Afghan duty offers ultimate in unconventional warfare

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-04-11-afghan-cover_x.htm#>

USA Today


Afghan duty offers ultimate in unconventional warfare
 By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
ORUZGAN, Afghanistan - Afghan fighters bristling with rocket launchers and
machine guns pour into a government compound here to try to intimidate a
small team of U.S. Special Forces soldiers in their midst. (Related
graphic: A-Team in Afghanistan)

Capt. Paul Toolan and District Chief Ubai Dullah walk off together after
averting a showdown in Oruzgan.

By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

The Green Berets, a long way from home and two days from their base, want
to destroy 10 tons of weapons found in bunkers under the hilltop
headquarters of the fighters' leader, a district chief here. The atmosphere
is suddenly hostile.

"If things go sour," Special Forces Capt. Paul Toolan tells a two-man
sniper crew he quickly orders into position on a rooftop, "go for the head
of the food chain." He nods at the white-turbaned district chief standing
nervously a few feet away.

 In a nation raw from two decades of fighting, with remnants of the
al-Qaeda terrorist network still a menace and with Osama bin Laden having
eluded capture for 2 1/2 years, the front lines of war emerge and vanish
like storm clouds. Elite teams of Special Forces soldiers see the
counterinsurgency in Afghanistan as their classic fight. Many concede that
they relish serving here.

For a few recent weeks, Toolan and his 10-member team allowed rare and
intimate access into their operations in the southern Afghan province of
Oruzgan.

They momentarily let slip the Special Forces mystique of super-soldiers in
beards and baseball caps who conduct secret missions and are known only by
their first names.

 They emerge as soldiers who carry their own set of contradictions and
complexities: proud and embarrassed by the public perception of them as
elite soldiers; both sympathetic toward and contemptuous of the Afghans;
confident that this war is theirs to win, even if victory is years away.

Finding bin Laden is unlikely here because the terrorist leader is believed
to be hiding along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan. Their job is
to destroy Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, capture or kill fugitives such as
Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, and bring security to the
still-untamed Afghan countryside.

 In March, two GIs with the 10th Mountain Division were killed during a
U.S. raid in Miam Do, a village in Oruzgan province. To operate in this
region, Toolan and his men must coordinate with local leaders and militia,
whose loyalties are sometimes unclear.

The Green Berets exercise a certain independence in their actions.

Many say this is the best time to serve in the Special Forces since
Vietnam. They are the only American faces anybody ever sees in the vast,
rugged stretches of formidable terrain about 200 miles from Kabul, the
Afghan capital. Unshaven in their Oakley sunglasses, with 15-shot Beretta
pistols strapped to their hips, they stalk a province the size of Indiana,
gunslingers in an Asian frontier.

But they also are health care providers, diplomats, combat instructors,
roadside mechanics and crisis managers. In the course of one afternoon,
Toolan will take steps aimed at killing District Chief Ubai Dullah and his
armed minions for their belligerence. Then, after feverish talks, he and
Dullah will walk arm-in-arm across the chief's compound in the local custom
of male bonding, as tears well up in Dullah's eyes.

"Let's discount for a moment my 5 1/2-month-old son, my wife, paved roads
and a soft bed," says Toolan, a Rhode Islander with a razor-sharp wit.
"Without all that, you can never beat this. It's got everything. It's got
every single aspect of unconventional warfare you could ever possibly
imagine."

Muck and grease

 Like everyone else in this arid wasteland, the Special Forces troops find
day-to-day conditions harsh. They suffer diarrhea from the local cuisine.
Their faces cake with muck from hours bouncing atop a Humvee. Their hands
blacken with grease as they repair broken-down U.S. vehicles.

There's nothing elite about events that go wrong. For 45 minutes in a
narrow mountain pass, Green Berets hold up frustrated local drivers because
a four-wheeled Army ATV gets a clogged fuel pipe.

A water tank on an Afghan National Army truck breaks loose in the middle of
a Green Beret convoy.

And when American and Afghan troops set up a human chain to load captured
ammunition, they wind up standing in a field of human excrement that had
been used as an open privy by the local militia.

"Yeah, that was really glamorous," Toolan says later.

Nor are they immune from troubles at home.

 The team sergeant, Kevin Patrick, frets over a 6-month-old daughter in the
USA who is without her parents. He is in Afghanistan, and his wife, a
civilian defense analyst, has been assigned to duty in Iraq. A woman caring
for the infant e-mails photos. "She's starting to crawl," Patrick, 38,
reports with a mixture of joy and regret.

Staff Sgt. Jaison Eggleston, 29, a barrel-chested soldier who can
bench-press 400 pounds and has a fondness for SpongeBob SquarePants
T-shirts, is a victim of credit fraud at home. His wife, Sonya, seven
months' pregnant, scrambles to salvage their family finances. But
bureaucrats demand to speak with a husband who is away at war. "I am
helpless," says her husband. "What I need is a lawyer."

A team medic, Sgt. 1st Class Don Grambusch, 27, is a single parent who uses
a satellite connection and a speakerphone to bond with his 5-year-old son.
The boy is being cared for by the soldier's sister. "Basically, my private
life back there is a mess," Grambusch says. "But work (here) seems to be
excellent."

Because they work roughly five months on and five months off overseas,
these Green Berets spend as much time with each other as they do with wives
or girlfriends. They heckle one other relentlessly but take pride in their
close association.

"They're not supermen," says Sgt. 1st Class Larry Hawks, a senior team
member. "They're just guys who won't quit."

Even though he's the commander, Toolan is just "Paul" to the men. He likes
to fire war-movie lines at each of them for a rote reply. From Apocalypse
Now: "Who's the commanding officer here?" Response: "Ain't you?" From
Platoon: "Don't drink that ... you're gonna get malaria." Response: "I hope
so."

There is an insularity created by their isolation. "We are, in every sense
of the word, on our own out here," Toolan says.

Building an Afghan force

 Their mission to this town is an important first for Oruzgan province,
home to nearly a million Afghans and the area where Omar, the Taliban
leader, was raised. They are introducing Afghan soldiers to this backwater
region.

 For the past two years, coalition forces in Afghanistan have fashioned
from ragtag fighters a multiethnic Afghan force of 9,000. The hope is that
one day a 70,000-man Afghan National Army (ANA) will be able to tame a
nation steeped in conflict.

Some of the veteran Green Berets on Toolan's team helped train the new
soldiers. Grambusch personally designed an Afghan National Army
marksmanship badge. "You kind of feel proud - like, 'Hey, I helped build
this,' " he says.

The mission begins with a platoon of Afghan soldiers. They are taken across
rollicking mountain roads from the Special Forces base near the village of
Deh Rawood to the provincial capital in Tarin Kowt to meet Gov. Jan
Mohammad, an appointee of President Hamid Karzai.

In the convoy are Toolan and eight other team members, two dozen ANA
troops, a U.S. Marine advising the Afghans, an Air Force combat air
controller, two journalists and three other U.S. soldiers supporting the
operation.

A tenth member of Toolan's team, Chief Warrant Officer Bruce Defeyter, is
back at a U.S. military installation in Kandahar providing logistical
support.

So arduous is the Afghan landscape that it takes another full day from
Tarin Kowt to reach Oruzgan. Everywhere they go, the reception is positive.
The ANA soldiers, in their green military fatigues and Russian-style
helmets, are received with enthusiasm.

"It's the first evidence of the central government that we have seen," says
Majeed Akhand, a money changer in Deh Rawood.

Children ogle the Afghan soldiers and tug at their uniforms. Adults crowd
around in curiosity and shake hands with the officers.

For Toolan, the Afghan troops are much more than a symbolic gesture. A
seasoned Afghan fighting force could help U.S. forces navigate the
crosscurrents of tribal rivalry, opium drug dealing and the still-lethal
threat of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. "They'll be able to open up doors
that we couldn't," Toolan says.

That's exactly what happens here. An Afghan lieutenant, Mohammed Taher,
finds the cache of weapons under the district headquarters by poking around
and asking questions.

 The haul includes heavy machine gun ammo, land mines, hundreds of rockets
and a thousand mortar shells. There are even 6-foot-long missiles. Special
Forces teams had visited the compound before but were unaware of what was
below.

"I asked the district chief," Taher says of how he found the weapons. "He
told me they were from Taliban time." The Taliban regime controlled much of
Afghanistan from 1996 until it was driven out of Kabul by U.S.-led forces,
including northern rebels, in December 2001.

Confrontation

 Toolan and Taher have no reason to believe that Dullah, the district
chief, has Taliban sympathies.

He has close ties to the Karzai-appointed governor. But a tradition of
harboring heavy weapons, emblematic here of power and survival, is a tough
habit to break. But if security is ever to come to Afghanistan, Toolan
says, weapons such as these can only be in the hands of the central
government.

 He decides that the stuff has to be collected and destroyed.

Dullah balks and trots out armed fighters to intimidate the GIs. Toolan
sends the sniper team to the district headquarters roof.

 Dullah calls the governor on a satellite phone. Both leaders threaten to
quit their posts if weapons are taken. Toolan, wearing no helmet or body
armor as a measured counter-response to the growing tension, calls their
bluff. Through an interpreter, he tells them: OK, go.

 He directs the Air Force combat controller to summon air support by radio.
In 20 minutes, a B-1 bomber that was on close standby is crisscrossing the
valley.

"Nothing like flexing a couple billions dollars' worth of technology,"
Eggleston says with a grin as the supersonic jet roars overhead. Hawks
chimes in: "That's going to change their politics."

 By phone, the governor relents: It's all a misunderstanding. Dullah and
his men turn docile.

 The Green Berets agree to leave a few boxes of machine gun ammo and mortar
rounds for the local police. The rest goes. Locals look on gravely as the
weapons disappear into rented trucks, to be carted away and blown up. But
by the end of the day, Dullah, seemingly relieved to have the burden of
this confrontation lifted, is embracing Toolan and holding his hand. When
they say their farewells, Dullah has tears in his eyes.

 The episode highlights an American frustration with Afghanistan's culture
of violence that has, in the view of many Special Forces soldiers, left the
country chaotic and backward.

 The night before the standoff, Americans and Afghans shared dinner on the
floor of the district chief's meeting room. Shoes and sandals were left
outside by custom. A wood-fired tin furnace warded off the mountain chill.
Platters of rice, flatbread and bowls filled with freshly slaughtered lamb
- the hunks of roasted mutton floating in grease - were devoured off mats
on the floor.

At one point, a young Afghan man, carrying apples into the room in his
shirt, stumbles and spills them on the floor.

Toolan can't resist.

"First day?" he wisecracks. The ensuing laughter causes Dullah to ask for a
translation. When he hears Toolan's joke in Pashto, he bursts out laughing,
all the more pleased because the man who spilled the apples is one of his
in-laws.

It is a moment that cuts through two cultures.

Later, Dullah goes to bed, and Toolan reflects on his conflicted feelings.
"The Special Forces experience in Afghanistan is the ultimate emotional
dichotomy," he says.

 "On the one hand, in your mind, you hold these people in contempt for the
situation they have created for their country and themselves. And on the
other hand, in your heart, you have sympathy for them, because you know
that it's not their fault."

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'