U.N. says Afghan violence rises 30 percent; AP count of insurgency-related deaths passes 5,000

The Associated Press
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=7727281

KABUL, Afghanistan: Violence in Afghanistan has surged nearly 30 percent this year and suicide bombings are inflicting a high toll on civilians, a new United Nations report says.

The report said Afghanistan is averaging 550 violent incidents a month, up from an average of 425 last year. It said three-fourths of suicide bombings are targeting international and Afghan security forces, but suicide bombers also killed 143 civilians through August.

"Suicide attacks have been accompanied by attacks against students and schools, assassinations of officials, elders and mullahs, and the targeting of police in a deliberate and calculated effort to impede the establishment of legitimate government institutions," according to the report, which was released in New York last week.

A suicide attack Tuesday on a police bus in western Kabul killed 13 officers and civilians, including a woman and her two children who boarded the vehicle seconds before the explosion, the Afghan government reported. It was the second bombing of a bus in the capital in four days.

The U.N. report didn't give any other violence-related numbers.

An Associated Press count of insurgency-related deaths, meanwhile, reached 5,086 in the first nine months of this year. AP counted 4,019 deaths in 2006, based on violent incidents reported by Western and Afghan officials. That was the first year AP compiled such figures.

The AP tally for this year includes more than 3,500 militants killed and more than 650 civilians dead from either insurgent violence or U.S. or NATO attacks.

Almost 180 international soldiers have been killed. That includes 85 U.S. military personnel, nearing the total of 98 American deaths reported by the Pentagon for all of 2006.

Insurgents have staged a record number of suicide attacks this year — more than 100, including the two bus bombings in Kabul since Saturday that killed 43 people between them.

Four children were among the 13 people killed in Tuesday's suicide attack by a man wearing a pakul — an Afghan hat commonly seen in the country's north — and a shawl around the upper half of his body called a chador, said Amin Gul, who owns a metalworking shop next to the blast site.

"When the bus came, an old man got on, then a woman with two children, then the guy wearing the chador entered, and then a big boom," said Gul, who witnessed the attack.

The seats in the front of the bus were covered in blood and small body parts, and workers washed blood from nearby trees after the attack. Ten people were wounded in the bombing, Health Minister Mohammad Amin Fatemi said.

The blast killed eight police officers, the mother, her baby and another child, as well as two unaccompanied children who had been heading to a special school for handicapped students, Fatemi said. The children ranged in age from 2 to 8.

"This attack goes against all of Islam," Fatemi said. "There is no reason to blow up Muslims, especially during the holy month of Ramadan. My message to these people: Please stop killing Muslims."

Tuesday's explosion is the third attack in four months against police or army buses in Kabul.

___

Associated Press writer Amir Shah contributed to this report.

October 28, 2007
Afghan Ex-Militia Leaders Hoard Arms
By KIRK SEMPLE
new york times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/world/as...agewanted=print


KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 27 — Many former militia commanders and residents in northern Afghanistan have been hoarding illegal weapons in violation of the country’s disarmament laws, giving the excuse that they face a spreading Taliban insurgency from the south that government forces alone are too frail to stop, Afghan and Western officials say.

After years of moderate success for government disarmament programs, rumors of widespread defiance in the north have arisen recently among government officials and intelligence agencies in Kabul and elsewhere. Although there is little hard evidence that commanders are greatly enlarging their arsenals, officials say, some have been thwarting government programs, refusing to disarm and possibly even remobilizing militias.

The talk of rearming underscores a deepening north-south ethnic divide that some diplomats and Afghan officials privately worry could lead the way toward a shift of power back to warlords — and toward a countrywide armed conflict — if left unchecked. And the situation poses a major challenge for President Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from the south, whose administration has failed to win the confidence of many non-Pashtun leaders and northerners.

Prices on the weapons black market in the north have skyrocketed as residents, governed by suspicion and foreboding, have kept their firearms, driving down the supply.

“There is an environment of mistrust” in the government, Brig. Gen. Abdulmanan Abed, a Defense Ministry official who works with the government’s demilitarization program, said in an interview this month in Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province. “There is a fear of the return of the Taliban.”

A prominent political leader from the north, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it this way: “The Taliban are coming toward us. What should we do? Who will defend us? Who will protect us? This is in the minds of the people in the north.”

Col. Mats Danielsson, the Swedish commander of a 450-man military unit helping to provide security in four northern provinces, said the Karzai administration and its international allies must find a way to roll back the Taliban threat and reassure northerners.

“We have to keep the window of opportunity open, but I feel that the window is closing,” he said.

The Taliban insurgency is strongest in southern and eastern Afghanistan. And while it has been able to bedevil Afghan and international troops in some other regions of the country, before this year its reach rarely stretched into the northern provinces.

But government officials report an increase in Taliban activity in the north this year, particularly in the northwest. The number of Taliban attacks on Afghan and international security forces in Balkh and the other relatively peaceful provinces of north-central Afghanistan has risen from last year, the authorities say.

Residents here in Balkh Province and elsewhere in north-central Afghanistan say they are beginning to feel encircled.

“The Taliban is trying to start up its old networks here,” Colonel Danielsson said in an interview in early October at his headquarters in Mazar-i-Sharif. “We have to figure out how to stop this influence.”

Afghan and Western officials also say that in addition to an increase in Taliban activity, there has been an escalation in crime and, in some areas, tensions among rival northern political factions. These officials say it is often difficult to determine who is to blame for specific violent acts.

The most apparent signs of rearming, officials say, are in Faryab Province, in the northwest, where commanders have organized an armed militia to fend off a growing Taliban presence in neighboring Badghis Province that has gone largely unchecked by Afghan and international security forces.

Gen. Dan K. McNeill, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in a recent interview in Kabul that he had received unconfirmed intelligence reports that small shipments of weapons had been smuggled across the border “from one or two countries to the north” and delivered “to receivers in some of the northern provinces.” But he declined to provide further details.

Afghan government officials also say that in certain northern districts, militia commanders have evaded government weapons inspectors by breaking down their stockpiles of illegal firearms and redistributing them throughout their communities, making them harder to find.

Afghan and Western officials say that weapons are hidden everywhere: in grain silos and closets, in mountain caves and in holes in the ground.

And though the government’s demobilization programs have gone some way toward dismantling many of the hundreds of illegal militias, and have removed nearly all the heavy weapons from those factions, former warlords still hold considerable sway.

“They have the power of a phone call to put hundreds, or thousands, in arms,” Colonel Danielsson said. “There are a lot of weapons up here.”

All the weapons in Afghanistan were supposed to be in the government’s hands by now, all the private militias were to be a thing of the past.

After the Taliban fell in 2001 and fighting erupted among rival warlords, the Afghan government began the first of two disarmament and demobilization programs that were principally intended to dismantle warlords’ militias and other illegal armed groups. In three decades of war, weapons had poured across the borders and authority was often established by the rule of the gun.

The programs, which are voluntary, have dismantled at least 274 paramilitary organizations, reintegrated about 62,000 militia members into civilian life and recovered more than 84,000 weapons, including thousands of heavy arms that had fallen under the control of regional warlords. Afghan and NATO forces have confiscated and destroyed many other weapons, officials said. But Afghan and international officials acknowledge that hundreds of illegal armed groups still operate in Afghanistan. And hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — of weapons remain in private hands, although they are mostly small arms rather than heavy weapons, the officials say.

Of the weapons that have been collected, they say, at least 40 percent were not functional.

“There is at least one weapon in each house,” said General Abed, who was an officer in the anti-Taliban mujahedeen. Government officials note that the demilitarization programs were not intended to collect arms and were instead focused on disbanding armed groups.

“I think it will take many, many years” to disarm the population, said Hameed Quraishi, manager of the government’s demilitarization program in the north. “It doesn’t matter how hard you try. It’s the level of confidence the people have in the government.”

But the talk about rearming is not entirely military. It also appears to be a means of pressing the Karzai government, which many northern leaders have accused of favoring the south, a region mostly populated by members of his Pashtun ethnicity.

“We selected Karzai to unify the country,” said a prominent politician from the north and former member of the Northern Alliance, which fought the Taliban. “But people who joined him have pushed him to being a Pashtun leader, not a national leader.”

Disproportionate amounts of aid money and weapons have flowed to the south to prop up the regional leadership and battle the Taliban. As part of this effort, the government has been trying to build an auxiliary police force among southern Pashtun tribes to confront the insurgency.

Many northern leaders say that they have been shortchanged in the distribution of development aid and worry about the militarization of the south as they are being asked to disarm.

“Northern commanders are saying: ‘We can’t disarm. This guy is trying to unite all Pashtuns. We have to defend ourselves!’ ” a European diplomat said in Kabul.

General McNeill doubts some of the northern claims. “There’s no question that there’s a hell of a lot of political posturing in the northern sectors,” he said. “Where they think they’re ignored in the reconstruction process, there often is a report: ‘They’re here! The Taliban! They got us surrounded!’ ”

In interviews, northern Afghan leaders said that in spite of their concerns about the central government, they were standing by Mr. Karzai. And most of them denied that any stockpiling of weapons was occurring.

“If we take up arms, it means the democratic process is defeated,” said Sayed Mustafa Kazemi, spokesman for the National Front, a political coalition mainly composed of non-Pashtun leaders from the north. “We want this government to survive its entire term because we don’t want the process to be defeated.”

Karzai: Stop The Air Strikes
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/25/...le3411230.shtml
Oct. 28, 2007
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(CBS) After six years, the liberation of Afghanistan has become a triumph without victory. The fighting is the greatest it has been since the beginning of the war and more civilians are dying. In fact, 60 Minutes was surprised to hear this: while the enemy has killed hundreds of civilians this year, a similar number of civilians have been killed by American forces. With relatively few troops there, the U.S. and NATO rely on air power. The number of civilians killed in air strikes has doubled.

60 Minutes wondered whether civilian deaths are undermining the effort to win the Afghan people. So correspondent Scott Pelley looked into one air strike from last spring. At the time, the Army said in a press release that there were unconfirmed reports that nine people died in an engagement with the enemy. But when we asked, the Army wouldn't tell us anything else, so we went to see for ourselves.


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Our journey took us through Afghanistan, up the Shomali Plain north of the capital, Kabul. The Taliban are active in the area, so 60 Minutes hired Panjshiri mercenaries to cover our trip. The scene of the air strike is a village in the hills above Kapisa Province.

The 60 Minutes team found the dead buried in a cornfield. It appears there were no enemy combatants. It was four generations of one family, all killed in the air strike: an 85-year-old man, four women, and four children, ranging in age from five years to seven months. One boy survived. The night of the bombing, seven-year-old Mujib happened to be staying with his uncle, Gulam Nabi.

"Some of the bodies were missing a hand or a leg or half a head. We recognized one of them only by the clothes she was wearing," Nabi remembers.

Nabi recognized Mujib's mother among the dead,

"I saw my mom, my sisters, and my brother and my grandfather were dead. And our house was destroyed," the little boy remembers.

Mujib's father was not there. He's accused of being a local Taliban leader and the U.S. has been searching for him with no luck. The air strike came March 4th. An Army press release says it started after enemy forces fired a rocket at a U.S. base above the village. The rocket fell "causing no coalition casualties," in fact, "missing the fire base" altogether. Then U.S. pilots saw two men with AK-47 rifles leaving the scene of the rocket attack and entering a compound in the village.

The fort, which is on a hill, began raining down mortar fire on part of the village -- mortar fire that came down for about an hour. It was nighttime, and even though there were no U.S. forces in contact with the enemy on the ground, a decision was made after the mortars to call in an air strike. U.S. Air Force aircraft dropped two bombs on the neighborhood, each one weighing 2,000 pounds.

The bombs hit their intended targets. But when the smoke cleared there were no men with rifles -- just Mujib's family.

"During the Russian invasion we haven’t heard of 10 members of one family being killed by Russians in one incident. But the Americans did that," a villager remarked.

These Afghans, like many others, are deciding whether to support the U.S.-backed government. We expected anger, but we didn’t expect this.

"You can't be saying that the Soviets were kinder to your people than the Americans have been," Pelley remarks.

"We used to hate the Russians much more than Americans," the villager replied. "But now when we see all this happening, I am telling you Russians behave much better than the Americans."

Really, there's no comparison. The Soviets killed something like a million Afghans over ten years. But it's the kind of thing that Afghans are saying, because so far this year, 17 air strikes have killed more than 270 civilians according to the humanitarian organization Human Rights Watch.

It leaves Afghan President Hamid Karzai explaining to his people why they’re being killed by his allies.

"Why are so many Afghan civilians being killed by U.S. forces?" Pelley asks President Karzai.

"The United States and the Coalition Forces are not doing that deliberately. The United States is here to help the Afghan people. The Afghan people understand that mistakes are made. But five years on, six years on, definitely, very clearly, they cannot comprehend as to why there is still a need for air power," Karzai explains.

Asked if he is asking the American government to roll back the air strikes, Karzai says, "Absolutely. Oh, yes, in clear words."

Karzai told 60 Minutes he delivered those words, privately, to President George W. Bush. But he decided to take the message public in this interview. "And I want to repeat that, alternatives to the use of air force. And I will speak for it again through your media," he says.

"You're demanding that?" Pelley asks.

"Absolutely," Karzai says.

60 Minutes wanted to understand how these air strikes are planned. It turns out the mission that made Mujib’s neighborhood look like an ancient ruin was run through a futuristic-looking, classified control center. We were surprised to get into the facility because it has never been seen on television before. We promised the Air Force we wouldn’t reveal classified information, or the Persian Gulf country where the center is located.

Air Force Col. Gary Crowder is deputy director of the Combined Air Operations Center, which runs the air war over both Afghanistan and Iraq.

"You know, I'm curious. How often is an air strike prepared that's called off at the last minute?" Pelley asks.

"Thousands and thousands of times a month,” says Crowder. “We look very, very often, we tracked some of the insurgent leaders we will track for days and days on end. And we are prepared to strike them at any moment. But we can never get all of the criteria necessary to meet our rules of engagement.”

We learned there are two kinds of targets: deliberate targets which are analyzed for days and watched for patterns of civilians coming and going, and immediate targets, such as when troops are in combat and need air support. In both cases, civilian casualties are estimated in advance and it's up to the commander on the ground to decide whether the strike is worth the cost.

"We rely on those commanders to make the assessment at the time of what the requirement is. He assesses proportionality. He assesses the validity of the military target," Crowder explains.

Asked what he means by " proportionality," Crowder tells Pelley, "If we know that there is a sniper on a roof and the roof is in the middle of a mosque which is a protected site or in the middle of a very populated area, then dropping a 2,000 pound weapon on that would not be proportional to going after the sniper."

"Two men with AK-47s run into a house. Do you bomb the house?" Pelley asks.

"In some circumstances, we will bomb the house,” says Crowder. “It is entirely dependent upon the circumstances on the ground, and the ground commander's assessment of that particular situation.”

"There's this macabre kind of calculus that the military goes through on every air strike, where they try to figure out how many dead civilians is dead bad guy worth," says Marc Garlasco, who knows the calculus of civilian casualties as well as anyone.

At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He told 60 Minutes his team was authorized to kill a set number of civilians around high-value targets -- targets like Saddam Hussein and his leadership.

"Our number was 30. So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you're gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that's not a problem," Garlasco explains. "But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld."

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets -- Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, "a couple of hundred civilians at least" were killed.

"The bombs that are dropped are really only as accurate as the intelligence behind them?" Pelley asks Crowder.

"That's true. But we have come a very long way in getting that intelligence to be more accurate," Crowder says. "We will collect human intelligence, signals intelligence, overhead full-motion video, all of that tied together, very often in real time. That gives us a better understanding and a significantly higher confidence that the targets we're engaging are in fact valid military targets."

Of course the Taliban are killing civilians too, targeting them deliberately. By contrast, 60 Minutes watched American airmen calculate how to minimize civilian casualties with the choice of timing, weapon, and direction of attack.

"I don't think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the U.S. military goes through in order to make sure that they're not killing civilians," Garlasco points out.

"If so much care is being taken why are so many civilians getting killed?" Pelley asks.

"Because the Taliban are violating international law,” says Garlasco, “and because the U.S. just doesn't have enough troops on the ground. You have the Taliban shielding in people's homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs.”

But why were bombs dropped on Mujib's house? As we said, the Army wouldn’t speak to us about it. An Air Force source says that Mujib’s house was a Taliban hideout. But through an interpreter, the villagers disputed that, and they said the U.S. should have known better.

"The Americans came here the day before they bombed, they searched the whole house and saw women and children in the house," says Mujib's uncle, Gulam Nabi.

"This is such an important point. Let me be sure I've got this. Who came the day before?" Pelley asks,

"The Americans came the day before," a translator explains.

We took their accusation to the military. And an Air Force source confirmed that U.S. troops searched the house the day before. We don’t know what those troops may have seen or reported. Marc Garlasco left the Pentagon in 2003 to become senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. He has examined this case and he told 60 Minutes that even if Mujib’s father was a local Taliban leader, the air strike backfired.

"You have to ask yourself, is a mid-level thug worth nine dead civilians? But it goes beyond that. You're not talking about just losing nine dead civilians. You're also talking about violent protests throughout the country, requesting a democratically elected government be taken down, you then take people who maybe were in a pro-government area, and all of a sudden you're turning them against you, and turning them towards the Taliban," Garlasco says.

"To return just for a moment to the bombing at Kapisa,” Pelley addresses President Karzai. “A rocket was fired at a U.S. base there. It missed. No one was hurt. And yet, the response was to drop 4,000 pounds of explosives on that neighborhood.”

"That is wrong," the president says.

"They hit what they were aiming at," Pelley points out.

"That is a mistake," Karzai says. “I know that. It may be at times careless. A careless mistake, but not deliberate.”

"There is one young boy who is the sole survivor from that house,” Pelley tells Karzai. “A seven-year-old boy named Mujib. We asked him what he thought of the Americans and as you might expect, he said, 'I hate them.’”

"Naturally," Karzai agrees.

"That doesn't bode well for the future," Pelley says.

"Yeah, it doesn't,” Karzai responds. “That's why I'm so strongly asking for rethink of the use of air force. And this little boy I will call to my office. I will share his pain with him, as do the rest of the Afghan people. And try to get him a future.”

This is the byproduct of Bush going into Iraq before Afghanistan was secured.

It allowed al Qaeda to regroup.

It allowed the Taliban to regroup.

It took valuable focus away from our intellligence services in shifting their priorities to Iraq.

This is in addition to increasing recruitment, funding and sympathy for bin Laden.

In a recent poll, 20% of Muslims in the US said that suicide bombing was a legitimate response in some cases.

This is ridiculous.

This is a result of failed Bush policy.

War

Sergeant Joshua McDonough and Specialist Miguel Gutierrez fire grenades and automatic weapons from the Restrepo bunker. Photographs by Tim Hetherington.

Into the Valley of Death

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feature...currentPage=all

A strategic passage wanted by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley is among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S. forces. One platoon is considered the tip of the American spear. Its men spend their days in a surreal combination of backbreaking labor—building outposts on rocky ridges—and deadly firefights, while they try to avoid the mistakes the Russians made. Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington join the platoon’s painfully slow advance, as its soldiers laugh, swear, and run for cover, never knowing which of them won’t make it home.
by Sebastian Junger January 2008 The 20 men of Second Platoon move through the village single file, keeping behind trees and stone houses and going down on one knee from time to time to cover the next man down the line. The locals know what is about to happen and are staying out of sight. We are in the village of Aliabad, in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, and the platoon radioman has received word that Taliban gunners are watching us and are about to open fire. Signals intelligence back at the company headquarters has been listening in on the Taliban field radios. They say the Taliban are waiting for us to leave the village before they shoot.

Below us is the Korengal River and across the valley is the dark face of the Abas Ghar ridge. The Taliban essentially own the Abas Ghar. The valley is six miles long, and the Americans have pushed halfway down its length. In 2005, Taliban fighters cornered a four-man navy-seal team that had been dropped onto the Abas Ghar, and killed three of them, then shot down the Chinook helicopter that was sent in to save them. All 16 commandos on board died.

Dusk is falling and the air has a kind of buzzing tension to it, as if it carries an electrical charge. We only have to cover 500 yards to get back to the safety of the firebase, but the route is wide open to Taliban positions across the valley, and the ground has to be crossed at a run. The soldiers have taken so much fire here that they named this stretch “the Aliabad 500.” Platoon leader Matt Piosa, a blond, soft-spoken 24-year-old lieutenant from Pennsylvania, makes it to a chest-high stone wall behind the village grade school, and the rest of the squad arrives behind him, laboring under the weight of their weapons and body armor. The summer air is thick and hot, and everyone is sweating like horses. Piosa and his men were here to talk to the local elder about a planned water-pipe project for the village, and I can’t help thinking that this is an awful lot of effort for a five-minute conversation.

Video: Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington discuss this article.
Classic: “Massoud’s Last Conquest,” by Sebastian Junger (February 2002)
Classic: “Afghanistan’s Dangerous Bet,” by Christopher Hitchens (November 2004)

Photos: View a Web-exclusive slide show of Hetherington’s soldier portraits from Afghanistan. Also: more of Hetherington’s photos from Afghanistan.
I’m carrying a video camera and running it continually so that I won’t have to think about turning it on when the shooting starts. It captures everything my memory doesn’t. Piosa is about to leave the cover of the stone wall and push to the next bit of cover when I hear a staccato popping sound in the distance. “Contact,” Piosa says into his radio and then, “I’m pushing up here,” but he never gets the chance. The next burst comes in even tighter and the video jerks and yaws and Piosa screams, “A tracer just went right by here!” Soldiers are popping up to empty ammo clips over the top of the wall and Piosa is shouting positions into the radio and tracers from our heavy machine guns are streaking overhead into the darkening valley and a man near me shouts for someone named Buno.

Buno doesn’t answer. That’s all I remember for a while—that and being incredibly thirsty. It seems to go on for a long, long time.

The Center Cannot Hold
By many measures, Afghanistan is falling apart. The Afghan opium crop has flourished in the past two years and now represents 93 percent of the world’s supply, with an estimated street value of $38 billion in 2006. That money helps bankroll an insurgency that is now operating virtually within sight of the capital, Kabul. Suicide bombings have risen eightfold in the past two years, including several devastating attacks in Kabul, and as of October, coalition casualties had surpassed those of any previous year. The situation has gotten so bad, in fact, that ethnic and political factions in the northern part of the country have started stockpiling arms in preparation for when the international community decides to pull out. Afghans—who have seen two foreign powers on their soil in 20 years—are well aware of the limits of empire. They are well aware that everything has an end point, and that in their country end points are bloodier than most.

The Korengal is widely considered to be the most dangerous valley in northeastern Afghanistan, and Second Platoon is considered the tip of the spear for the American forces there. Nearly one-fifth of all combat in Afghanistan occurs in this valley, and nearly three-quarters of all the bombs dropped by nato forces in Afghanistan are dropped in the surrounding area. The fighting is on foot and it is deadly, and the zone of American control moves hilltop by hilltop, ridge by ridge, a hundred yards at a time. There is literally no safe place in the Korengal Valley. Men have been shot while asleep in their barracks tents.

Second Platoon is one of four in Battle Company, which covers the Korengal as part of the Second Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment (airborne). The only soldiers to have been deployed more times since the September 11 attacks are from the 10th Mountain Division, which handed the Korengal over last June. (Tenth Mountain had been slated to go home three months earlier, but its tour was extended while some of its units were already on their way back. They landed in the United States and almost immediately got back on their planes.) When Battle Company took over the Korengal, the entire southern half of the valley was controlled by the Taliban, and American patrols that pushed even a few hundred yards into that area got attacked.

If there was one thing Battle Company knew how to do, though, it was fight. Its previous deployment had been in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, and things were so bad there that half the company was on psychiatric meds by the time they got home. Korengal looked like it would be even worse. In Zabul, they had been arrayed against relatively inexperienced youths who were paid by Taliban commanders in Pakistan to fight—and die. In the Korengal, on the other hand, the fighting is funded by al-Qaeda cells who oversee extremely well-trained local militias. Battle Company took its first casualty within days, a 19-year-old private named Timothy Vimoto. Vimoto, the son of the brigade’s command sergeant major, was killed by the first volley from a Taliban machine gun positioned around half a mile away. He may well not have even heard the shots.

I went to the Korengal Valley to follow Second Platoon throughout its 15-month deployment. To get into the valley, the American military flies helicopters to the Korengal Outpost—the kop, as it’s known—roughly halfway down the valley. The kop has a landing zone and a clutch of plywood hooches and barracks tents and perimeter walls made of dirt-filled hesco barriers, many now shredded by shrapnel. When I arrived, Second Platoon was stationed primarily at a timber-and-sandbag outpost named Firebase Phoenix. There was no running water or power, and the men took fire nearly every day from Taliban positions across the valley and from a ridgeline above them that they called Table Rock.

I spent a couple of weeks with Second Platoon and left at the end of June, just before things got bad. The Taliban ambushed a patrol in Aliabad, mortally wounding the platoon medic, Private Juan Restrepo, and then hammered a column of Humvees that tore out of the kop to try to save him. Rounds rattled off the armor plating of the vehicles, and rocket-propelled grenades plowed into the hillsides around them. One day in July, Captain Daniel Kearney, the 27-year-old commanding officer of Battle Company, counted 13 firefights in a 24-hour period. A lot of the contact was coming from Table Rock, so Kearney decided to end that problem by putting a position on top of it. Elements of the Second and Third Platoons and several dozen local workers moved up the ridge after dark and hacked furiously at the shelf rock all night long so that they would have some minimal cover when dawn broke.

A Black Hawk helicopter comes in to land on the roof of a village house in Yaka China to take out Captain Dan Kearney following a village meeting to discuss insurgent activity.
Sure enough, daylight brought bursts of heavy-machine-gun fire that sent the men diving into the shallow trenches they had just dug. They fought until the shooting stopped and then they got back up and continued to work. There was no loose dirt up there to fill the sandbags, so they broke up the rock with pickaxes and then shoveled pieces into the bags, which they piled up to form crude bunkers. Someone pointed out that they were actually “rock bags,” not sandbags, and so “rock bags” became a platoon joke that helped them get through the next several weeks. They worked in 100-degree heat in full body armor and took their breaks during firefights, when they got to lie down and return fire. Sometimes they were so badly pinned down that they just lay there and threw rocks over their heads into the hescos.

But rock bag by rock bag, hesco by hesco, the outpost got built. By the end of August the men had moved roughly 10 tons of dirt and rock by hand. They named the outpost Restrepo, after the medic who was killed, and succeeded in taking the pressure off Phoenix mainly by redirecting it onto themselves. Second Platoon began taking fire several times a day, sometimes from distances as close as a hundred yards. The terrain drops off so steeply from the position that their heavy machine guns couldn’t angle downward enough to cover the slopes below, so the Taliban could get very close without being exposed to fire. Lieutenant Piosa had his men lay coils of concertina wire around the position and rig claymore mines hardwired to triggers inside the bunkers. If the position were in danger of getting overrun, the men could detonate the claymores and kill everything within 50 yards.

The Quiet Americans
Sergeant Kevin Rice’s tattoo bears testimony to fallen friends from a previous deployment.
I return to Second Platoon in early September, walking out to Restrepo with a squad who are going to evacuate a soldier who has broken his ankle. The hillsides are steep and covered with loose shale, and nearly every man in the company has taken a fall that could have killed him. When we arrive, the men of Second Platoon have finished work for the day and are sitting behind hescos, tearing open pouches of ready-to-eat meals (M.R.E.’s). They go to sleep almost as soon as it gets dark, but I stay up talking to the Weapons Squad sergeant, Kevin Rice. At 27, Rice is considered the “old man” of the platoon. He grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and says that nothing he has done building Restrepo was any harder than the work he did around the farm as a kid. He has a tattoo of dancing bears on his left arm—a tribute to the Grateful Dead—and the names of men who were lost in Zabul on his right. He keeps an expression of slight bemusement on his face except during firefights, when he simply looks annoyed. Rice is known for his weird calm under fire. He’s also known for fighting with the kind of slow, vengeful precision that most men can barely maintain on the pool table. I ask what he thinks about an all-out attack on Restrepo, and he just chuckles.

“I’m kind of looking forward to it,” he says. “It would be very entertaining. It would be up close and personal.”

With that, Sergeant Rice stretches out on his cot and goes to sleep.

Dawn, the Abas Ghar curtained by mist. It will burn off by midmorning, leaving the men drenched in sweat when they work. A patrol comes in before sunrise, elements of the Second who had gone to the kop for a few days of cooked food and hot showers, maybe a phone call to their wives. Fully loaded with ammunition, weapons, and food, they can easily have 120 pounds on their backs. They dump their rucksacks in the dirt and several of them light up cigarettes. Some are still breathing hard from the climb. “Quitters never win,” Rice observes.

A 22-year-old private named Misha Pemble-Belkin is sitting on the edge of a cot, cutting the pocket off his uniform. On his left forearm Pemble-Belkin has a tattoo of the Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship that became entrapped by sea ice in Antarctica in 1915. “It’s the greatest adventure story ever,” Pemble-Belkin says by way of explanation. He takes the pocket he has just liberated and sews it over a rip in the crotch of his pants, which he is still wearing. The men spend their days clambering around shale hillsides dotted with holly trees, and most of their uniforms are in shreds. Pemble-Belkin uses his free time back at the kop painting and playing guitar, and says that his father was a labor organizer who supports the troops absolutely, but has protested every war the United States has ever been in. His mother sends him letters written on paper she makes by hand.

The workday hasn’t started yet, and the men sit around talking and watching Pemble-Belkin sew his pants. They talk about what kinds of bombs they’d like to drop on the valley. They talk about how the militants try to hit airplanes with R.P.G.’s—a mathematical near impossibility. They talk about post-traumatic stress disorder, which many of the men in the unit have to some degree. One man says he keeps waking up on his hands and knees, looking for a live grenade that he thinks someone has just thrown at him. He wants to throw it back.

The sun pries itself over the eastern ridges and half the platoon gets to work filling hescos while the other half mans the heavy weapons. The men work around the outpost in teams of three or four, one man hacking at the rock shelf with a pickax while another shovels the loose dirt into sandbags and a third drops the biggest chunks into an ammo can, then walks over to a half-full hesco, muscles the can over his head, and dumps the contents in.

“Prison labor is basically what I call it,” says a man I know only as Dave. Dave is a counter-insurgency specialist who spends his time at remote outposts, advising and trying to learn. He wears his hair longer than most soldiers, a blond tangle that after two weeks at Restrepo seems impressively styled with dirt. I ask him why the Korengal is so important.

“It’s important because of accessibility to Pakistan,” he says. “Ultimately, everything is going to Kabul. The Korengal is keeping the Pech River Valley safe, the Pech is keeping Kunar Province stable, and hence what we are hoping is all that takes the pressure off Kabul.”

While we are talking, some rounds come in, snapping over our heads and continuing on up the valley. They were aimed at a soldier who had exposed himself above a hesco. He drops back down, but otherwise, the men hardly seem to notice.

“The enemy doesn’t have to be good,” Dave adds. “They just have to be lucky from time to time.”

Rules of Engagement
The Korengal is so desperately fought over because it is the first leg of a former mujahideen smuggling route that was used to bring in men and weapons from Pakistan during the 1980s. From the Korengal, the mujahideen were able to push west along the high ridges of the Hindu Kush to attack Soviet positions as far away as Kabul. It was called the Nuristan-Kunar corridor, and American military planners fear that al-Qaeda is trying to revive it. If the Americans simply seal off the valley and go around, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters currently hiding near the Pakistani towns of Dir and Chitral could use the Korengal as a base of operations to strike deep into eastern Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is rumored to be in the Chitral area, as are his second in command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and a clutch of other foreign fighters. While thousands of poorly trained Taliban recruits martyr themselves in southern Afghanistan, bin Laden’s most highly trained fighters ready themselves for the next war, which will happen in the East.

In addition to its strategic value, the Korengal also has the perfect population in which to root an insurgency. The Korengalis are clannish and violent and have successfully fought off every outside attempt to control them—including the Taliban’s in the 1990s. They practice the extremist Wahhabi version of Islam and speak a language that even people in the next valley over cannot understand. That makes it extremely difficult for the American forces to find reliable translators. The Korengalis have terraced the steep slopes of their valley into fertile wheat fields and built stone houses that can withstand earthquakes (and, as it turns out, air strikes), and have set about cutting down the enormous cedar trees that cover the upper elevations of the Abas Ghar. Without access to heavy machinery, they simply grease the mountainsides with cooking oil and let the trees rocket several thousand feet to the valley below.

The timber industry has given the Korengalis a measure of wealth that has made them more or less autonomous in the country. Hamid Karzai’s government tried to force them into the fold by regulating the export of timber, but the Taliban quickly offered to help them smuggle it out to Pakistan in return for assistance fighting the Americans. The timber is moved past corrupt border guards or along a maze of mountain tracks and donkey trails that cross the border into Pakistan. The locals call these trails buzrao; some American soldiers refer to them as “rat lines.” The routes are almost impossible to monitor because they cross steep, forested mountainsides that provide cover from aircraft. After firefights, the Americans can listen in on Taliban radio communications calling for more ammunition to be brought by donkey along these lines.

Insurgent operations in the valley are run by an Egyptian named Abu Ikhlas al-Masri, who married locally and has been fighting here since the jihad against the Soviets. Ikhlas is paid directly by al-Qaeda. He shares responsibility for the area with an Afghan named Ahmad Shah, whose forces in 2005 cornered the navy-seal team and shot down the Chinook helicopter. Competing with them for control of the area—and al-Qaeda financing—is an Arabist group called Jamiat-e Dawa el al Qurani Wasouna. The J.D.Q., as it is known by American intelligence, is suspected of having links to both the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments, as well as to Pakistan’s infamous intelligence services. Both groups are thought to pay and train local Afghan fighters to attack coalition forces in the area.

The first firefight of the day happens around noon, when a Chinook comes in to drop a load of supplies. The men have lit a red-smoke stick, meaning that it’s a hot landing zone, and the Chinook starts taking fire as soon as it settles in low over the ridge. The pilot dumps his slingload and then bears off hard to the north while Restrepo’s heavy guns open up. Someone has spotted muzzle flashes at a house in the next valley down, and the men pepper it with machine-gun fire. The house is painted a distinctive white and sits at the edge of an insurgent-held village named Laui Kalay. Eventually the muzzle flashes stop.

The men work until the next firefight, an hour later. A Black Hawk dropping off the battalion sergeant major takes fire at the kop, and its Apache escort cranks a high turn over the valley and drops down to investigate. It makes a low run to the south and takes fire from the same white house. The men shake their heads and mutter strange compliments about anyone who would shoot at an Apache. The helicopter banks so hard it nearly goes upside down, and it comes in like some huge, furious insect, unleashing a long burp of 30-mm.-cannon fire. The house undulates with impacts, and then whoever is inside shoots again.

“Jesus,” someone says. “That takes balls.”

The houses in the valley are constructed of shelf rock and massive cedar timbers, and they have withstood 500-pound bombs. The Apache tears into it a few more times and then loses interest and loops back up the valley. The smoke around the house gradually clears, and after a few minutes we can see people standing on the roof. The villages are built on such steep hillsides that it is possible to step off the road onto the rooftops, which is what these people have done. A woman appears with a child, and then another woman wanders up.

“The women and children are there first, they’re on top of the roof,” says a private named Brendan O’Byrne, who is watching through a spotting scope. Standing next to him at the heavy machine gun is a soldier named Sterling Jones, busy working away on a lollipop. Jones has just pumped 150 rounds into the house. “They’re on top of the roof just so we can see them,” O’Byrne continues. “Now the men are arriving. We got one male, fighting age, on top of the roof He knows that we won’t shoot, because there are women and children there.”

The American rules of engagement generally forbid soldiers to target a house unless someone is shooting from it, and discourage them from targeting anything if civilians are nearby. They can shoot people who are shooting at them and they can shoot people who are carrying a weapon or a handheld radio. The Taliban know this and leave weapons hidden in the hills. When they want to launch an attack they just walk out to their firing positions and pick up their weapons. Following a late-afternoon firefight, they can easily be home for dinner.

The reason for all this caution—other than the obvious moral issues—is that killing civilians simply makes the war harder. With their superior weapons, the U.S. military can kill insurgents all day long, but the only possibility of a long-term victory lies in the civilian population’s denying aid and refuge to the insurgents. The Russian military, which invaded this country in 1979, most emphatically did not understand this. They came in with a massive, heavily armored force, moved about in huge convoys, and bombed everything that moved. It was a textbook demonstration of exactly how not to fight an insurgency. More than one million people died—7 percent of the pre-war civilian population—and a truly popular uprising eventually drove the Russians out.

American forces are far more sensitive to humanitarian concerns than the Russians were—and far more welcomed—but they still make awful mistakes. In June, jumpy American soldiers in Korengal shot into a truck full of young men who had refused to stop at a local checkpoint, killing several. The soldiers said they thought they were about to be attacked; the survivors said they had been confused about what to do. Both sides were probably telling the truth.

Faced with the prospect of losing the tenuous support that American forces had earned in the northern half of the valley, the battalion commander arranged to address community leaders in person after the accident. Standing in the shade of some trees by the banks of the Pech River last June, Colonel William Ostlund explained that the deaths were the result of a tragic mistake and that he would do everything in his power to make it right. That included financial compensation for the grieving families. After several indignant speeches by various elders, one very old man stood up and spoke to the villagers around him.

“The Koran offers us two choices, revenge and forgiveness,” he said. “But the Koran says that forgiveness is better, so we will forgive. We understand that it was a mistake, so we will forgive. The Americans are building schools and roads, and because of this, we will forgive.”

It was probably no coincidence that the site chosen for this meeting was the foot of a steel bridge that the Americans had just built over the fast, violent Pech. According to Colonel Ostlund, there was a possibility that the Taliban had paid the driver of the truck to not stop at the checkpoint when ordered to. By the colonel’s reasoning, the Taliban would win a strategic victory no matter what: either they would find out how close they could get a truck bomb to an American checkpoint, or there would be civilian casualties that they could exploit.

Whatever the truth of that particular incident, the Taliban have certainly learned the value of American mistakes. Around the same time as the checkpoint shooting, coalition air strikes killed seven Afghan children at a mosque compound in the southeastern part of the country. Reaction was predictably outraged, but almost lost in the outcry was the testimony of survivors. They allegedly told coalition forces that before the air strike al-Qaeda fighters in the area—who undoubtedly knew they were going to be bombed—had beaten the children to prevent them from leaving.

“We had surveillance on the compound all day,” a nato spokesman explained. “We saw no indication there were children inside.”

The soldiers of Second Platoon lurch out of their cots and feel around for weapons in the electric-blue light before dawn. The dark shapes around them are the mountains from which they will get shot at when the sun rises. A local mosque injects the morning silence with a first call to prayer. Another day in the Korengal.

The men assemble with their trousers untucked from their boots and their faces streaked with dirt and stubble. They wear flea collars around their waists and combat knives in the webbing of their body armor. Some have holes in their boots. Several have furrows in their uniforms from rounds that barely missed. They carry family photographs behind the bulletproof steel plates on their chests, and a few carry photographs of women in their helmets, or letters. Some have never had a girlfriend. Every single man seems to have a tattoo. They are mostly in their early 20s, and many of them have known nothing but war and life at home with their parents.

In my time in the Korengal, only one soldier told me that he joined the army because of September 11. The rest are here because they were curious or bored or because their fathers had been in the army or because the courts had given them the choice of combat or jail. No one I talked to seemed to have regretted the choice. “I joined the infantry to get out of people work and "expletive deleted",” one soldier told me. “My main thing was partying. What was I going to do, keep partying and living with my mom?”

A short, brawny team leader named Aron Hijar said he enlisted because he understood a fundamental truth about a volunteer army: if people like him don’t sign up, everyone his age will be subject to a draft. When he told his family about his decision, to a person they urged him against it, but no one could say why. Hijar was a fitness trainer in California; he was bored, and his grandfather had fought in World War II, so he went down to the army recruiting office and signed the papers. He decided to keep a journal, though, so others could know what it was like. “When my children, if I have any, decide to go into the military, I’ll say, ‘You can do whatever you want, but you got to read this first,’ ” Hijar explains. “It has everything, the good times, the bad times, everything that ever meant anything to me.”

The men start their day by moving the supplies that were slingloaded onto the ridgetop the day before. One man grumbles about having to do it so early in the morning, until someone else points out that they could always do it in broad daylight under fire. The supplies are mostly bottled water and M.R.E.’s, and it takes about half an hour for the men to skid them down into camp on a plastic evacuation sled and unload them. When they’re done, they sit on their cots and knife open the M.R.E.’s for breakfast while a specialist named Brian Underwood drops to the ground and starts doing push-ups in full body armor.

Specialist Brian Underwood shouts out to his gunner while preparing grenades, during an insurgent assault on Restrepo.
Underwood competes as a bodybuilder and is probably the strongest man in the platoon besides Carl Vandenberge, who stands six feet five and weighs 250. Specialist Vandenberge doesn’t say much but smiles a lot and is reputed to be a computer genius back home. In June, I saw him throw an injured man over his shoulder, ford a river, and then carry him up a hill. His hands are so big he can palm sandbags. He turned down a basketball scholarship to join the army. He says he has never lifted weights in his life.

“Vandenberge, you big bastard,” I overheard someone say to him once. It was out of the blue and utterly affectionate. Vandenberge didn’t look up.

“My bad,” he just said.

Battle-Tested
“get his waist! get his waist!”

Little gouts of dirt erupting from the ground. The workman-like hammering of a heavy machine gun. A soldier named Miguel Gutierrez is down.

“up on the "expletive deleted"in’ ridge!”

“how many rounds you got?”

“he’s in the draw!”

Everyone is yelling, but I hear only the parts between the bursts of gunfire. The .50-caliber is laboring away inside the bunker and Angel Toves is taking fire from the east and trying to unjam his machine gun and spent shells are vomiting in a golden arc out of another machine gun to my left. We’re getting hit from the east and the south and the west, and the guy to our west is putting rounds straight into the compound. I duck into the bunker, where Sergeant Mark Patterson is calling grid points into the radio and the platoon medic—the one who replaced Restrepo—is hunched over Gutierrez. Gutierrez was on top of a hesco when we got hit and he jumped off and no one knows if he took a bullet or just broke his leg. Three men dragged him into the bunker under fire while Teodoro Buno hit the ridge with a shoulder-fired rocket and now he’s lying on a cot, groaning, with his pant leg slit up to his knee.

“Guttie’s "expletive deleted"in’ hit, dude,” I hear Mark Solowski say to Jones, deeper in the bunker. There’s a momentary pause in the firing so Rice can figure out what’s going on, and the men are talking low enough that Guttie can’t hear. I ask Jones what happened.

“We just got "expletive deleted"in’ rocked,” Jones says.

The most immediate threat is a grenade attack from the draw, and someone has to make sure that whoever is down there is killed or pushed back before he gets any closer. That means leaving the cover of the outpost and shooting—completely exposed—from the lip of the draw. Rice moves to the gap in the hescos and steps into the open and unloads several long bursts of gunfire and then steps back and calls for 203s, which are grenades shot from an M16-attached launcher. Steve Kim sprints to the bunker and grabs a rack of 203s and a weapon and sprints back and hands them to Rice. Bravery comes in many forms, and in this case it’s a function of Rice’s concern for his men, who in turn act bravely out of concern for him and one another. It’s a self-sustaining loop that works so well that officers occasionally have to remind their men to take cover during firefights. The rounds snapping in over the sandbags can become an abstraction to men who have been too well drilled in the larger, violent choreography of a firefight.

Rice was once reprimanded for smoking during a firefight. He’s not smoking now, but he might as well be. He walks into the open like he’s in his bathrobe going out to get the morning paper and pumps several rounds into the draw and then steps back to cover. He’s aiming close, the detonation coming almost immediately after the shot, and, after he’s finished, retreats to the bunker to check on Guttie.

Guttie wasn’t hit, as it turns out, but he broke his tibia and fibula jumping off the hesco. The medic has given him a morphine stick to suck on and Guttie’s stretched out on a cot listening to his iPod and staring up at the plywood ceiling of the bunker. “I find it odd that an airborne-qualified soldier jumps five feet and breaks his ankle,” a soldier named Tanner Stichter comments.

“And by the way, I ain’t wipin’ your ass,” adds Corporal Old, the medic.

Guttie asks Hijar for a cigarette and lies there smoking and sucking on the morphine. Brendan Olson is asleep against some sandbags and Kim is reading a Harry Potter book and, next to Guttie, Underwood is lying with his tattooed arms folded over his chest. The men get hit one more time that afternoon, another 20-minute blur of gunfire and shouting and rounds slapping into dirt. Everything seems backward in a firefight: the snap of the bullets going by is the first sound you hear, and then—many seconds later—the far-off staccato of the machine gun that fired them. Men who get hit from a great distance don’t hear the gunshots until they’re down, and some men never get to hear the gunshots at all.

The fighting is over by dusk, and the men gather again by the bunker in a weirdly lighthearted mood. O’Byrne once showed me footage shot by another soldier of him in a firefight. He’s in the bunker returning fire when a burst of rounds comes in that smacks the sandbags all around him and sends him to the floor. When he gets up, he’s laughing so hard he can barely work his weapon. Something like that is happening now, only it’s most of the platoon and it’s delayed by several hours. They’ve been hit hard today, a man’s broken his leg, and the enemy has figured out how to get within a hundred yards of us. In a situation like that, maybe finding something to laugh about is as crucial as food and sleep.

The light mood ends abruptly when Sergeant Rice gets off the radio with the kop. The military eavesdropping operation, code-named Prophet, has been listening in on Taliban radio communications in the valley, and the news isn’t good. “Intel says they’ve just brought 20 hand grenades into the valley,” Rice says. “And 107-mm. rockets and three suicide vests. So get ready.”

Ranch House, everyone is thinking, but no one says it. Ranch House was an American firebase in Nuristan that nearly got overrun last spring. Before it was finished, the Americans were throwing hand grenades out the bunker door and calling for aircraft to strafe their own base. They survived, but barely: 11 out of the 20 defenders were wounded.

“You don’t get 20 hand grenades to throw from 300 meters,” Jones finally says to no one in particular. He’s smoking a cigarette and looking down at his feet. “They’re going to try to breach this mother"expletive deleted"er.”

No one says much for a while, and eventually the men drift off toward their cots. As soon as it’s full dark the helicopters are going to come to lift Guttie out, and there’s not much to do until then. Jones is sitting on the cot next to me, smoking intently, and I ask what got him into the military in the first place. I’d heard he was a star athlete in high school and was supposed to go to the University of Colorado on an athletic scholarship. Now he’s on a hilltop in Afghanistan.

“I pretty much prepped my whole life to play basketball,” Jones says. “I could run the 40 in 4.36 and bench-press 385 pounds. But I was making money the illegal way, and I got into the army because I needed a change. I pretty much went into the army for my mother and my wife. My mom raised me on her own, and she didn’t raise me to be selling drugs and "expletive deleted".”

The 120-mm.-mortar squad at the KOP base.
That night I sleep in my boots with my gear close to me and a vague plan of trying to make it off the backside of the ridge if the unimaginable happens. It’s not realistic, but it allows me to fall asleep. The next morning comes clear and quiet, with a sharp little feeling of autumn in the air, and the men fall to working as soon as the sun is up. They stop only when a squad of Scouts shows up to deliver a hex wrench that Rice needs to fix one of the heavy weapons. After 20 minutes the Scouts shoulder their packs and head back toward the kop, and I grab my gear to join them. It’s a two-hour walk, and we take our time on the steep slopes in the heat of the day. The squad leader is a 25-year-old sniper from Utah named Larry Rougle, who has done six combat tours since September 11. His marriage has fallen apart, but he has a three-year-old daughter.

“I usually vote Republican, but they’re all so divisive,” Rougle says on the way down. We are taking a rest break in the shade of some trees; Rougle is the only man who looks like he doesn’t need it. “Obama’s the only candidate on either side who’s actually talking about unity, not division. That’s what this country needs right now, so he’s got my vote.”

Video: Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington discuss this article.
Classic: “Massoud’s Last Conquest,” by Sebastian Junger (February 2002)
Classic: “Afghanistan’s Dangerous Bet,” by Christopher Hitchens (November 2004)

Photos: View a Web-exclusive slide show of Hetherington’s soldier portraits from Afghanistan
Ten minutes later we’re moving again, and just outside the kop we take two bursts of machine-gun fire that stitch the ground behind us and make leaves twitch over our heads. We take cover until the kop’s mortars start hitting back, and then we count to three and run the last stretch of ground into the base. A soldier is watching all this from the entrance to his tent. There’s something strange about him, though.

He’s laughing his ass off as we run by.

Three weeks after I left the Korengal Valley, Battle Company and other units from the Second of the 503rd conducted a coordinated air assault on the Abas Ghar. They were searching for foreign fighters thought to be hiding on the upper ridges, including Abu Ikhlas, the locally renowned Egyptian commander. Several days into the operation, Taliban fighters crept to within 10 feet of Sergeant Rougle, Sergeant Rice, and Specialist Vandenberge and attacked. Rougle was hit in the head and killed instantly. Rice was shot in the stomach and Vandenberge was shot in the arm, but both survived. Nearby, a Scout position was overrun and the Scouts fled and then counterattacked with help from Hijar, Underwood, Buno, and Matthew Moreno. They retook the position and then helped evacuate the wounded. Rice and Vandenberge walked several hours down the mountain to safety.

The following night, First Platoon walked into an ambush and lost two men, with four wounded. One of the dead, Specialist Hugo Mendoza, was killed trying to prevent Taliban fighters from dragging off a wounded sergeant named Josh Brennan. He succeeded, but Brennan died the following day at a U.S. military base in Asadabad. An estimated 40 or 50 Taliban were killed, most of them foreign fighters. Three Pakistani commanders were also killed, as well as a local commander named Mohammad Tali. Locals claim that five civilians also died when the U.S. military dropped a bomb on a house where two fighters were hiding.

The incident caused village elders to declare jihad against the American forces in the valley.

Sebastian Junger is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

Without invading Iraq, Afghanistan would have received crucial US military support and this would likely not be an issue...

January 13, 2008
Afghan Police Struggle to Work a Beat in a War
By C. J. CHIVERS
NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/world/as...agewanted=print

NAWA, Afghanistan — Many of the problems frustrating Afghanistan’s efforts to secure its dangerous eastern and southern provinces were evident in the bizarre tour of duty of Shair Mohammad, a police officer who spent 18 months in an isolated swath of steppe.

Until December, when a colonel arrived to replace him, Mr. Mohammad, 30, had been the acting police chief in the Nawa district of Ghazni Province. The job gave him jurisdiction over hundreds of square miles near Pakistan that the Taliban had used as a sanctuary since being ousted from power in 2001.

But his ability to police his beat was severely compromised.

Mr. Mohammad had no rank, no money for food and not enough clothing or gear to operate in cold weather. Two of his six trucks were broken. The ammunition the Pentagon provided him came in cardboard boxes that immediately crumbled, exposing cartridges to the elements on his storeroom’s dirty floor.

Compounding his woes, the possibility of mutiny was on his mind. It was a natural worry, he said, because since April none of his men had been paid.

“My commanders always just give me promises,” he said. “They never send the money.”

In its simplest distillation, the strategy driving this American-led war is straightforward. Western troops are an interim force to provide security, spur development and mentor indigenous security forces until the Afghan leadership can govern alone.

But in the past two years, the insurgency has blossomed, making control of many provinces a contest. The Afghan Army, under American tutelage, has made considerable progress, American officers say.

The police lag far behind. Lightly equipped, marginally trained, undermined by corruption and poor discipline, they remain weak, though their expected role is daunting. They are not asked merely to police a country that lacks the rule of law. They are being used to fight a war.

The American and Afghan governments say improving the police’s capabilities is a priority. American financing has sharply increased to do so.

“If you look at how the Afghan Army has changed for the better, and project that kind of change for the Afghan police, there is reason to be optimistic,” said Lt. Col. Timothy J. McAteer, who commands the Second Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry, the principal American unit working in Ghazni Province.

But Mr. Mohammad’s tour, undermined by mismanagement from above and the poor discipline that surrounded him, suggested how difficult any transformation might be. As his tour ended in mid-December, he spent his last evenings crouched by a hissing space heater in a mud-walled fort, sipping tea and waiting for his government to provide the help the police needed.

Mr. Mohammad himself, and his sense of commitment, provided reason to be hopeful, American officers said. Tiny, bearded, wild-eyed and bedecked with long strands of unkempt black hair, he led with a style that was variously whimsical, pragmatic, resolute and cunning.

“He is a true patriot,” said First Lt. Mordechai Sorkin, a platoon leader who worked alongside him. “He has been here almost all alone, trying to make Afghanistan better.”

In the deadpan lexicon of infantry life, several soldiers nicknamed him “Charles Manson,” to whom he bears a slight resemblance. The name was meant in good humor. The soldiers said Mr. Mohammad was a character of his own: he managed a gentle and wry demeanor, but never declined to join them on patrols and was courageous under fire.

In a Taliban ambush in October, they noted, one of his officers was killed and four others wounded. Mr. Mohammad survived and tried to rally his penniless ranks.

He was also steadfast in the face of intimidation. Another day, the mutilated body of an elderly man who had spoken against the Taliban was found on the road. The man had been beheaded. Afghanis, the national currency, had been stuffed in his nose.

On patrols with Americans through villages that harbor the Taliban, Mr. Mohammad gathered elders and gave speeches against the insurgents and such behavior, telling villagers that siding with the government was the surest route away from barbarism to a more secure life.

Resolve was not enough. As his tour ended, Mr. Mohammad said, his own government had failed to match his sense of duty.

His district had long been a transit corridor for insurgents between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and had had almost no government presence. Since 2006 the area had been covered only by Mr. Mohammad’s detachment and one American platoon, roughly 40 soldiers. Many villages in the district had never been visited by either the military or the police.

In early December, Colonel McAteer, the American commander, augmented the firebase with most of his battalion’s Company B — more than two more platoons. The company commander, Capt. Christopher J. DeMure, moved to Nawa with a detachment of Afghan Army soldiers and about a dozen Afghan police officers, including a colonel to relieve Mr. Mohammad.

The officers in Nawa, the only government representatives that had ever entered much of Nawa, were surviving on donations — some might call it extortion — from a local bazaar.

When Captain DeMure arrived, Mr. Mohammad told him the government’s logistics system was such a failure that he owed $3,400 to shopkeepers for goods he had commandeered to keep his police station fed and supplied. The sum equaled roughly three years of his salary.

Lt. Col. Amanuddin, the police supervisor who arrived with new officers, appeared to be just as disappointed as Mr. Mohammad. (Like many Afghans, Colonel Amanuddin has only one name.) “I need 20 good police officers, and could use 100,” he said. “Good people — not any hashish smokers. And I need sleeping bags and mattresses and a generator for power.”

Without more officers and better equipment, he said, it would be impossible to conduct night patrols with American soldiers.

But there were signs as well that Mr. Mohammad, for all of his courage and sense of loyalty, lacked other fundamental leadership traits. The station Colonel Amanuddin was inheriting was a picture of disorder and filth.

Its front yard was a junkyard of scrapped vehicles and broken artillery pieces. Inside was a garbage pit. The garbage was not confined to this hole; it was everywhere. The courtyard was overrun by dogs that fed on it.

At least three unexploded rockets littered the grounds, and the police had taken to using a guard tower as a toilet. Human waste covered its floor.

Seeing the depth of the problems, Captain DeMure contacted a provincial coordination center that supervises the police. He hoped to get more gear, wages for the officers and more officers for the district.

He also organized the police into patrols, led by Americans, to search for Taliban fighters and meet villagers for introductions.

But on Dec. 6, Mr. Mohammad’s fear of mass desertion came true. Destitute and dispirited, most of the officers under his command abandoned their posts at sunrise; it was not the first time, he said, that such a thing had happened.

Nine of Colonel Amanuddin’s officers announced that they were leaving, too. Only one new officer remained: Amir Mohammad, a driver with only one arm.

The only other officers to agree to work were three of Mr. Mohammad’s relatives — cheerful but largely untrained men. At one point, Mr. Mohammad had commanded more than 15 men.

Captain DeMure urged the new chief to ask the men to keep working. It was no use. “None of the officers have been paid,” the colonel said. “If we force them, they might kill us.” Mr. Mohammad nodded knowingly.

Captain DeMure was soon back in contact with Ghazni, asking for police officers again. The patrols he had organized had been encouraging; many villagers had seemed friendly and said they wanted the government to move into the district.

“There are people here who welcome the government and the change it can bring,” he said. “But we need the police down here to help make that happen.”

A few days later, at the captain’s urging, eight more officers arrived to work with Colonel Amanuddin. More were expected soon, he said.

Mr. Mohammad’s tour was over at last. Earlier, he had said that when he was relieved he would confront the supervisors he suspected of embezzling his officers’ wages.

But even this wish showed how much work was ahead. He would have to travel in an American convoy, he said, because if a police officer risked driving to the capital alone, he would almost certainly be shot.

“This looks like a fortress,” he said, gesturing to the compound where he had lived for a year and a half. “Really it is an island. The Taliban is all around.”



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February 24, 2008
The Candidates
Choosing Which War to Fight
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON
NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/weekinre...agewanted=print

TWO weeks ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise trip to Afghanistan that was so cloaked in extra security and secrecy that reporters traveling with her weren’t told where they were going until her plane had taken off from London.

Arriving in Kabul, Ms. Rice’s entourage was immediately hustled across the runway to a gray C-17 military transport plane for a one-hour trip to Kandahar, where she stayed for less than three hours, never venturing off the airfield where NATO forces have their headquarters. Then it was back to Kabul for lunch with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in his barricaded palace. A mere eight hours after landing in Afghanistan, Ms. Rice was gone. She had spent, all told, only six hours on the ground; her plane, with its distinct blue and white United States of America logo, made a swift, steep ascent, disappearing from rocket range within minutes.

The secrecy and security that surrounded Ms. Rice’s visit highlight a central question that has now thrust its way into this year’s presidential campaign: Six years after the United States invaded Afghanistan with the goal of rooting out Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the terrorist threat, Afghanistan remains a security danger zone for Americans, far more so than in 2002, the year in between the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, has Afghanistan now become a bigger security threat to the United States than Iraq?

The three leading contenders for the presidential nominations have staked out positions that differ radically, along party lines. All three say they believe that Afghanistan is an important security threat that needs to be addressed. But the Republican, John McCain, suggests that Iraq remains America’s bugaboo of security threats, while the two Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, appear to have moved on to Afghanistan. Both of them argue that focusing on Iraq gets in the way of a more serious threat in Afghanistan.

Senator McCain, the likely Republican nominee, makes a de facto argument that Iraq and Afghanistan are two sides of the same coin. “Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will withdraw our forces from Iraq based on an arbitrary timetable designed for the sake of political expediency and which recklessly ignores the profound human calamity and dire threats to our security that would ensue,” Mr. McCain said in a Feb. 7 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Distilled to its simplest form, Mr. McCain’s argument is that withdrawing from Iraq would make Americans less safe in the long run, because a withdrawal would embolden Al Qaeda, put American interests at risk in the Middle East, and make an already volatile region less safe.

Senators Obama and Clinton have tacked in the opposite direction. Iraq, they argue, makes Afghanistan more dangerous. The Iraq war, Mr. Obama told an audience of supporters in Houston last Tuesday, “distracted us from the fight that needed to be fought in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda. They’re the ones who killed 3,000 Americans.” He has said that if elected, he would deploy at least two additional brigades in Afghanistan.

Senator Clinton, who has been to Afghanistan three times, holds a similar position, her aides say, except they say that she hasn’t specified how many additional brigades she would send to Afghanistan because she wants to further explore the security situation there first. Mrs. Clinton has proposed appointing a special envoy to deal with the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

“There is a theater of war, that I would call AfPak, with two fronts — an eastern front and a western front,” said Richard Holbrooke, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations and a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s. “I believe that we will look back ten years from now and say that AfPak was even more important to our national security than Iraq.”

For the Democrats, who have a base of support that clearly wants out of Iraq, framing the issue in terms of Afghanistan makes it a lot easier, politically, to pull out of Iraq. But leaving Iraq will be no easy thing. Experts who side with Mr. McCain argue that a quick American exit from Iraq could lead to a conflagration in the Middle East that could end up involving Saudi Arabia and Iran in a Shia-Sunni-Kurd war — a conflict that would have few winners and would likely produce an enormous number of civilian casualties.

Beyond that, the logistics of pulling out 130,000 troops from Iraq would be daunting, and it could take close to a year to get all the equipment out. Indeed, some military experts say that if the United States military was given a year to exit Iraq, it would be so consumed with the logistics that it wouldn’t be able to do anything else.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates entered the fray earlier this month, for a moment sounding almost like the (gasp!) Clinton and Obama camps by urging Europeans to draw a distinction between the wars. During remarks on his way to Munich to take the Europeans to task for not sending enough troops to support NATO in Afghanistan, Mr. Gates said part of the problem was that many Europeans were conflating Iraq with Afghanistan.

“I worry that for many Europeans the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are confused,” Mr. Gates said. “I think they combine the two.” It was an unusually candid acknowledgment from a senior member of the Bush administration that the war in Iraq had exacted a cost, in NATO’s chances for victory in Afghanistan. Many Europeans, Mr. Gates said, “have a problem with our involvement in Iraq and project that to Afghanistan, and do not understand the very different — for them — the very different kind of threat.”

The problem is, with the United States Army stretched thin in Iraq, the Bush administration has, thus far, been left to hector its NATO allies to send additional troops to handle the growing Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. And European populations generally disapprove of their troops being sent into harm’s way in Afghanistan. No surprise, given the opposition on the streets of Europe to the American invasion of Iraq. That’s what Mr. Gates means when he says that Europeans conflate the two: Why help the United States in Afghanistan, the European logic goes, when America would be able to handle Afghanistan much more easily if its G.I.’s weren’t bogged down in Iraq?

In any case, the dynamics of the two conflicts are not the same, many foreign policy experts stress. The rapidly deteriorating situation on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, the Musharraf government’s increased inability to confront Islamist insurgents in its border provinces, combined with the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan have turned AfPak into America’s No. 1 national security problem, these experts say, even as parts of Iraq seem to have quieted since more American troops were sent there last year. Conditions in Pakistan became even more volatile on Monday after the party of President Pervez Musharraf suffered a drubbing in parliamentary elections, leading some to question how long Mr. Musharraf will be able to cling to power and how much of his already diminished authority he can retain. And Pakistan, the experts say, is inextricably linked to Afghanistan.

“Losing Afghanistan would be far more consequential than losing Iraq,” says Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who was an adviser on counterterrorism to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2004. “If Pakistan, especially along the border, fell into complete disarray, the integrity of the Afghan country and its government will be even more threatened, and that would have far greater repercussions for us.”

February 24, 2008
Battle Company Is Out There
By ELIZABETH RUBIN
Correction Appended
NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/magazine...agewanted=print

WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the Americans’ small mountain outposts, but the area’s reputation among the soldiers was mythic. It was a known safe haven for insurgents. American troops have tended to avoid the place since a nasty fight a year or so earlier. And as Halloween approached, the soldiers I was with, under the command of 26-year-old Capt. Dan Kearney, were predicting their own Yaka China doom.

The Korengal Valley is a lonely outpost of regress: most of the valley’s people practice Wahhabism, a more rigid variety of Islam than that followed by most Afghans, and about half of the fighters confronting the U.S. there are homegrown. The rest are Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks; the area is close to Pakistan’s frontier regions where Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda figures are often said to be hiding out. The Korengal fighters are fierce, know the terrain and watch the Americans’ every move. On their hand-held radios, the old jihadis call the Americans “monkeys,” “infidels,” ‘’bastards” and “the kids.” It’s psychological warfare; they know the Americans monitor their radio chatter.

As far as “the kids” are concerned, the insurgents are ghosts — so the soldiers’ tactics often come down to using themselves as bait. The insurgents specialize in ambushes, harassing fire and hit-and-run attacks. NATO’s military advantage in such a war is air power. The soldiers don’t hesitate to call in Big Daddy (who, in today’s military, often flies in with the voice of a female pilot). But while these flying war machines are saviors to the soldiers, they cannot distinguish between insurgents and civilians.

I went to Afghanistan last fall with a question: Why, with all our technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes? As of September of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, NATO was causing alarmingly high numbers of civilian deaths — 350 by the coalition, compared with 438 by the insurgents. The sheer tonnage of metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds between January and September of 2007, compared with half a million in all of 2006.

After a few days, the first question sparked more: Was there a deeper problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? More than 100 American soldiers were killed last year, the highest rate since the invasion. Why were so many more American troops being killed? To find out, I spent much of the fall in the Korengal Valley and elsewhere in Kunar province alongside soldiers who were making life-and-death decisions almost every day — decisions that led to the deaths of soldiers and of civilians.

Subduing the Valley

OVER THE LAST two years, the Americans have steadily increased their presence in Kunar province, fanning out to the small platoon-size outposts that have become the signature of the new counterinsurgency doctrine in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Korengal Outpost, nicknamed the KOP, was built in April 2006 on the site of a former timber mill and motel. The soldiers of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team live there in dusty tents and little wooden huts. They now have hot food and a small chow tent with an Internet linkup and a few phones for calling home. But the place was protected by not much more than concertina wire and sentries. Nearly every time I arrived at the KOP our helicopter was greeted by sniper fire or the dushka — a Russian-made antiaircraft gun.

Dan Kearney was essentially lord of the Korengal Valley. A self-described Georgia army brat, he grew up idolizing his warrior dad, Frank Kearney, and wanted to move in his father’s world of covert and overt operations. (His father is now a lieutenant general in Special Operations command.) Kearney often calls himself a dumb jock, playing the crass, loudmouthed tough guy with his soldiers. He had been in Iraq and told me he had gone emotionally dead there with all the dying and killing, and stayed that way until the birth of his son a year ago. His hardest day in Iraq was when a close friend, Rob Shaw, was severely wounded by an improvised explosive device that killed his first sergeant and a bunch of their friends — and the next thing he knew their colonel was asking Kearney to step in for Shaw and lead the company.

But as hard as Iraq was, he said, nothing was as tough as the Korengal. Unlike in Iraq, where the captains and lieutenants could let down their guard in a relatively safe, fortified operating base, swapping stories and ideas, here they had no one to talk to and were almost as vulnerable to enemy fire inside the wire as out. Last summer, insurgents stormed one of the bases in a nearby valley and wounded 16.

And unlike every other place I’ve been in Afghanistan — even the Pech River valley, just an hour’s drive away — the Korengal had no Afghan police or district leaders for the Americans to work with. The Afghan government, and Afghans down the valley, seemed to have washed their hands of the Korengalis. As Kearney put it to me one day at the KOP, the Korengal is like a tough Los Angeles neighborhood, “and we’re the L.A.P.D. kicking in the door, arresting guys, demanding information about the gangs, and slowly the people say, ‘No, we don’t know anything, because that guy in the gang, he’s with my sister, and that other guy, he’s my uncle’s cousin.’ Now we’ve angered them for so many years that they’ve decided: ‘I’m gonna stick with the A.C.M.’ ” — anticoalition militants — “ ‘who are my brothers and I’m not gonna rat them out.’ ”

So what exactly was his job out here? To subdue the valley. It’s a task the Marines had tried, and then the soldiers of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division — a task so bloody it seemed to drive the 10th Mountain’s soldiers to a kind of madness. Kearney’s soldiers told me they’d been spooked by the weird behavior of their predecessors last May: near the end of their tour, many would sit alone on the fire base talking to themselves. Privates disobeyed their sergeants, and squad leaders refused to step outside the wire to show the new boys the terrain. No one wanted to be shot in the last days of his tour.

Kearney kept his soldiers on a tight leash at first. Col. John Nicholson, a brigade commander with the 10th Mountain Division, had promised the Afghans he would not bomb their homes. When Kearney and the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team officially took over from the division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team on June 5, they kept that promise. “My guys would tell me they didn’t know which houses they’re shooting from, and I’d tell them they can’t shoot back into the villages,” Kearney recalled. “They hated me.” The insurgents were testing the new captain, he suspected, by deliberately shooting from homes. On July 10, the Korengalis ambushed his soldiers from one house they often used — a three-story mansion on a fertile outcropping, with balconies overlooking the valley, that belonged to Haji Matin, a timber baron turned insurgent leader. It had been the scene of fighting in the past.

When Kearney’s moment of decision came, two of 2nd Platoon’s sergeants, Kevin Rice and Tanner Stichter, had been shot, and the fight was still going on. Kearney could see a woman and child in the house. “We saw people moving weapons around,” Kearney told me. “I tried everything. I fired mortars to the back side to get the kids to run out the front. I shot to the left, to the right. The Apache” — an attack helicopter — “got shot at and left. I kept asking for a bomb drop, but no one wanted to sign off on the collateral damage of dropping a bomb on a house.” Finally, he said, “We shot a javelin and a tow” — both armor-piercing missiles. “I didn’t get shot at from there for two months,” Kearney said. “I ended up killing that woman and that kid.”

Kearney could often sound cold-blooded, like when he’d march into the mess tent in shorts, improvising rap lyrics about killing bad guys. But then he’d switch to counselor, trying to salvage a soldier’s marriage, or he’d joke with a Korengali elder about arranging a marriage between his own infant son and the elder’s daughter to make peace. The performances steeled him against shouldering so much mortality. As he put it, “The only reason anyone’s listening to me in this valley right now is ’cause I’m dropping bombs on them.” Still, he wasn’t going to let himself shoot at houses every time his unit took fire: “I’d just create more people that hate me.”

A Blood Feud

IN LATE 2001, the B-52 symbolized, for many Afghans, liberation from Taliban rule. They wove images of the plane into their carpets. Urban legends sprang up about the B-52’s power, how the planes glided along unscathed, even as the Taliban barraged them with antiaircraft fire. Kabulis spread the story that the B-52s had dropped thousands of leaflets saying, “Hit us if you can!” — and afterward the Taliban didn’t waste their bullets on the B-52s.

But the jets that defeated the Taliban were wiping out innocent families as well. In July 2002, Special Forces in the mountains of Oruzgan thought they were destroying a high-value Taliban target, but instead they rocketed and bombed an engagement party. About 40 Afghans were killed and nearly 100 were wounded.

Such mistakes have continued, though the causes can change. The insurgents regularly use civilians as shields, children as spotters and women as food suppliers. NATO killing civilians is great propaganda for the Taliban. At the same time, to Afghans with little technological sophistication, the scale and impersonality make the accidents seem intentional. Many are convinced the Americans are deliberately bombing them and even deliberately aiding a Taliban comeback. The reality is that bombs are only as accurate as the intelligence on the ground — and since 9/11, the U.S. and NATO have used air power as a substitute for ground troops.

By now, seven years of air strikes and civilian casualties, humiliating house searches and arbitrary detentions have pushed many families and tribes to revenge. The Americans then see every Afghan in those pockets of recalcitrance as an enemy. If you peel back the layers, however, there’s always a local political story at the root of the killing and dying. That original misunderstanding and grievance fertilizes the land for the Islamists. Whom do you want to side with: your brothers in God’s world or the infidel thieves?

In the case of the Korengal Valley, the story began about a century ago, when the tribesmen now known as Korengalis were kicked out of the province of Nuristan (immediately north of Kunar province) and settled in the Korengal, which was rich with timber forests and farmland. Over time they made an alliance with one branch of the large Safi tribe, which once dominated Kunar politics. But down the road along the Pech River valley, the rest of the Safis opposed the Korengalis.

As the Afghans tell the story, from the moment the Americans arrived in 2001, the Pech Valley timber lords and warlords had their ear. Early on, they led the Americans to drop bombs on the mansion of their biggest rival — Haji Matin. The air strikes killed several members of his family, according to local residents, and the Americans arrested others and sent them to the prison at Bagram Air Base. The Pech Valley fighters working alongside the Americans then pillaged the mansion. And that was that. Haji Matin, already deeply religious, became ideological and joined with Abu Ikhlas, a local Arab linked to the foreign jihadis.

By 2007, the Americans understood what happened. Last year, the governor of Nuristan even sat them down with the Korengali elders to try and mediate between the two sides. Nothing came of it. Kearney tried to dig deeper, sending e-mail messages to anthropologists and Afghan experts to get their guidance. He spent hours listening to Haji Zalwar Khan — who acted as the valley’s representative to the Americans and the government — talk about history and grievances. Haji Zalwar, a jihadi veteran of the anti-Soviet fight, bore the valley’s burden almost alone and had the grim demeanor to prove it. Kearney met as many villagers as possible to learn the names of all the elders and their families. But he inherited a blood feud between the Korengalis and the Americans that he hadn’t started, and he was being sucked into its logic.

“Serious P.T.S.D.”

LAST AUTUMN,, after five months of grueling foot patrols up and down the mountains, after fruitless encounters with elders who smiled in the morning and were host to insurgents in the evening and after losing friends to enemy fire, Captain Kearney’s men could relate to the sullen, jittery rage of their predecessors in the 10th Mountain Division. Many wondered what they were doing out there at all.

Kearney refused to entertain that thought. He would tell his visitors, whether generals or reconstruction teams, that his campaign plan was clear, if modest: “It’s World War II Pacific-island hopping, turning one village at a time.” Over five months, he had gained about 400 yards of terrain. When some generals and colonels had flown in for a quick tour, and Kearney was showing them the lay of the land, one officer said to another, as Kearney later recalled it, “I don’t know why we’re even out here.” Another officer jumped in to talk up the logic of the operation. Kearney told me he thought: Sort your stuff out before you come out here. My boys are sucking it up and dying. . . . For besides being lord of the valley, he had another role to play — motivator, disciplinarian and confidant to his soldiers. “It’s like being in charge of a soap opera,” he told me. “I feel like Dr. Phil with guns.”

One full-moon night I was sitting outside a sandbag-reinforced hut with Kearney when a young sergeant stepped out hauling the garbage. He looked around at the illuminated mountains, the dust, the rocks, the garbage bin. The monkeys were screeching. “I hate this country!” he shouted. Then he smiled and walked back into the hut. “He’s on medication,” Kearney said quietly to me.

Then another soldier walked by and shouted, “Hey, I’m with you, sir!” and Kearney said to me, “Prozac. Serious P.T.S.D. from last tour.” Another one popped out of the HQ cursing and muttering. “Medicated,” Kearney said. “Last tour, if you didn’t give him information, he’d burn down your house. He killed so many people. He’s checked out.”

As I went to get some hot chocolate in the dining tent, the peaceful night was shattered by mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire banging and bursting around us. It was a coordinated attack on all the fire bases. It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants. The soldiers were on a 15-month tour that included just 18 days off. Many of them were “stop-lossed,” meaning their contracts were extended because the army is stretched so thin. You are not allowed to refuse these extensions. And they felt eclipsed by Iraq. As Sgt. Erick Gallardo put it: “We don’t get supplies, assets. We scrounge for everything and live a lot more rugged. But we know the war is here. We got unfinished business.”

For sanity, all they had was the medics’ tent, video games and movies — “Gladiator,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Dogma,” Monty Python. Down the road in the Pech Valley, soldiers played cricket with Afghan kids and had organized boxing and soccer matches. Lt. Kareem Hernandez, a New Yorker running a base on the Pech River, regularly bantered over dinner with the Afghan police. Neighbors would come by with tips. But here in the Korengal, the soldiers were completely alienated from the local culture. One night while watching a scene from HBO’s “Rome” in which a Roman soldier tells a slave he wants to marry her, a soldier asked which century the story was set in. “First B.C. or A.D.,” said another soldier. The first shook his head: “And they’re still living like this 800 meters outside the wire.”

At the end of the summer, Kearney told his dad, “My boys are gonna go crazy out here.” The army sent a shrink, and Kearney got a wake-up call about his own leadership. He discovered that half his men thought he was playing Russian roulette with their lives and the other half thought he stuck too closely to the rules of engagement. “The moral compass of the army is the P.L. and the C.O.” — the platoon leader and the commanding officer, Kearney told me. “I told every one of my P.L.’s that they have to set that moral standard, that once you slip to the left, you can’t pull your guys back in.”

Operation Rock Avalanche

ON OCT. 19, Kearney and Battle Company were air assaulted into the insurgents’ backyard for a mission that many thought insane. It was called Rock Avalanche and would last about six days. One of its main targets was the village of Yaka China.

Kearney, being the good soldier, tried to pump up his boys with the promise that they would be going after insurgents who had killed their friends and whose grizzled faces were plastered on their bad-guy family-tree wall at the KOP. They would upset the guerrillas’ safe haven and their transit routes from Pakistan. They would persuade the villagers to stop harboring the bad guys by offering an $11 million road project that had just been approved by NATO and Kabul and would be built by the Kunar Provincial Reconstruction Team. And they’d complete the “human terrain mapping” that is part of the new counterinsurgency doctrine — what families dominate, who’s married, who’s feuding, are there divisions to be exploited?

It was a lot to ask of young soldiers: play killer, cultural anthropologist, hearts-and-minds winner and then killer again. Which is why, just hours before the mission was to begin, some soldiers were smearing black-and-green war paint on their faces when their sergeant shouted: “Take it off. Now!” Why? They’d frighten the villagers.

It seemed a moot point as Rock Avalanche got under way. Apache gunships were scanning the ridges for insurgents. Other helicopters were dropping off more soldiers. An unmanned drone was whining overhead as it sent infrared video feeds to a large screen back at the battalion’s headquarters, Camp Blessing, six miles north of the KOP.

Almost immediately, high on a mountainside looking down on Yaka China, Kearney had to play God. In a ditch to his left, Jesse Yarnell, a young intelligence officer, along with John, an Afghan interpreter, were intercepting insurgents on their two-way radios saying, “We see them, we’re going to wait.”

“They’re right down there!” said Kevin Caroon as he gazed out of his night vision. Caroon, from Connecticut and a father of two, was an Air Force JTAC — the joint terminal attack controller who talks the combat pilots onto their targets. “See that? Two people moving south 400 meters away from us,” Caroon said, pointing down the mountain face. More insurgents were located nearby.

“Sir, what do you want to do?” Caroon asked Kearney.

“I want them dead,” Kearney said.

“Engage them?”

“Yes. Take ’em out.”

Caroon radioed the pilot his instructions, “On-scene commander’s intent is to engage.” And that was it.

A sudden wail pierced the night sky. It was Slasher, an AC-130 gunship, firing bullets the size of Coke bottles. Flaming shapes ricocheted all around the village. Kearney was in overdrive. The soldiers back at the KOP were radioing in that the drone was tracking 10 men near the tree line. Yarnell was picking up insurgent radio traffic. “They’re talking about getting ready to hit us,” someone said. The pilot could see five men, one entering a house, then, no, some were in the trees, some inside, and then, multiple houses. He wanted confirmation — were all these targets hostile? Did Kearney have any collateral-damage concerns? Cursing, Kearney told them to engage the men outside but not to hit the house. The pilots radioed back that men had just run inside. No doubt there would be a family. Caroon reminded Kearney that Slasher had only enough fuel to stay in position for 10 more minutes.

“What do you want to do, sir?” Caroon asked him.

Kearney radioed his soldiers back at the KOP to contact his boss, Lt. Col. Bill Ostlund. Ostlund, a Nebraska social scientist who could switch effortlessly from aggressive bomber to political negotiator talking family values with Afghan tribal elders, was in the crowded tactical-operations room at Camp Blessing watching the drone’s video feed and getting the same intelligence. He signed off on collateral damage, and Kearney turned to Caroon: “Take out the compound. And anyone that comes out.”

Flaming rockets flashed through the sky. Thunder rumbled and echoed through the valley. Then there was a pause. Slasher asked Caroon whether the insurgents were still talking. Kearney shouted over to Yarnell in his ditch, “You picking anything up?” Nothing. More spitting rockets.

The night seemed incomprehensible and interminable. Slasher departed and Gunmetal — an Apache helicopter — swept in. Radio communication kept breaking down. At one point the crew of Gunmetal, sensing no hostile intent, refused Kearney’s orders to fire. Then suddenly Gunmetal was rocketing at figures scattering for cover. Then Slasher was back in the sky doing more “work.” In the predawn light Bone — the nickname for the B-1 bomber that seemed to be the soldiers’ favorite — winged in and dropped two 2,000-pound bombs above the village. Finally, around dawn, a weary Kearney, succumbing to gallows humor, adrenaline and exhaustion, said: “O.K., I’ve done my killing for the week. I’m ready to go home.”

Kearney estimated that they killed about 20 people, adding: “I’m not gonna lie. Some are probably civilians.”

In the logic of war, the best antidote for the menacing ghostliness of the ambushing enemy is killing and knowing you’ve killed them. The soldiers in the Korengal almost never had that kind of satisfaction. Any insurgents, if they were killed, would be buried fast, and all that was left in their wake were wounded civilians. That morning, after a long night of fighting, was no different. Within an hour or so, Lt. Matt Piosa, an earnest, 24-year-old West Point grad, and his patrol were in Yaka China. They radioed that the village elders were asking to bury their dead. They’d also collected wounded civilians. The tally was bad — 5 killed and 11 wounded, all of them women, girls and boys.

Kearney radioed Camp Blessing the bad news and dropped his head between his knees. Killing women and children was tragedy enough. But civilian casualties are also a political issue. If he didn’t manage to explain his actions to the Yaka China villagers and get them to understand his intentions, he could lose them to the enemy. Meanwhile, Yarnell and his team were intercepting radio messages like: “Be very quiet. Move the things over here. Pray for us.” At least some of the insurgents from the previous night’s fight had survived to fight again. The planes were tracking them hiding along a creek. But after the civilian casualties of the night before, senior commanders were refusing to give Kearney clearance to bomb or rocket them.

The short day was fading. The sun dropped behind the peaks. The cold winds rattled our bones. The soldiers tried to make light of their conviction that they’d be attacked by those insurgents dissolving into the villages. Their fears were realized.

Hearts and Minds

TO TRY TO ACQUIRE allies, Kearney and some of his men flew down the next day to Yaka China. With nowhere else to land, the Black Hawk helicopters descended on the roof of a house not far below the compound that Slasher, the AC-130, had rocketed the night of the 19th. Dust and dried grass whipped across the house and the villagers’ faces. Just to endear themselves even more, the soldiers from Battle Company had to step on harvested corn as they climbed down; it was drying on the second story.

The adversaries faced off in the courtyard as chickens sprinted in and out. On one side were Kearney, Ostlund and Larry LeGree, a naval nuclear engineer and head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team, together with their entourage, including interpreters, all in futuristic high-tech gear. On the other side were the Korengali elders, who looked as if they stepped out of “Lord of the Rings” with their crooked walking sticks, beards dyed red and blue eyes framed by kohl. With no Afghan government out here, the elders are the only channel for communication. The younger men sat on the ground, wrapped in shawls and bold indifference.

Kearney squatted and told the Korengalis that when he came to this region he hoped to walk into Yaka China and find out what the villagers needed. Instead, he found that there were some 50 insurgents in and around the village. He pointed to the evidence — military radio batteries that his men had found, binoculars, rockets, an old pistol, a small pamphlet titled, in Arabic, “How to Kill,” and one in Pashto, “The Concise Book on the Virtues of Jihad” — that had been collected in the general area by Afghan soldiers and Americans. It was not a very incriminating haul, and everyone knew it.

The day before, a U.S. medevac had airlifted out the wounded civilians from the village. Humanitarian assistance was air-dropped in, including concrete for retaining walls, rice and blankets for winter. The provisions were not compensation, Kearney told the elders. “It’s what the government does for their people when there is security here,” he said. He asked them to tell him where in the mountains the insurgents were hiding their supplies. “That way I don’t have to come in here and shoot at you and identify the good guys from the bad guys,” he said.

To keep his bearings amid the hostile faces, Kearney kept appealing to Haji Zalwar Khan, the leading go-between among the valley’s elders. He made his fortune in the timber trade and blamed the Americans for shutting it down. He tried to placate both the Americans and the insurgents. He was not about to side with Kearney in public. “How can I know where you found these things?” he asked, referring to the jihadi items. “In the mountain? The house? How do I know whom they belong to?”

Kearney smiled. He was getting used to the routine between the Americans and the villagers — miscommunication and deception. The encounter felt as much performative, a necessary part of the play, as substantive. And I wondered how Kearney was going to keep his sanity for 10 more months.

Just a week or so earlier, I had been at the KOP when villagers from Aliabad — a mile south of the KOP, and the home village of Haji Zalwar Khan — complained to Kearney that some ordnance had hit a house. Later they sent up the homeowner’s teenage son to wrest compensation from Kearney. As we walked to the KOP’s entrance to meet the boy, a shot rang out, then another. The bullets smacked the dirt in front of us. Kearney shoved me into a shack where an Afghan was cooking bread. A few more shots were fired. It was “One-Shot Freddy,” as the soldiers refer to him, an insurgent shooter everyone had a theory about regarding the vintage of his gun, his identity, his tactics — but neither Kearney’s scouts nor Shadow the drone could ever track him. I accidentally slashed my forearm on a nail in the shack and as I watched the blood pool I thought that if I had to live with Freddy and his ilk for months on end I, too, would see a forked tongue in every villager and start dreaming of revenge.

Kearney was angry. “Taliban shot your house?” he asked the boy from Aliabad. An interpreter translated.

No, said the boy, Americans did.

“What’d we shoot with?”

“I don’t know the weapon, but there’s little holes and two big holes.”

“I didn’t shoot into Aliabad,” said Kearney, adding that if one of his soldiers had, it was because insurgents were firing from the village.

“No one shoots from the village,” said the boy, though everyone knew insurgents had wounded several of Kearney’s soldiers by shooting from the mosque, the cemetery, the school. . . .

The boy changed course, “God knows better than me,” and that sent Kearney on a riff: “Yes. God does and God talks to me and told me they do.” And by the way, hadn’t the boy noticed that the bad guys always start shooting first?

“O.K., then shoot them, not our house,” the boy said.

“Then tell me where the bad guys are,” Kearney said. The boy said he didn’t know. What he knew was that the Americans were always shooting at the village.

This went on for some time. When the boy again protested that no one shoots from his village, Kearney interrupted him. “Aminullah does,” he said. Aminullah was a native of Aliabad and a rising figure in the valley’s insurgency.

The boy smiled.

“You’re smiling because you know I’m right,” Kearney said.

“You’re right,” the boy said. “So shoot the cemetery, not our house.”

Kearney moved closer to him. “Look, if you want help with your house, all you have to do is ask. But don’t accuse us every time something goes wrong.”

The boy laughed and repeated that he didn’t know where the bad guys were.

“It’s crazy, man. They must be ghosts!” Kearney said, laughing.

“Aminullah doesn’t come to Aliabad anymore,” the boy said, perhaps trying to give Kearney a bone.

Kearney leapt at it. “So Aminullah is bad?”

“Yes.”

“Ah! Finally! We’re getting somewhere.” Kearney took off his helmet and squeezed his hands together and rocked as he sat on a wall. “What about Mohammad Tali, he’s a good guy isn’t he?” Kearney asked.

Smiling again, the boy looked at the dirt: “No. You already told us he’s a bad guy.”

“Ah!” Kearney said, throwing up his hands. “So you were down there in the village when I gave radios and food. But instead you say I shoot at you all the time?” Kearney swung his legs back and forth. “Hey dude, ask yourself. Why would I bring you radios and food and shoot at you? Does Aminullah? No. What happened that day after I left?” The boy said all he knew was that the villagers went home and “they” started shooting. “Where?” Kearney asked, “from your village?”

“What can I say? The Americans were in my village.”

“Yeah, so I was doing good stuff for you guys and they shot at me. And what I’m trying to say is they could have shot at you again. And if I shoot at your house I’ll help. We’ll fix up that wall. I’m not here to hurt you.”

Everyone was getting restless in the little check post. Kearney tried to lighten up a bit. He asked the boy what he thought about the Americans.

“You build roads and clinics and schools and are here to help,” the boy said.

“Cop out,” Kearney shouted, chuckling. “Easy answer. Hey dude, you can say we’re rotten and messing up your lumber trade.” The boy laughed. Kearney laughed. Pfc. Michael Cunningham, the radio operator, and Sgt. Taylor White, who always manned the check post, both laughed.

“See, I knew it,” Kearney said. “That’s what you really think. Think I want to be here?”

“Yeah,” the boy said. “I think so.”

“Dude. I got a wife and son. I came here to help you out. If you give me as much help as possible I’ll get out of here a hell of a lot faster.”

Kearney told him to enjoy Ramadan, and then shouted, “Where’s my fuzzy friend?” as he looked about for Jericho, the puppy whose ears were chopped off by an Afghan worker: it was pre-emptive preparation for dog fighting — the ears would just give an enemy dog something to grab onto. “I need someone to make me happy. Jericho, I need some love.” Jericho appeared, leaping about. Kearney picked him up. “Hey, what’s up buddy? You’re a good boy. You smell like dirt.”

Kearney turned to Cunningham and White and said, “Well, he’s the first to admit Aminullah’s bad.” And give or take a little unreliable information shared here and there, that was the Korengal routine.

Fight Time

THE DAY AFTER the meeting with the elders of Yaka China, Yarnell and John could hear insurgents trying to pinpoint where Kearney and his men were. The helicopters had moved us to a ridge line, about 8,400 feet high, straddling the Korengal and Shuriak Valleys. The insurgents used the deep caves, boulders and forests as hideouts and transit routes between Pakistan and Afghanistan. We could hear someone who called himself Obeid saying he’d do whatever the Yaka China elders decided — whether to cooperate with the Americans or take revenge. By evening the elders had apparently reached their verdict. It was fight time.

Kearney, too, had reached a verdict. He would fool the insurgents, feigning a troop extraction when the helicopters came for resupply and pushing out his best guys in small “kill teams.” We heard the insurgents say, “We have wolves on them,” meaning spotters. A hoarse, whispering insurgent had eyes on either Sgt. Larry Rougle and his scouts or on Lieutenant Piosa and his rear guard. There was joking that Rougle and Piosa should dance and see which one the whisperer was spying on. Then nothing happened for almost 24 hours.

Rougle — who was called Wildcat — was on his sixth deployment since Sept. 11, 2001. He was with the first group of Rangers in Afghanistan. Even his rough background was something of a legend; he would tell how he grew up in a South Jersey gang, shot a guy, went to “juvie,” and there taught himself Russian (though he was estranged from his Russian father), taught himself politics, history, zoology. At night out in the woods, he’d tell his fellow scouts, “You know penguins are monogamous?”

I hung out with Piosa and his crew. His white skin, red hair and blue eyes belied the months of constant warfare he and his platoon had scraped through. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon and the soldiers were joking around, heating up Meals Ready to Eat, spitting gobs of Copenhagen and then, in a moment, recess was over. The insurgents were on them. Bullets ricocheted all through the woods. A strange silence fell as everyone scrambled for cover. Three of us crouched behind a skinny pine tree. And the silence broke: curses, shouting.

“Where’s it coming from?”

“Where are my guys?”

“Jones, are you seeing things?”

More bullets. Cracks against the tree trunks. Bits of confusing information were coming in on Piosa’s radio.

“They’re comin’ up the low ground at 2-4” — Sergeant Rice’s call sign.

“One W.I.A. hit in the arm.” Then there was panic and screaming.

“The enemy’s overtaken the hill,” bellowed Pvt. Sterling Dunn from further down the trees.

“2-4 is hit” — that was Rice.

“Wildcat is run over the hill” — that was Rougle.

“Get a team to run up there and take that hill. They pushed Wildcat over the hill!” Piosa shouted, trying over and over to reach Rice and Rougle, but getting no answer. The battalion surgeon, Capt. Joel Dean, and a sergeant sprinted up the hill to get to the wounded. As the first Americans neared Rice and Rougle’s positions they were fired on from those same positions. What was going on?

I followed Piosa through the brush toward the ridge. We came upon Rice and Specialist Carl Vandenberge behind some trees. Vandenberge was drenched in blood. The shot to his arm had hit an artery. Rice was shot in the stomach. A soldier was using the heating chemicals from a Meal Ready to Eat to warm Vandenberge and keep him from going into shock.

Piosa moved on to the hill where the men had been overrun. I saw big blue-eyed John Clinard, a sergeant from North Carolina, falling to pieces. He worshiped Rougle. “Sergeant Rougle is dying. It’s my fault. . . . I’m sorry. . . . I tried to get up the hill. . . .” Sergeant Rougle was lying behind him. Someone had already covered him with a blanket. Only the soles of his boots were visible.

“There’s nothing you could do,” Piosa said, grabbing Clinard’s shoulder. “You got to be the man now. You can do it. I need you to get down to Rice and Vandenberge and get them to the medevac.” Clinard wiped his face, seemed to snap to and headed off through the trees.

Two of Rice’s squad mates appeared, eyes dilated. They couldn’t believe they’d seen, up close, the ghosts they’d been fighting for the last five months. “I saw him in the eyes,” Specialist Marc Solowski said. “He looked at me. I shot him.” He and Specialist Michael Jackson had crawled up the hill twice trying to retake it. Each time the insurgents in “manjammies” whipped them back with machine-gun fire. There was blood on the stones around us. Some thought they saw blood trailing down toward the village of Landigal, where they were sure an insurgent had dashed into a cottage.

“We’re not losing this hill again,” Piosa shouted. “This hill is ours!” He wanted bombs to be dropped immediately.

“There’s women praying in that house,” Dunn shouted back.

I was fixating on Rougle’s black hat, lying by the bloodied rock patch where Dunn was sitting, when Sergeant Stichter, Dunn’s senior, appeared, out of breath and shaking, back from tending to Vandenberge. He needed water. The F-15 known as Dude was en route, the Apaches were chasing men and Kearney — who had bolted down the mountain, throwing grenades in caves — was barking orders. Kearney was badly shaken. He adored Rougle, and he’d broken down when he saw his big old buddy Rice bleeding at the landing zone. Rice comforted him and then lumbered to the helicopter, just asking to talk to his wife before they put him under.

The insurgents had run off with some of Rougle, Rice and Vandenberge’s stuff — ammunition, communication equipment, night vision goggles, machine guns. Kearney wanted the equipment back. He wanted to punish the valley. Stichter had his eyes on a guy pacing a rooftop in Landigal and wanted to blow his head off. Specialist Mitchell Raeon, whose uniform was now soaked in Rougle’s blood, had the guy in his scope but couldn’t range that far. “That’s a female,” Dunn said.

Kearney had identified insurgents who’d dashed into a house and wanted to hit them, but Stichter got back word from Camp Blessing saying the target was too close to other houses. Kearney sent back a reminder — you let some guys get away the other night. It was impossible to know for sure, but Kearney believed they were the guys who had killed Rougle, and now, he said, you’re going to let another group get away?

Someone cursed, then said, “They’re all leaving the house.”

Kearney radioed down to one of his lieutenants at an observation post. “Where are they going?” Yarnell heard the insurgents say they were coming back for the rest of the equipment. And then, with no warning, an F-15 dropped a bomb on Landigal, but off target, or so it seemed. Kearney was furious. He was sure headquarters had intentionally missed the house he had wanted hit.

I noticed Raeon was packing and unpacking Rougle’s things. Rougle’s scouts were in disarray, rudderless, and admitting it. Raeon said he kept seeing in his mind Rougle’s face alert and then dead, switching back and forth; he wanted it to stop.

The next day brought another brief firefight, and Rougle’s scouts rallied swiftly. They said they felt him watching and proud. There were more bomb drops and refusals to drop bombs, and then Becky, everyone’s favorite Apache pilot, swept in. Not only did she offer the comforting voice of a woman seeping right into their ears, but Becky was one of the most aggressive shooters. She flew up and down the canyon walls seeking out and rocketing insurgents. We heard them on the radio again boasting about retreating to safety under fire. They talked about the strike in Landigal that they thought might have killed Azizullah — “a real bad guy,” the radio operator told me.

Kearney was watching a crow flying above us. “Taliban are right,” he said. “Like they said yesterday, follow the birds, they follow the Americans. I wish I was made as strong as haj” — their nickname for insurgents. “They were balls to do what they did. And guess what? I’m not gonna lie. They won.”

Killing Together

AS WE WAITED for dusk to get back to the KOP, we all knew the insurgents were nearby, eyes on Kearney, eyes on the soldiers down in the valley. Even nightfall was no comfort because the full moon was floodlighting the Korengal. I returned to the KOP by helicopter with Kearney, while 1st and 2nd Platoons had to make the long trek back on foot. As soon as 1st Platoon set off, the insurgents struck with a devastating L-shaped ambush. All Kearney could do, back at the KOP, was calm his boys on the radio, get in the medevac and invoke the gods of war. The Apaches, Slasher and Bone dropped bombs all night. The soldiers and insurgents were so close that when Slasher, the AC-130, flew in, the pilot coordinated not with the JTAC but with Sgt. Roberto Sandifer, the platoon’s forward observer, who at that moment was under fire watching one of his guys die.

Around midnight, 1st Platoon filed into the KOP, eyes bulging, drenched in sweat, river water and blood. They were hauling the belongings of Mohammad Tali, a high-value target. Specialist Sal Giunta had killed him.

The next day I climbed up to the KOP and found Specialist Giunta, a quiet Iowan lofted into a heroism he didn’t want. His officers were putting him up for a medal of honor. Giunta told me the story of that night, how they’d barely moved 300 yards before they were blasted. Giunta was fourth in the file when it happened, and he jumped into a ditch. He couldn’t figure out why they were getting hit from where Joshua Brennan and baby-faced Franklin Eckrode should have been leading up ahead. He knew it must be bad, but as he leapt up to check he got whacked with a bullet in his armored chest plate. It threw him down. They were taking fire from three sides. He grabbed some grenades: “I couldn’t throw as far as Sergeant Gallardo. We were looking like retards and I decided to run out in front of the grenades.” He found Eckrode with gunshot wounds. “He was down but moving and trying to fix his SAW” — a heavy machine gun — “so I just kept on running up the trail. It was cloudy. I was running and saw dudes. Plural.”

He couldn’t figure out who they were. Then he realized they were hauling Brennan off through the forest. “I started shooting,” he recalled. “I emptied that magazine. They dropped Brennan.” Giunta scrambled up to Brennan. He was a mess. His lower jaw was shot off. “He was still conscious. He was breathing. He was asking for morphine. I said, ‘You’ll get out and tell your hero stories,’ and he was like, ‘I will, I will.’ ”

They were still taking fire. No one was there to help. Hugo Mendoza, their platoon medic, was back in another ditch, calling: “I’m bleeding out. I’m dying.” Giunta saw Brennan’s eyes go back. His breathing was bad. Giunta got Brennan to squeeze his hand. A medic showed up out of the sky. They prepared Brennan to be hoisted to the medevac in a basket. Soon he would be dead.

As the medevacs flew out, Sergeant Sandifer had talked in air cover: Slasher, the AC-130. The pilot was a woman and, Sandifer later told me, “It was so reassuring for us to hear her voice.” She spotted guys hiding and asked if she was clear to engage. “ ‘You’re cleared hot,’ I told her. And we killed two people together.” But, at this point, the killings were no consolation to Sandifer.

As Giunta said, “The richest, most-trained army got beat by dudes in manjammies and A.K.’s.” His voice cracked. He was not just hurting, he was in a rage. And there was nothing for him to do with it but hold back his tears, and bark — at the Afghans for betraying them, at the Army for betraying them. He didn’t run to the front because he was a hero. He ran up to get to Brennan, his friend. “But they” — he meant the military — “just keep asking for more from us.” His contract would be up in 18 days but he had been stop-lossed and couldn’t go home. Brennan himself was supposed to have gotten out in September. He’d been planning to go back to Wisconsin where his dad lived, play his guitar and become a cop.

Sandifer was questioning why they were sticking it out in the Korengal when the people so clearly hated them. He was haunted by Mendoza’s voice calling to him: “I’m bleeding out. I’m dying.” He worried that the Korengal was going to push them off the deep end. In his imagination it had already happened. One day an Afghan visited their fire base, Sandifer told me. “I was staring at him, on the verge of picking up my weapon to shoot him,” he said. “I know right from wrong, but even if I did shoot him everyone at the fire base would have been O.K. We’re all to the point of ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ” And they still had 10 months to go in the Korengal.

I wondered how Kearney was going to win back his own guys, let alone win over the Korengalis. Just before I left, Kearney told me his biggest struggle would be holding his guys in check. “I’ve got too many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end and kill people,” he said. One of his lieutenants wanted to shoot every Afghan in the face. Kearney shook his head. He wished he could buy 20 goats and let the boys beat and burn them and let loose their rage. He tried to tell them the restraints were a product of their success — that there was an Afghan government with its own rules. “I’m balancing plates on my goddamn nose is what I’m doing,” he said. “All it’s gonna take is for one of these guys to snap.”

But leave the Korengal, as the colonel had suggested, and let some other company deal with it? No way. He’d spent five months learning the valley, getting involved in it; he couldn’t just pull out. At least he would keep the insurgents busy here so the other companies could do hearts and minds unimpeded down along the Pech river. “I lost seven dudes here,” he told me. “It’s too much blood. I don’t want to give this up. This is mine.”

To Be Continued

COLONEL OSTLUND and his officers, and the governor of Kunar and his officials, held an all-day meeting with the Korengali elders. The elders wanted to talk about Rock Avalanche and the devastation that had rained down on them. Colonel Ostlund told them, “If anything should happen to Captain Kearney, pain and misery will knock on many doors in the Korengal.” He gave them 10 days to pick sides — the insurgents or the government. Only then would he consider going ahead with the road project. Their answer came back. They would leave the valley altogether. But they didn’t, and 10 days later insurgents pulled off another ambush of a platoon from the 173rd. The entire patrol went down, either wounded or killed. Kearney told me recently that they had wounded Abu Ikhlas and killed some other bad guys. He said he was pretty sure that Haji Matin, the embittered timber lord, had been killed, too. But the dialogue with the Korengalis was pretty much the same as it had been. Only the winter snows have brought some minor respite to the valley.

Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer, has reported extensively on Afghanistan, most recently in a two-part series for the magazine on the revival of the Taliban.

Correction: February 26, 2008
A front-page picture caption on Saturday with the “This Weekend” summary carried an erroneous credit in some editions. The photograph of a wounded soldier in Afghanistan was by Lynsey Addario for The New York Times, not by Joshua Lott.

February 26, 2008
Pentagon Releases Projections for Forces
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/washingt...agewanted=print

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon is projecting that when the United States troop buildup in Iraq ends in July there will be about 8,000 more troops on the ground than when it began in January 2007, a senior general said Monday.

Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, head of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that by July the troop total was likely to be 140,000. There were 132,000 troops there when President Bush approved orders to send five more Army brigades to Iraq to improve security and avert civil war.

General Ham also announced that the Pentagon believed that United States force levels in Afghanistan would be at 32,000 in late summer, up from about 28,000 now. The current total is the highest since the war began in October 2001, and 3,200 more marines are scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan this spring.

It had been widely expected that some support troops sent to Iraq with the five extra brigades would need to remain, even after July. But until now it was not clear what the number would be.

General Ham stressed that his projected number of 140,000 was subject to change depending on security conditions, but it was the first time the Pentagon had publicly estimated the total.

Asked if the total would be below 132,000 by the time President Bush leaves office next January, General Ham said, “It would be premature to say that.” Among the support forces needed beyond July, General Ham said, are military police officers, logistics troops, aviation forces and a headquarters staff to command combat forces in an area south of Baghdad. The headquarters of the Third Infantry Division was installed there as part of President Bush’s increase in forces in April. It will be replaced this summer by an unspecified unit, General Ham said.

A strategy to save Afghanistan
By Paddy Ashdown

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b358eec6-d9d6-11...00779fd2ac.html

Published: February 13 2008 02:00 | Last updated: February 13 2008 02:00

The great sixth century BC military strategist Sun Tzu wrote: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

With fighting in Afghanistan now entering its seventh year, no agreed international strategy, public support on both sides of the Atlantic crumbling, Nato in disarray and widening insecurity in Afghanistan, defeat is now a real possibility. The consequences for both Afghanistan and its allies would be appalling: global terrorism would have won back its old haven and created a new one over the border in a mortally weakened Pakistan; our domestic security threat would be gravely increased and a new instability would be added to the world's most unstable region.

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, is right - in the face of these consequences, withdrawal is not an option.

But then neither is continuing as we are. So what should we do?

Some say more troops should be sent and they are certainly needed. Some say those Nato members who are not sharing the burden of the fighting should do so - and they should. Some say we need more aid - and we do. We are putting into Afghanistan one 25th the troops and one 50th of the aid per head of population that we put into Kosovo and Bosnia.

Increasing resources in Afghanistan is clearly necessary, but it is not sufficient. Even if we were to provide what was necessary, and even if everyone pulled their weight, we would still find it very difficult to turn the tide, which is now running increasingly strongly against us.

What we lack above all is a strategy that all (including, crucially, the Afghan government and the international military) can buy into. We know well enough what the objective is - to help President Hamid Karzai's government to govern so that we can hand over the tasks we are doing, including the fighting, to them.

However, we have not yet turned this aim into a plan. Neither have we agreed a single person to head up the fractured international effort, with the authority to bash international heads together and provide the support the government of Afghanistan needs to begin winning again.

Here is the plan I assembled over the past four months, as I reluctantly considered what I would do, if I had had to do this job.

Firstly, we (the international community) have to concentrate fiercely on the necessary and not be distracted by the merely desirable. To have too many priorities is to have none.

I fixed on three priorities for the period ahead.

The first is security. We have to convince ordinary Afghans that their government can provide them with better security than the Taliban. I do not mean here just military security - it is human security that matters. That includes electricity, the rule of law, effective governance and the chance of a job in a growing economy.

What is needed to deliver this is a much closer co-operation between the military and the civilian side. It is no good soldiers winning a battle with the Taliban if the civilian reconstruction takes too long to begin to improve the lives of the people afterwards. We British have a tendency to be rather self-congratulatory about our skill at this and a bit sniffy about our US allies' hamfistedness and clumsy use of force. But it is very foolish to underestimate the US military's ability to learn lessons fast, just as they did after Vietnam. US counter-insurgency practice is now as good as the best - and better than any when it comes to getting the civilians in straight after the military (the UK's department for international development please note). We also have to start looking at security from a political angle. Breaking up the Taliban by winning over the moderates is a far better route to success than bombing and body counts.

Our second priority should be governance. Until we have strengthened the mechanisms of Afghan government we cannot ask them to do more: they cannot deliver what their citizens need and neither of us will be able to persuade Afghans that Kabul is a better bet for their future than the Taliban. We should make improving governance the first, and if we can the only, priority for all future aid programmes.

Here, however, we hit a dilemma. According to its constitution, Afghanistan is a centralised state. But on the ground it is a highly decentralised one. Which end of the pipeline of governance should we start with? The answer is start at the bottom and work with the grain of the Afghan tribal structure.

The third priority, linking these two, is strengthening the rule of law, from the judiciary, to the police, to the security structures, to the penal code. Corruption is always endemic in countries emerging from war and Afghanistan, where drugs super-charge the problem, is no exception. Unless and until the rule of law is established there can be no safe democracy, no trusted government, no successful economy and no security for ordinary citizens.

We have not lost in Afghanistan. Indeed the more I looked at it, the more I could see positive things to be built on. But we will lose if we do not start doing things differently. What we need is a strategy, not a disconnected collection of unco-ordinated tactics. What we should not need is a Chinese philosopher from 26 centuries ago to tell us that.

Lord Ashdown was leader of the Liberal Democrats and high representative in Bosnia, 2002-2006. He was asked by the United Nations secretary general to be the UN's special envoy in Afghanistan but was rejected by Mr Karzai

February 22, 2008
NATO Chief Warns of Threats to Afghan Mission
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/world/as...agewanted=print

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Militants using suicide attacks that cause large numbers of casualties in Afghanistan are trying to swing public opinion among NATO nations that have troops here, the alliance’s top official said Thursday.

The bombers “want to influence Afghan public opinion, but at the same time the public opinion in our nations who provide the forces,” Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO’s secretary general, said at a news conference with President Hamid Karzai. “Let’s not give them a ticket to ride.”

Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said that convincing Western legislatures that the situation was not deteriorating was of “key importance.”

He was leading a delegation of the alliance’s North Atlantic Council, consisting of its 26 permanent representatives. They met with local and international officials in Afghanistan.

Some NATO members have been reluctant to provide troops for Afghanistan or have limited the nature of their participation, leading some participating countries to threaten to pull their troops out. Canada’s minority Conservative government, bowing to a major opposition demand, said Thursday that its military mission in southern Afghanistan would end in 2011 and would not be extended, Reuters reported. Canada has 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.

Two suicide bombings this week left more than 140 people dead in the south, most of them civilians.

The Afghan Defense Ministry said Thursday that Afghan and American-led coalition troops battled for five hours on Wednesday with militants north of Musa Qala, where Taliban militants were in control for much of 2007 before Afghan, American and British troops took the southern town and surrounding areas in Helmand Province in December.

The Defense Ministry said 30 people suspected of being Taliban fighters were killed in the operation, during which coalition aircraft bombed militant hide-outs. The coalition, reporting no casualty figures, said 11 militants were detained in Wednesday’s operation, and 1,000 pounds of heroin and an arms cache were seized.

Helmand is the world’s largest opium-producing region, and officials estimate that up to 40 percent of proceeds from the country’s drug trade are used to finance the insurgency.

The southern region is also where the insurgency is most active, and NATO commanders have asked for more combat troops for the area. NATO’s International Security Assistance Forces now has 50,000 troops.

Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said that more troops would be deployed but did not say how many or where they would go.

NATO also lags in efforts to provide enough military trainers to mentor the fledgling Afghan National Army, Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said, calling it a “mission of necessity.”

The United States, which has 28,000 service members in the country — both in the NATO-led mission and as part of a separate American-led counterterrorism coalition — is sending 3,200 more marines to Afghanistan in April, most of whom are expected to be stationed in Kandahar during their seven-month tour.

Shocking Stories About the Forgotten War in Afghanistan
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on February 26, 2008, Printed on February 26, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/77500/

They say journalists provide the first draft of history. With the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, that draft led to an almost universal consensus, at least among Americans, that the attack was a justifiable act of self-defense. The Afghanistan action is commonly viewed as a "clean" conflict as well -- a war prosecuted with minimal loss of life, and one that didn't bring the kind of international opprobrium onto the United States that the invasion of Iraq would lead to a year later.

Those views are also held by many Americans who are critical of the excesses of the Bush administration's "War on Terror." But there's a disconnect there. Everything that followed -- secret detentions, torture, the invasion of Iraq, the assault on domestic dissent -- flowed inevitably from the failure to challenge Bush's claim that an act of terror required a military response. The United States has a rich history of abandoning its purported liberal values during times of war, and it was our acceptance of Bush's war narrative that led to the abuses that have shattered America's moral standing before the world.

In his book, The Guantánamo Files, historian and journalist Andy Worthington offers a much-needed corrective to the draft of the Afghanistan conflict that most Americans saw on their nightly newscasts. Worthington is the first to detail the histories of all 774 prisoners who have passed through the Bush administration's "legal black hole" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But his history starts in Afghanistan, and makes it abundantly clear that the road to Guantánamo -- not to mention Abu Ghraib -- began in places like Kandahar.

AlterNet recently asked Worthington what that road looked like at its point of origin.

Joshua Holland: I think most Americans believe that we went into Afghanistan to rout anti-American or anti-Western "jihadi," but your book captures the fact that the U.S. entered on one side of a long-standing civil war that had nothing to do with any sort of "clash of civilizations" between East and West. Can you give us some sense of what that conflict was about?

Andy Worthington: Sure, it's a very good question, actually. Briefly, the roots of the conflict lie in the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, when the United States, via Pakistani intermediaries, and the Saudis vied to fund the mujahideen -- Afghan warlords and their soldiers, backed up by a rather smaller number of Arab recruits.

At the end of the 1980s, when the Soviet Union withdrew, the country was plunged into a civil war, as the various warlords, pumped up with billions of dollars of U.S. and Saudi aid, fought each other to gain control of the country. Tens of thousands of civilians died, and crime and human rights abuses were rife.

Largely in response to this lawlessness, the Taliban -- initially a group of ultraorthodox religious students from the south of the country -- rose up to cleanse the country by creating a pure Islamic state. Their project, too, was soon derailed by brutality and by a religious fundamentalism that shocked the West, but it was the struggle between the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance that attracted thousands of foreign foot soldiers to Afghanistan in the 1990s, summoned by fatwas issued by radical sheikhs in their homelands, which required them to help the Taliban in their struggle against the Northern Alliance.

Osama Bin Laden, who had been living in Saudi Arabia and Sudan in the post-Soviet period, returned to Afghanistan in 1996 and became involved in funding military training camps and building up his plans for a global, anti-American jihad, but -- although there was some overlap between Al Qaeda and parts of the Taliban leadership -- the vast majority of the recruits, as I've indicated, were involved not in a grand "clash of civilizations" but in a provincial inter-Muslim civil war.

Holland: That's an important point. There's a common belief that a seamless integration existed between the Taliban and Bin Laden's group, and that integration justified our attacking Afghanistan, a nation-state, in "self-defense." But in reality, the Taliban was busy fighting this inter-Muslim civil war and had little or no role in Al Qaeda. Let's go a bit further: just how much overlap was there?

Worthington: According to a senior intelligence official interviewed by the journalist David Rose in 2004, the overlap was very small. Rose was told, "In 1996 it was nonexistent, and by 2001, no more than 50 people." Now this official was referring to an overlap of fairly high-level people in both organizations, and certain commentators have pointed out that Al Qaeda's "Arab Brigade" of around 500 soldiers contributed to the Taliban's military strength, but, to return to what we discussed before, this was in the context of an inter-Muslim civil war, and not a war against the United States.

There were certainly major divisions within the Taliban leadership regarding Bin Laden, and even Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, was apparently unimpressed by Bin Laden in the years after his return to Afghanistan. In 1998, Omar had even been planning to betray Bin Laden to the Saudis, but when Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the U.S. retaliated by launching cruise missile attacks on training camps in Afghanistan, Omar drew closer to Bin laden. Even so, the Taliban offered to hand over Bin laden after 9/11 if proof was offered of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

Holland: They were so close in 1998 -- the deal had been done, and two jets carrying Saudi Prince Turki and a group of Saudi commandos had actually landed in Afghanistan and were waiting to pick up Bin Laden when the deal soured.

Worthington: That's right. And another clear sign of the lies involved in the "seamless integration" you refer to happened on Oct. 7, 2001, the first night of "Operation Enduring Freedom," when the U.S. military announced that it had bombed 23 Al Qaeda training camps. As I mention in the book, of the dozens of training camps established in Afghanistan from the 1980s onwards, most were funded by Pakistan and wealthy donors in the Gulf countries. Some were run by Afghan warlords, others by Pakistani groups and others by militant groups from other countries. Although bin Laden had a few camps of his own, it was inappropriate to describe all the training camps in Afghanistan as "Al Qaeda camps."

Holland: OK, let me go back briefly to an earlier point. Supporters of Bush's global network of "black" prisons say that those who ended up in them were "unlawful combatants." And you said that a lot of people from around the Muslim world were drawn to serve as foot soldiers in Afghanistan's civil war, but in the book, you also make it clear that many were not even foot soldiers -- not combatants at all -- but religious students, aid workers and other adventurous young people, and many of them would later get caught up in the chaos that followed the invasion and ended up at Gitmo.

Worthington: Yes, that's right. I'd say that between 70 and 100 of the foreign -- non-Afghan -- detainees had traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid to the Afghan people, to teach or study the Koran, as economic migrants, or even because they were curious about the "pure Islamic state" that, in some quarters, the Taliban was alleged to have established. A similar number were captured in Pakistan. Charity workers were captured near the border, where they had traveled to provide assistance at refugee camps, and others -- including missionaries, entrepreneurs, economic migrants, refugees and students -- were actually captured elsewhere in Pakistan, in towns and cities far from the "battlefields" of Afghanistan.

And then, of course, there are the Afghan detainees, who made up over a quarter of Guantánamo's total population. Many of these were unwilling conscripts, who were forced to serve the Taliban, and most of the rest were picked up either on the basis of false intelligence -- because the U.S. forces did not know who to trust -- or were handed over by their rivals, in business or in politics, who told false stories to the Americans.

Holland: And what was the process by which the U.S. military sorted out one from the other -- how did they distinguish between "enemy combatants" and the poor suckers that were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Worthington: There was no process. In all previous wars, the U.S. military has followed the Geneva Conventions, and, in accordance with Article 5 of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, has held battlefield tribunals to separate the wheat from the chaff -- or the fighters from the farmers. In the first Gulf War, for example, the military held 1,196 battlefield tribunals, and nearly three-quarters of the prisoners were subsequently released.

In Afghanistan, however, not only were there no battlefield tribunals, but Chris Mackey, who worked as a senior interrogator in the prisons at the airbases in Kandahar and Bagram, where the Guantánamo prisoners were processed, noted in his book The Interrogators that every single Arab who ended up in U.S. custody was sent to Guantánamo on the orders of senior figures in the military and the intelligence services, who received the lists of prisoners at their base in Kuwait.

Although only Afghans with "considerable intelligence value" were supposed to be sent to Guantánamo, Mackey also made it clear that it was not until June 2002, when around 600 detainees were already in Guantánamo, that those in charge on the ground in Afghanistan came up with a category of temporary prisoner -- "persons under U.S. control" -- who could be held for 14 days without being assigned a number that entered the system overseen by military officials in Kuwait. It was the only way that they could deal with at least some of the many innocent Afghans who ended up in their custody.

Holland: A few of the stories you tell in the book really drive these points home, so I'd like to just ask you to briefly tell us the stories of a couple of detainees. According to the U.S. military, there were three juveniles under 16 years of age who were held at Guantánamo. Choose any of the three, and tell us how he ended up at Gitmo.

Worthington: Well, first of all, there were actually far more than three detainees who were under 16 years of age, and all of these detainees should have counted as juveniles -- and been treated accordingly -- in any civilized society.

The three you're talking about, however, are three Afghan boys who were aged 12, 13 and 14 at the time of their capture. Two were captured in a raid on the compound of a minor Afghan warlord named Samoud, whose many enemies seem to have included the Taliban, and the other -- 14-year-old Mohammed Ismael Agha -- was actually delivered to U.S. forces by the Taliban. He'd been looking for work with a friend and had been obliged to spend the night at a Taliban outpost. In the morning, the Taliban soldiers asked them to join them, and when they refused, they were delivered to the nearest U.S. base.

Holland: The military says that efforts were made to provide "for their special physical and emotional care," that they were housed "in a separate detention facility modified to meet the special needs of juveniles" and "were not restricted in the same manner as adult detainees." Is that what you found?

Worthington: Up to a point, yes. These three were, at some point, housed separately in a block called Camp Iguana, and they were released in January 2004, although they should have been released much earlier. They were the lucky ones, however. To give just one example, Agha's companion, Abdul Qudus, who was also 14 years old, was not released until 2005 or 2006, and there is no evidence that he -- or any of the other juveniles -- was held separately from the rest of the adult population, or, for that matter, treated any differently.

The most notorious case of a juvenile in Guantánamo is, of course, the Canadian Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was captured after a firefight in July 2002, in which he allegedly killed a U.S. soldier. Khadr was treated appallingly in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, and is currently on trial in one of the administration's contentious military commissions, in which it has recently been revealed that he might not even have been responsible for the death of the U.S. soldier in the first place.

Holland: Who is Mohammed Sadiq?

Worthington: Mohammed Sadiq was Guantánamo's oldest prisoner. 88 years old at the time of his capture, Sadiq was apparently seized because his nephew had worked for the Taliban. U.S. forces bombed his house, took all his belongings and delivered him to the prison at Kandahar airbase. He was one of the first detainees to be released, in October 2002, but the fact that he was sent to Guantánamo at all was a disgrace, and it was reported, after his release, that he was unable to come to terms with what had happened to him.

Holland: And, finally, tell me who Abdul Razeq was?

Worthington: Abdul Razeq was a severely disturbed schizophrenic who was kept isolated in Kandahar, because, amongst other things, he had a tendency to eat his own excrement. In a dehumanizing touch, the soldiers referred to all the detainees as "Bob," and Razeq was known as "Crazy Bob." He too was sent to Guantánamo, but was flown back to Afghanistan in May 2002. Chris Mackey noted that he arrived "strapped down in the center of the plane like Hannibal Lecter." He was then placed in a maximum-security cell in a hospital, where a journalist interviewed him. He was so disturbed that he described the prison at Kandahar as a "hotel" and said that the Americans had taken him to Guantánamo "to treat my mental problems."

Holland: And the U.S. thought these people were …

Worthington: "Enemy combatants." That's how it worked. Everyone who ended up in U.S. custody was an "enemy combatant." Essentially, when you look at the lack of screening in Afghanistan and the failures of the tribunal process that took place in Guantánamo from 2004 onwards -- which Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, who worked on them, described in an explosive statement last year as reliant upon generalized and often generic "evidence" that had nothing to do with the detainees in question, and was designed merely to rubber-stamp their designation as "enemy combatants" -- you realize that, in connection with the "War on Terror," the presumption of innocence has been done away with completely.

For the first four and a half years after 9/11, every prisoner was effectively regarded as guilty until proved guilty. After the tribunals, 38 detainees were cleared for release -- although the administration, denying the concepts of innocence and wrongful arrest, referred to them as "no longer enemy combatants" -- and many more have been cleared in the review boards that have taken place every year since then, but for the 281 detainees who remain, it's apparent that the "evidence" against them has never really been tested at all.

Holland: As I was reading the book, it struck me that not only did the American public -- not to mention the military and intelligence establishments -- have a totally false view of who the "enemy" was, but also that there was a widespread belief that the Northern Alliance were the "good guys." I didn't really sense any "good guys" in your book -- who were we allying ourselves with?

Worthington: The short answer is that, in an attempt not to get bogged down like the Soviet Union did, the U.S. invasion involved just a few hundred Special Forces operatives who hooked up with various Northern Alliance leaders in northern Afghanistan and supported them with money, arms and air power.

There were some principled military commanders in the Northern Alliance -- not least Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Alliance's charismatic leader, who was killed by Al Qaeda assassins just two days before 9/11 -- but even Massoud's men had been accused of atrocities over the years, and what we should perhaps consider is that, at the base of everything, Afghanistan is a disproportionately well-armed country that has been psychologically brutalized by what is now nearly 30 years of war.

Nevertheless, the invasion led to some horrific events, in which the U.S. military was at least partly complicit. In November 2001, after the surrender of the city of Kunduz, Gen. Rashid Dostum, one of the Alliance leaders, slaughtered hundreds, if not thousands of native and foreign Taliban fighters by suffocating them in container trucks en route to his prison at Sheberghan (death by container being a fairly recent innovation that was practiced by both sides). There appears to be evidence that U.S. forces were not unduly put out by this turn of events, and that, moreover, they were involved in the particularly brutal treatment of some of the survivors at Dostum's prison.

In one sense, of course, all of this could be regarded as part and parcel of the horrific reality of warfare, but the U.S. record is no better in the south of the country, where, in an attempt to foster support in the Taliban's Pashtun heartlands, U.S. forces entered into numerous dubious deals with various untrustworthy warlords, which, in turn, led to many innocent Afghans being sent to Guantánamo.

Holland: Now, in the book you describe a scene of total chaos in the aftermath of the invasion, and one of the common claims among so many of the detainees who would end up at Gitmo was that they had been sold to U.S. troops by these same allies -- or tribal leaders or Taliban units or whoever encountered them -- for as much as $5,000 per head. Essentially, there were real financial incentives for claiming that some unlucky foot soldier or Koranic student was a high-level Al Qaeda operative.

Worthington: Oh, absolutely. The military's psyops teams came up with over a hundred different leaflets and dropped millions of them all over Afghanistan. Most of them fruitlessly offered rewards of $25 million for the capture of Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri and Mullah Omar, but one in particular featured the following message: "You can receive millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch Al Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life -- pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people."

And in Pakistan, the situation was arguably even more corrupt. In his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, President Musharraf boasted that, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects (including many transferred to Guantánamo), "We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars."

Holland: And those that were turned over to the U.S. by various factions weren't lucky. I think most people would be shocked at how abusive and violent U.S. troops were towards the prisoners they held in Afghanistan.

Worthington: I think you're right to raise that point, because Kandahar and Bagram were really the front line in the "War on Terror," where conditions were, I think it would be fair to say, primitive, brutal and terrifying. In the early months, prisoners were beaten, humiliated and prevented from speaking to one another. The worst abuses, however, happened in Bagram from July 2002 onwards. That was when at least two prisoners were murdered -- including one, an innocent taxi driver named Dilawar, who is featured in my book and is also the focus of Alex Gibney's excellent documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

And there were even worse prisons in Afghanistan -- a number of secret, CIA-run prisons (to this day no one knows exactly how many), including two near Kabul. The "Dark Prison" was like a medieval torture dungeon, but with 24-hour music and noise, and the other was the "Salt Pit." Dozens of Guantánamo detainees passed through these facilities, as well as other "ghost prisoners" who have subsequently disappeared.

Holland: And that was a model that was then taken to Abu Ghraib, as well as Gitmo?

Worthington: Sadly, yes. The team responsible for the worst violence at Bagram -- at the time of the murders -- was actually transferred to Abu Ghraib, and much of the institutionalized violence at Guantánamo was inspired by the Afghan prisons. It's also worth noting, however, what happened at Guantánamo in the fall of 2002. The administration was disappointed by the quality of the intelligence obtained from the detainees and decided that it was because they had been trained by Al Qaeda to resist interrogation, whereas in fact they were mostly innocent men or foot soldiers and had no worthwhile intelligence to give. In an attempt to "break" the detainees, the Pentagon authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," including prolonged solitary confinement, forced nudity, the use of extreme heat and cold, sexual humiliation and the prolonged use of painful stress positions. The commander at the time was Geoffrey Miller, and he was later sent to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" the Iraqi operations, with the results that horrified the world when the scandal broke in April 2004.

Holland: Let me shift gears here for a moment. Bush's apologists often excuse the kinds of abuses you describe by claiming that the prisoners held in Gitmo were "captured on the field of battle." Was that always the case?

Worthington: No, not at all. The overwhelming majority were not captured on any kind of battlefield at all and, as an analysis of Pentagon documents by the Seton Hall Law School showed, were not even captured by U.S. forces. Eighty-six percent were captured by the Americans' allies, who then handed them over, or sold them, as discussed above. It's also worth noting that several dozen detainees were captured in 17 other countries, including Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Egypt, the Gambia, Georgia, Indonesia, Iran, Mauritania, Thailand and Zambia.

After 9/11, many countries were willing to cooperate with the U.S. in an attempt to track down potential terrorists, but it's also important to understand that the administration put enormous pressure on these countries. For example, this is what happened to the six Algerian-born Bosnians who are still in Guantánamo. The U.S. government accused them of planning to blow up the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. The Bosnians then imprisoned them and investigated them for three months but found no incriminating evidence whatsoever. As soon as they were released, however, they were seized by U.S. agents and taken to Guantánamo. The Bosnians were powerless to prevent it.

Holland: I think we've come to the heart of your book. The administration says that those housed in Gitmo are "the worst of the worst." But you claim that of the nearly 800 human beings who the U.S. captured or purchased, held incognito without any legal rights, regularly beat and on a few occasions allegedly murdered, only about 40 were die-hard anti-U.S. terrorists. How do you arrive at that? Wouldn't real terrorists claim that they were just innocents caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Worthington: My claim is based firstly on statements made by dozens of high-level military and intelligence sources cited by the New York Times in June 2004, when 749 detainees had been held at Guantánamo. These officials said that none of the prisoners "ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda," and "only a relative handful -- some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen -- were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner workings."

Ten more detainees were transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2004 -- although I have no doubt that they were not all terrorists -- and another 14 "high-value" detainees -- including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four of the other men charged recently in connection with the 9/11 attacks -- were transferred in September 2006.

Forty might therefore be too low a figure, but I'm confident that it's no more than 50. As a percentage of Guantánamo's total population, that's just 6 percent, which, as a success rate, is both disappointing and disgraceful.

Holland: Finally, you argue that all of these policies were dictated at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Can you explain briefly what makes you think that?

Worthington: Sure. Dick Cheney and his advisors -- especially David Addington, his legal counsel (and now chief of staff) -- came up with the military order in November 2001 that authorized the president to capture anyone he regarded as a terrorist anywhere in the world, declare them an "enemy combatant" and hold them without charge or trial. That same document also established the military commissions. Then Cheney and his cabal persuaded the president to accept that the prisoners were not protected by the Geneva Conventions and in August 2002's "Torture Memo" sought to establish that interrogations constituted torture only if the pain endured was "of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." This in turn encouraged the widespread use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which, at Guantánamo, were explicitly approved by Donald Rumsfeld.

There are many fine, principled Americans who attempted to resist these innovations, or spoke out against them, but the most insightful quote I found about the implications of these policies came from Milton Bearden, a former CIA bureau chief, who told David Rose, "It doesn't matter what distribution that memo had or how tightly it was controlled. That kind of thinking will permeate the system by word of mouth. Anyone who suggests that this and other official memos on this subject didn't have an impact doesn't know how these things work on the ground."

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.