its job.

Christian Lowe is a staff writer with Army Times Publishing Company. He recently returned from a month in Afghanistan.