Speak softly, carry a big gun
Into the hinterland with the Special Forces
KANDAY, AFGHANISTAN--The elders arrive at the shura shortly after 9 a.m., from villages that don't appear on any military map. Taking seats on the wool carpet, they sip tea, stroke their beards, and work prayer beads through scarred fingers. They have come to see the two men in pakul hats sitting cross-legged at the end of the mud-brick room, their M-4 rifles leaned against the crumbling windowsill.
After the local district chief convenes the meeting with a flowery introduction, the Special Forces soldier with the red beard stands and addresses the elders. "A long time ago, we worked together to fight the Russians, and a short time ago we worked together to fight the Taliban," begins Ron, the commander of Operational Detachment Alpha 936. Speaking for 10 minutes through an interpreter, he talks about the American mission to bring security to this untamed region of northeastern Afghanistan. Then: "We are looking for a few people who come through this valley from time to time. You guys know we are looking for Osama. If any of you has information about him, I will pay good money for it." The old men with the long beards and tired faces close their eyes, smile, and nod their heads slowly.
"Little Big Horn. " Yet if the hunt for the world's most-wanted man were all that the soldiers of ODA 936 needed to worry about, their job would be far more simple. Instead, the Special Forces team was inserted into the Pesch Valley in northeastern Afghanistan in December with only the vaguest of orders to carry out a complex mission: Develop an intelligence network, earn the trust of the locals, track down terrorists, and build an army of Afghan men who for decades have known nothing but war. The team's area of operations is a laboratory of the type of counterinsurgency that hasn't been tried since Vietnam, and U.S. News was granted rare access to its work. If the larger U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is to bear fruit, it will depend in no small part on the quiet accumulation of victories in places like the hardscrabble Pesch Valley.
Nestled in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains just 20 miles from the Pakistani border in Kunar province, ODA 936's base in the town of Nangalam is equal parts listening post and training camp in one of the world's most inhospitable places. Unlike the more fortified firebases elsewhere along the border, Camp Blessing is far removed from the safety of artillery and helicopter support. Known as an "A Camp," it is the first of its kind in hostile territory that U.S. Special Forces have built in more than 30 years. Only 14 soldiers live in camp, along with a platoon of marines beefing up security. "This place is pretty hard to defend," says Jim (no last names of ODA 936 members allowed), looking out at the steep mountain bluffs encircling the compound. "It's kind of like Little Big Horn."
This is perhaps an unfortunate analogy, given that the Special Forces commander for Kunar province is a man with the last name Custer. At the same time, being in "Indian country" is a fact of life around Camp Blessing, especially as ODA 936 builds up its network of local informants to track the movement of the al Qaeda cells that periodically attack the base. While the CIA believes men like Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, spend most of their time on the Pakistan side of the border, places like the lawless Pesch make a natural safe haven for al Qaeda operatives. "As this war changes, the enemy goes deeper into the hinterlands," says Col. Walter Herd, the top special operations commander in Afghanistan. "And that's where we need to be."
Operating in a region effectively beyond the reach of Hamid Karzai's fragile government, the Green Beret team is "the law" in a valley that has never been particularly friendly to foreigners. It was here that the mujahideen resistance against the Soviet Union began, and even the Taliban had difficulty maintaining control over the local tribes. Before their mission began, ODA 936's members were informed by the CIA that the valley was "the West Virginia of Afghanistan," a place where deep-seated clan loyalties make promoting a central government a tough sell. Residents make their living from the endless acres of opium poppies cultivated on the valley floor and bristle at edicts from Karzai's government forbidding poppy harvesting after this year. For now, this is one battle the Special Forces plan not to get in the thick of.
Since December, the goal has been to secure the villages closest to Camp Blessing, then gradually expand the U.S. sphere of influence outward. It is a counterinsurgency strategy the British employed with great success in Malaysia during the 1950s, and U.S. Special Forces are taking the same approach in similar bases along the Pakistani border and in central Afghanistan. To build trust, the Green Berets try to keep the door-kicking to a minimum, and ODA 936 has very purposefully used different tactics from the Army Rangers and 10th Mountain Division soldiers ("the men with helmets," the locals call them) who swept through the Pesch in force in November.
Of course, Al Capone's adage that you can go further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone certainly applies here, and the Special Forces unit ensures that its presence is felt. The soldiers constantly run armed patrols through the valley alongside the Afghan special-forces soldiers they trained, through villages where the smell of burning wood mixes with the sweet scent of opium poppies ripening for the harvest. Each night, marines in mountain observation posts fire mortars and .50-caliber machine guns into the distance, a not-so-subtle message that can be heard for miles.
Hearts and minds. Those villages that turn in weapons caches and provide intelligence about enemy movements get something in return: clinics, schools, and footbridges paid for with U.S. funds now being spread liberally throughout eastern Afghanistan. Even the Special Forces unit chaplain, a Mormon who in civilian life teaches folklore at Brigham Young University, is part of the hearts- and-minds effort. He meets with the mullahs in Pesch Valley villages to renovate dilapidated mosques and prods them to use their moral authority to turn locals against the insurgency.
In their more relaxed moments--sporting beards, baseball caps, and sandals--the soldiers of the Utah-based unit might be easily mistaken for heavily armed ski bums. The unit has only minimal contact with its superiors at Bagram Air Base, near Kabul, and even less contact with the world outside Afghanistan. (The soldiers learned of the recent bloody fighting in central Iraq only when two journalists visited the base.) The daily rhythms of their camp bear little resemblance to those of a normal American military base. Friday, rather than Sunday, is the day of rest, when calls to prayer from the local mosques echo across the ancient valley, amplified by new speaker systems paid for by the U.S. government.
Of course, nobody in ODA 936 believes that digging a well or building a school will automatically win the populace over. As the soldiers see it, maybe 10 percent of the locals embrace their presence, and 5 percent despise it. The rest want simply to be left alone. Yet in counterinsurgency work, mere "presence" is an enormous part of the mission, and presence is what Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan believe will make the difference in nabbing targets like bin Laden. As Scott, the team intelligence sergeant, explains while driving a 4x4 over a washed-out road on the way back from the shura in Kanday: "For us to finally catch [bin Laden], it won't be like in movies. It will take somebody like one of the elders we just met who comes forward and leads us to him."
Which is why keeping a promise to attend a meeting of old men in a far-flung village is worth the effort. On the way to the shura, one of the two pickup trucks loaded with Special Forces and Afghan soldiers blew out two tires, breaking down in a mountain village two hours from Kanday. The Americans paid a villager 500 Pakistani rupees ($8.65) for the use of his truck for the day, and everyone piled in. Hours later, as the gathering in Kanday dragged on, the two soldiers in the mud-brick room stayed to hear the concerns of the elders, nervously checking their watches and thinking about the four-star general on a courtesy visit who was probably back at Camp Blessing cooling his heels. Too bad, the general would have to wait. The shura was more important.
This story appears in the May 10, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.