Independent (London) - February 5, 2003
The near collapse of peace in this savage land is a narrative erased from the mind of Americans
[by Robert Fisk]
There's one sure bet about the statement to be made to the UN Security Council today by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell -- or by General Colin Powell as he has now been mysteriously reassigned by the American press: he won't be talking about Afghanistan.
For since the Afghan war is the "successful" role model for America's forthcoming imperial adventure across the Middle East, the near-collapse of peace in this savage land and the steady erosion of US forces in Afghanistan -- the nightly attacks on American and other international troops, the anarchy in the cities outside Kabul, the warlordism and drug trafficking and steadily increasing toll of murders -- -- are unmentionables, a narrative constantly erased from the consciousness of Americans who are now sending their young men and women by the tens of thousands to stage another "success" story.
This article is written in President George Bush's home state of Texas, where the flags fly at half-staff for the Columbia crew, where the dispatch to the Middle East of further troops of the 108th Air Defence Artillery Brigade from Fort Bliss and the imminent deployment from Holloman Air Force Base in neighbouring New Mexico of undisclosed numbers of F-117 Nighthawk stealth bombers earned a mere 78-word down-page inside "nib" report in the local Austin newspaper.
Only in New York and Washington do the neo-conservative pundits suggest -- obscenely -- that the death of the Columbia crew may well have heightened America's resolve and "unity" to support the Bush adventure in Iraq. A few months ago, we would still have been asked to believe that the post-war "success" in Afghanistan augured well for the post-war success in Iraq.
So let's break through the curtain for a while and peer into the fastness of the land that both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair promised not to forget. Hands up those who know that al-Qa'ida has a radio station operating inside Afghanistan which calls for a holy war against America? It's true. Hands up again anyone who can guess how many of the daily weapons caches discovered by US troops in the country have been brought into Afghanistan since America's "successful" war? Answer: up to 25 per cent.
Have any US troops retreated from their positions along the Afghan-Pakistan border? None, you may say. And you would be wrong. At least five positions, according to Pakistani sources on the other side of the frontier, only one of which has been admitted by US forces. On 11 December, US troops abandoned their military outpost at Lwara after nightly rocket attacks which destroyed several American military vehicles. Their Afghan allies were driven out only days later and al-Qa'ida fighters then stormed the US compound and burnt it to the ground.
It's a sign of just how seriously America's mission in Afghanistan is collapsing that the majestically conservative Wall Street Journal -- normally a beacon of imperial and Israeli policy in the Middle East and South-west Asia -- has devoted a long and intriguing article to the American retreat, though of course that's not what the paper calls it.
"Soldiers still confront an invisible enemy,'' is the title of Marc Kaufman's first-class investigation, a headline almost identical to one which appeared over a Fisk story a year or so after Russia's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979-80. The soldiers in my dispatch, of course, were Russian. Indeed, just as I recall the Soviet officer who told us all at Bagram air base that the "mujahedin terrorism remnants" were all that was left of the West's conspiracy against peace-loving (and Communist) Afghans, so I observed the American spokesmen -- yes, at the very same Bagram air base -- who today cheerfully assert that al-Qa'ida "remnants" are all that are left of Bin Laden's legions.
Training camps have been set up inside Afghanistan again, not -- as the Americans think -- by the recalcitrant forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's anti-American Afghans, but by Arabs. The latest battle between US forces and enemy "remnants" near Spin Boldak in Kandahar province involved further Arab fighters, as my colleague Phil Reeves reported. Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami forces have been "forging ties" with al-Qa'ida and the Taliban; which is exactly what the mujahedin "terrorist remnants" did among themselves in the winter of 1980, a year after the Soviet invasion.
An American killed by a newly placed landmine in Khost; 16 civilians blown up by another newly placed mine outside Kandahar; grenades tossed at Americans or international troops in Kabul; further reports of rape and female classroom burnings in the north of Afghanistan -- all these events are now acquiring the stale status of yesterday's war.
So be sure that Colin Powell will not be boasting to the Security Council today of America's success in the intelligence war in Afghanistan. It's one thing to claim that satellite pictures show chemicals being transported around Iraq, or that telephone intercepts prove Iraqi scientists are still at their dirty work; quite another to explain how all the "communications chatter" intercepts which the US supposedly picked up in Afghanistan proved nothing. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, you can quote Basil Fawlty: "Whatever you do, don't mention the war."
---
Wall Street Journal - January 24, 2003
Soldiers Still Confront An Invisible Enemy
By MARC KAUFMAN THE WASHINGTON POST
SHKIN, AFGHANISTAN -- Mike walked down from the high, mud-walled fortress that he commands and described his situation soberly.
"This is an extremely hostile environment," said Mike, who, like all U.S. special forces soldiers, would not give his last name. He turned toward the east and the Pakistani border. "That's where the rockets come from," he said, nodding toward the craggy tops of the nearby mountains.
At the foot of the mountains, in easy viewing range through binoculars, lies the Pakistani town of Angur Hada, which Mike and his military superiors in Afghanistan are convinced is often filled with al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, as are other villages and towns farther inside the country. Several weeks before, a U.S. soldier was shot and wounded as he neared the border post at Angur Hada, and an F-16 was called in to level the nearby building where the shooter had hidden.
"Someone is distributing violent propaganda against Americans, urging the people here to do us harm," Mike said as practice rounds from some large American weapons were fired into the countryside from a sandbagged bunker at the base of the fortress. "We take all this very, very seriously."
At a time when many U.S. officials in Washington and Afghanistan are eager to shift the focus of the U.S. military mission here from combat to the reconstruction of the country, soldiers at isolated U.S. fire-bases like the one here at Shkin know firsthand why that has not yet happened. Fifteen months after the start of their campaign to topple the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda, they still face an invisible but determined enemy capable of slipping into Afghanistan from apparent havens in Pakistan to attack those they see as infidels and invaders.
U.S. casualties in the Afghan war have been low -- 26 dead and 121 wounded, the military reports -- and the enemy's recent efforts are generally described as "low-intensity," designed to create an atmosphere of instability rather than a military threat.
Since the U.S. and its allies staged Operation Anaconda last spring in the Shahikot mountains, al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives have been unable to form large groups and mount significant attacks. But their small-scale operations have nonetheless been persistent, involving a wide range of weapons, and show no sign of diminishing, according to U.S. and Afghan sources. Most have been carried out in southeastern Afghanistan, where the Pashtun ethnic group that formed the core of the Taliban is populous on both sides of the border.
One day, a U.S. soldier stepped on a newly planted land mine near Khost. Another day, an explosive tied to a bicycle went off as a U.S. convoy passed near Jalalabad. A young man threw a grenade recently at two Americans in a jeep in Kabul, and unguided but potentially lethal rockets are fired toward U.S. bases almost daily. In the past 30 days, one U.S. soldier has been killed in action and 10 wounded.
Militants have managed to set up a radio station inside Afghanistan that sporadically broadcasts calls for jihad, or holy war, against Americans. The militants also frequently put up intimidating posters in border areas, and they seem able to move arms and ammunition into the country from Pakistan's largely lawless tribal areas along the border. U.S. military officials headquartered at Bagram air base near Kabul announce the capture of caches of arms and ammunition almost every day -- 20% to 25% of which is new material brought in from elsewhere, according to a spokesman, Col. Roger King.
As a result, while the Pentagon moves ahead with plans to send engineering and civil affairs specialists around the country and hand the job of security to a new Afghan army, the primary mission of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan remains unchanged. "First and foremost, what we are trying to do here is capture and kill terrorists," said Lt. Gen. Daniel McNeill, who commands U.S. forces in the country. Gen. McNeill said he expected U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to remain at about 8,000 for another 18 months to two years before they could be gradually decreased.
Here in the southeastern province of Paktika, a parched and thinly populated place with scores of hidden trails through the barren mountains,it is apparent that it will not be easy to stop attackers from crossing the long, ill-defined and ill-controlled border with Pakistan, despite the presence of U.S. troops and some Afghan militiamen along the border.
Not only does the rugged terrain favor the guerrillas over the foreign forces trying to stop them -- just as it enabled Afghan mujahedeen to cross back and forth during their fight against Soviet occupation in the 1980s -- but Pakistani border forces appear unwilling or unable to control the al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have sought refuge in the tribal areas on their side of the border. There are, for example, Pakistani posts at commanding positions on either side of Angur Hada, but U.S. and Afghan soldiers say rockets have been fired at them from near those positions. While military officials report that relations between the Americans and Pakistanis around Angur Hada have improved in recent weeks, they also said that not long ago both sides had their big guns trained on each other, rather than on al Qaeda fighters.
Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, the spokesman for Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said reports of tension between U.S. and Pakistani forces along the border are exaggerated and that Pakistan is doing all it can to capture terrorists.
"Relations between the coalition forces and the Pakistan armed forces are excellent, and whenever information is given to us we act quickly," he said. "People are making wild public accusations about what is happening on the Pakistan side, but I can tell you that there are no complaints' from the U.S. central command.
Political considerations play a large role in relations between Islamabad and Washington, which relies heavily on Pakistan's assistance in the war on terrorism. Though Islamic militancy is a potent force in Pakistan and a succession of Pakistani governments helped to nurture and support Taliban rule in Afghanistan, Gen. Musharraf sided with the U.S. when it mounted its Afghan campaign after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As a result, Washington is careful not to make demands on Gen. Musharraf that might enflame anti-American or pro-Taliban passions and place his government in peril.
"It is quite possible that a joint Pakistani-American mission could go after 50 al Qaeda hiding in a cave in the tribal areas, and could destroy them without unacceptable casualties and have a military success," said a U.S. military official. "But if protests begin and the Musharraf government falls, was it really worth it?"
One of the most telling examples of the resistance faced by U.S. troops was the decision last month to abandon a forward base at Lwara, 80 kilometers north of Shkin, in the same rugged borderlands that the Americans had held for 10 months.
The Lwara base was abandoned Dec. 11 after coming under frequent rocket attacks. Several rockets -- which generally carried white phosphorus, which causes a very hot fire when exposed to oxygen -- landed inside or near the U.S. compound. While no U.S. soldiers were killed or injured, several vehicles were destroyed.
Gen. McNeill said the Americans left the base primarily because it wasn't producing the intelligence that military officials wanted. But he acknowledged that it was vulnerable to attack because it was so close to the border, and that rockets were fired at it consistently, possibly from Pakistan. "We're not going to hunker down anywhere for the sole purpose to just have a place to reside," Gen. McNeill said. "It didn't produce what we expected, even though we were very active... . We didn't do this one right." According to Engineer Amin, an Afghan official sent to the area by President Hamid Karzai, there was tension among Pashtun tribes in the area, and most declined to cooperate with the Americans.
When the Americans left, they handed the compound over to a local militia group controlled by Abdul Shah Wazir, an ally from an important Pashtun tribe. But according to his brother, Turan Noorzad Wazir, the militia of 300 men received no support from the Americans, the central government in Kabul or provincial authorities.
Mr. Wazir said he and his brother went to Kabul to plead for help but got nothing concrete. Men started to melt away from the compound.
Last week, a poster went up threatening the Wazir brothers, telling them and their militia to get out of town. Worried by that, their lack of supplies and questionable support in the area, the last militiamen had left the compound by midweek. The next night, a group described by Mr. Wazir as "al Qaeda people" stormed into Lwara, attacked the compound with explosives and burned it. Mr. Wazir said it was largely destroyed.