Afghanistan's Eastern Front
Along the Pakistani border, al Qaeda and Taliban fighters take their best shots
KUNAR PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN—Sprawling on a rug in his embattled police station near the Kunar River, Police Chief Mohammed Youssuf eagerly boots up his laptop computer. Images appear on the screen—a Kalashnikov assault rifle firing wildly at enemies shooting back from hiding places in the craggy mountainside—along with a soundtrack that has the rapid clack-clack-clack gunfire punctuating a stream of shouted obscenities. Two U.S. soldiers crawl through underbrush toward an enemy position behind a cleft in the rocks. Overhead, two Apache helicopters spin in circles as they fire machine-gun volleys against the insurgents and, finally, unleash a Hellfire missile, which hits with a burst of smoke and flying rocks.
This is no video game. Youssuf, 33, recorded these scenes during a recent battle in which he fired off his rifle with one hand while gripping his video cam in the other. In the eight-hour fight, which followed an attack on a U.S. supply convoy, American and Afghan forces killed four suspected al Qaeda militants and captured a fifth. A dozen others escaped back across the border to their refuge in Pakistan.
As mountain snows melt and wildflowers bloom, Afghanistan's future depends in no small part on what happens along an ill-defined border, the Durand Line, which separates Afghanistan and Pakistan. A month of reporting along the mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan indicates that despite a growing ability of Afghans to govern themselves and an expanding NATO-led peacemaking force, the enemy is steadily gaining strength. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their various affiliates are poised to strike against what little stability this war-wracked country has achieved in the past five years. By most accounts, including from sources inside Pakistan, the al Qaeda and Taliban redoubts are flourishing just across the border, beyond the permitted reach of forces in Afghanistan. From the vantage point on the Afghan side of the border, there is little to show that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's declared crackdown on militants and claimed pacification amounts to much.
Goat paths. In Khost and Kunar provinces, there are five major mountain passes that link Pashtun tribesmen across the line. But there are also dozens of buzrao, or goat paths, that humans on foot, dirt bike, or donkey can navigate night and day. As more Taliban and hard-core al Qaeda types filter in to mount guerrilla attacks, hundreds of fresh U.S. forces deploy and disperse into small fire bases along the frontier. Although they are embedding with what commanders say are improving Afghan police and Army units, the U.S. troops are also exposed as targets.
In Kunar and Nuristan provinces, troops from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division are poised for a tough spring. They say they've created a "magnet for the bad guys" in the Korungal Valley, whose boulder-strewn mountainsides provide ideal terrain for insurgents because of the myriad hiding places and escape routes. "We've cleared them out once, and now they are coming back for a fight," says Lt. Col. Christopher Cavoli.
If Afghanistan is slipping toward an abyss, as many residents on the border insist, U.S. commanders don't see it that way. "I don't have any fears," says Lt. Col. Scott Custer of the 82nd Airborne Division, whose great-great uncle was the famous George Custer, who lost his life at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. "I'm sure we can get the job done militarily."
Across the border from Custer and his 82nd Airborne forces in Khost is what one government official refers to as "Suicide Inc., an al Qaeda and Taliban joint venture" based near the extremist stronghold of Miram Shah, Pakistan. Several loosely affiliated suicide cells send more and more young men into battle strapped with increasingly potent explosives. Suicide attacks increased sixfold in 2006 to 150, spiking after a September "peace deal" between Pakistan's Musharaf and leaders in the country's tribal areas, where Taliban and al Qaeda interests still hold sway. Senior Afghan intelligence personnel and U.S. officers believe that terror tactics seen in Iraq are fast "migrating" here. A new report to the U.N. Security Council states that suicide bombers attacking Afghanistan, usually with foreign funding, have been "emboldened by their strategic successes, rather than disheartened by tactical failures."
A local religious leader in Khost refers to the bombers as Osama bin Laden's "bastard children." Mothers and fathers lost to war, they have been schooled to kill in Pakistan's anti-American madrasahs, or religious schools. At least some of them are being pushed across the border with a nod and a blessing from Egyptian Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's wizened and bespectacled ideological lieutenant, say Afghan intelligence officials.
Al Qaeda also has cells inside Afghanistan—more precisely in Kunar province, which adjoins Pakistan's Bajaur tribal district where U.S. missiles targeted Zawahiri last year. Another Egyptian is ensconced in the Korungal Valley highlands, where 16 U.S. Special Forces on a mission to assist four Navy SEALs perished after being shot down in their M-47 Chinook transport helicopter in June.
"Abu Ikhlas, the Egyptian, was my student during the war against the Russians," says Mullah Nakibullah, a soft-spoken imam, who commanded hundreds of jihadis in the war against the Russians and now supports the Afghan government. "He is about 35 years old now and very ill tempered, but he is a good bomb and gun maker."
As elsewhere in the Islamic world, al Qaeda is mostly a facilitator. Bin Laden's experts channel and direct anti-American sentiment within disparate, home-grown Islamic groups and launch young men down the "buzrao" toward martyrdom.
Prisoners. Inside the medieval confines of the Tarta Beg fortress in Khost, several recently captured insurgents are on display. Clad in a prison gown, Hassan Khan, handcuffed to his first cousin, claimed he had been "forced to transport guns and shoot" at an Afghan police post by men with foreign accents. "They escaped, but we were arrested," he said, while eating a freshly plucked Pakistani tangerine. "We are all al Qaeda."
An American officer, Lt. Robert Marshall, who monitors guerrilla engagements in Khost and helps call in U.S. air support, says, "We talk to al Qaeda and the Taliban all the time over our shortwaves. They can also hear the Afghan comms [communications], and so they know when we are on the way and they take off."
Terrorist harassment comes in many forms. Last month, militants intercepted supply trucks headed to a remote U.S. base in Kunar province and systematically chopped off noses and ears from six drivers. A recent set of posters on display in mosques and on roadsides in the Khost region warned Afghans who collaborate with the U.S. infidels "one last chance" to leave their jobs and save their lives.
Taliban and al Qaeda tactics, including attacks and kidnappings, appear to have had in impact in the wheat fields just outside of Khost. "We can't talk against the Taliban anymore in front of our own people," said Mir Ahmed Shah, an Afghan criminal investigator along the border in the Gurbuz district of Khost. "We are confused as to what the U.S.A. is doing here. Now the Taliban move freely, especially in the last two months."
Other Afghan citizens and politicians believe that a broader Afghan conflict is inevitable in lieu of a peace process that currently has little international backing. And despite the U.S. military's contention that it is putting the Afghans in charge, the real voice and money behind the scenes is—for many Afghans—still that of a foreign occupier.
Government radio stations have been offered a base and funding inside the blast walls of American military compounds. While this has enabled the stations to boost their broadcasting range, it has undercut their credibility with Afghans, says Zahid Shah Angar, director of the independent "Peace Message Radio" in Khost. "They don't report the truth anymore, especially if the U.S. forces get bad intelligence and kill someone accidentally."
Philip Smucker is author of Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (Potomac Books, 2004).
This story appears in the April 9, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.