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A war of words in Afghanistan

By Mark McDonald
Knight Ridder Newspapers

DAVID P. GILKEY / DETROIT FREE PRESS U.S. soldiers try to get an Afghan man to lie down in the middle of a gun battle between U.S. forces and Taliban fighters in the village of Parle earlier this summer.

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It was high noon in the remote and stony heart of Taliban country, and 34 cavalry scouts from the U.S. Army were looking to pick a fight. Three hours later, they had all the fight they could handle.

The Taliban were driven from power nearly three years ago, but they've staged a ruthless comeback throughout southern Afghanistan. They're recruiting fighters, slitting the throats of local officials and terrorizing rural villagers who have dared to register to vote in Afghanistan's first presidential election Oct. 9.

The Taliban and their al-Qaida brethren like to hit and run and hide. When there's a fight, the Taliban choose the time, the place and the odds. The Americans' use of psychological warfare — the loudspeaker insults and the taunting — is a new gambit for them.

The U.S. scouts and their Kevlar-plated Humvees were recently dropped by helicopter into some of the most remote and hostile terrain on Earth. They landed in the back of beyond, about 100 miles north of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and their fugitive leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar.

The U.S. troop commander, Capt. Brian Peterson, is careful to call the region a Taliban "sanctuary" rather than a "stronghold." But make no mistake, it's a stronghold.

The grunts on the ground have their own name for the forbidding territory. They call it Indian Country.

It was still dark when the 34 men of Alpha Troop assembled on the edge of the tarmac at Kandahar Airfield. They seemed relaxed and confident, mostly.

Armed with loudspeakers

Along with Peterson's cavalry scouts were some long-range surveillance troops and a psychological-operations team. The PsyOps guys were the ones with the loudspeakers.

As dawn broke, the troop got airborne. The men strapped themselves into their bench seats inside the massive Chinook helicopters, and the unit's 10,000-pound Humvees were soon dangling from beneath the choppers like so many oversized Christmas ornaments.
 
The roar inside the Chinooks was ferocious, but the two young men assigned to Peterson's Humvee were asleep within minutes.

Spc. Nick Plummer cocked his helmeted head to one side and quickly dropped off. So did Pfc. Matt Ruhnke. His right arm cradled his M16 rifle, which he calls Mildred, and in his left hand was a half-sucked grape lollipop.

The Chinooks descended onto a small dusty plain high in the mountains. Nearby were a dozen earthen houses, a mud-walled mosque missing its minaret and a tumbledown police post.

The place has no name. It's off the grid, off the maps and part of another time. Except for an old Chinese machine gun in front of the mosque, things must look much as they did when the prophet Muhammad was born 15 centuries ago.

Peterson, Sgt. Doug Bishop and Lt. Randy Collette had lunch with Abdul Sattar, the deputy head of the local district. Sattar cooked up two platters of fried potatoes, and he served wheat bread and sweet tea. A slight young fellow with a perpetual smile, Sattar said the Taliban had placed a $20,000 bounty on his head because he's been cooperating with the Americans. He shrugged, then managed a rueful smile.

Sattar also said Taliban agents had kidnapped 18 men from Parle, a neighboring village that's to serve as the voting station for the surrounding district. As part of its mission, Alpha Troop was supposed to provide security at Parle so people could register, but most of the terrified villagers had fled into the hills. No one, Sattar said, will register to vote now.

After two hours of bump and grind across rocky flats, dusty tracks and dry streambeds, the convoy reached Parle and made camp in a bowl of hills. The Humvees formed a rectangle about the size of a football field, with the Psychological Operations Humvee smack in the middle.

Instead of the usual .50-caliber machine gun mounted on its roof, the PsyOps truck carried a bank of loudspeakers. "Those speakers are our primary weapon system," said Staff Sgt. Bill Clark, 34, the PsyOps team leader.

Clark took a few scouts and an Afghan "terp" — his interpreter — and they explored the largely abandoned village. They gave a couple of hand-cranked radios to some women they came across, hoping they'd tune in the Pushto-language broadcasts from the BBC or Radio Liberty.

"They're scared. They don't want us here," Clark said. "They say the Taliban will come back when we leave. It's a shame. They should finally be able to get some peace after 30 years of fighting. They're tired."

Clark knows that the illiterate, half-starved farmers in these mountains will probably vote the way the village elder tells them to — if they vote at all. They don't have a clue, he said, about elections, presidents or democracy.

"Democracy, no, they don't get it. But the more we reach out to them, the more courage they'll maybe have to say no to the guys coming off the mountain."

Dawn arrived bright and hot, and most of the weary soldiers were allowed to sleep through the morning. Mostly, though, they just dozed and sweated and grumbled. At 6 a.m., it was 97 degrees.

"Just another one of these stinking missions," said a lanky trooper folded into the back seat of a Humvee, except he didn't use the word stinking. A soldier in the front seat added: "Most of us think they've already caught Osama and they're just waiting to announce it the day before the (U.S.) election."

It's noon when the PsyOps unit played its taunting message through the loudspeakers, calling the Taliban cowards and women. This is much more than trash-talk. Backing down from a direct insult or a challenge to fight is the ultimate humiliation for an Afghan man.

Around 3 p.m., convinced the Taliban hadn't taken the bait, Peterson decided to head back to the helicopter-landing site. He wanted to gather more intelligence there. He also wanted to buy a goat from a villager and grill it for his men for dinner.

At 3:20, the convoy was lumbering through a rocky ravine, with a steep mountain on the left side and a pretty almond orchard close by on the right.

Suddenly, there was shouting over Peterson's radio: "Contact! Contact! Black Six, we have contact! They're shooting the crap out of me. Let's move! We gotta move — now!"

The frantic message was coming from Sgt. Doug Bishop, in the last Humvee in the convoy. Taliban fighters were blasting away at him with AK-47 rifles, and two rocket-propelled grenades had just missed his truck.

The Humvees were caught in a crossfire, and every vehicle was being hit. (The sound of bullet on metal isn't a ping, like the high-pitched ricochets in action films. It's more of sharp, nasty, cracking sound.)

Some of the troopers tried to get out of their Humvees to fight back, but the Taliban were too well-hidden and they drove the Americans back into their trucks. The convoy retreated two miles to regroup. The grunts, excited and angry, were eager to return to the orchard and pursue their attackers, and after about 20 minutes the officers agreed. The convoy headed back to the almond grove — and straight into another attack.

This time, however, several scouts from the Long Range Surveillance Detachment managed to get into the orchard. The men searched a few mud-walled houses tucked among the almond trees, but they soon began taking direct fire again, including two rocket-propelled grenades.

They charged toward the firing, and after a brief skirmish they captured three bearded and bedraggled men who were carrying 19th-century single-shot rifles. There was also a 14-year-old boy who'd been shot in the buttocks. All of them, the troopers insisted, had been firing at them.

"I don't know why they shot me," said the wounded boy, whose name was Malik. "I had no gun. I was just sitting here with my goats."

He didn't whimper, cry or even wince. He just said, "Please take me home. I want to see my mother."

An Army medic examined the boy and found no exit wound, so a helicopter was called to take him to the base hospital in Kandahar. The three other men, now handcuffed and blindfolded, were airlifted back to the base for questioning.

Back at the convoy, the Cav troopers checked the bullet holes in their Humvees and replayed the details of the battle. Nobody was killed or wounded, and they were in high spirits. The troop later claimed four "kills," although no bodies were found.

It was getting dark when the choppers arrived to take away the Taliban prisoners.

Peterson then led the convoy onto a low, dusty plain to spend the night. In the meantime, 45 soldiers from the Quick Reaction Force in Kandahar had arrived by helicopter to provide extra nighttime security for the cavalry. They switched on their night-vision equipment and scattered themselves among the boulders on the surrounding ridgelines.

The QRF commander, Maj. Joe Walsh, took control and began poring over battle maps with Peterson. Walsh approved an air strike against a nearby mountainside, and it wasn't long before two Kiowa helicopters swooped in low and fired salvos of rockets.

Show of force

The fireworks were meant to be a show of force for the Taliban, and the display was loud, impressive and violent.

Walsh said morale among the U.S. troops in Afghanistan is good, and the military works hard to convince the soldiers they're here for the right reasons.

"And they're buying into that," he said. "I think the soldiers do prefer to be here rather than Iraq, but it's just as dangerous here. We've lost guys, but that isn't stopping us. We're going to go down that road tomorrow, around the next bend and into the next village.

"We're doing our jobs, and nothing's going to stop us."