Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

^{CHAPTER FIVE} CENTCOM AND SOCOM ^{AFGHANISTAN, AUTUMN 2003 WITH NOTES ON PAKISTAN’S NORTHWEST FRONTIER}

By the time I had returned from the Philippines, the postwar stabilizations of Iraq and Afghanistan were in jeopardy. Both the Pentagon and the American public had thought in terms of final victory and victory parades. Yet the fact that more U.S. troops had been killed by shadowy gunmen in Iraq after the dismantling of the Saddam Hussein regime than during the war itself indicated that the real war over Iraq’s future was being fought now, and Operation Iraqi Freedom—the American-led invasion of the previous March, featuring hundreds of thousands of infantry troops—had merely shaped the battlefield for it.

The low-intensity violence in Sunni-inhabited central Iraq was an example of how the early twenty-first century constituted a universe in which war, to some degree, never ends because it is inextricable from politics and social unrest. In this universe, first defined by the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, the military becomes an unceasing instrument of statecraft even as diplomacy remains a principal weapon of war. Such an admixture of military combat and politics means that cultural and historical knowledge of the terrain is more likely than technological wizardry to dilute the so-called fog of war. As an avid reader of poetry and a product of the Romantic age before the Industrial Revolution—an age which respected the primacy of passion over rationality—Clausewitz had eerily intuited this.

But a never-ending state of war was a principle that Americans repeatedly found difficult to accept. Indeed, the first Gulf War in 1991 had seen a complete disconnect between America’s military aims and its postwar political strategy: by abruptly declaring victory, quickly withdrawing its military forces, not creating a demilitarized zone in southern Iraq to weaken Saddam’s surviving regime, and avoiding military links with anti-Saddam insurgents, the administration of George Bush the Elder ended up bolstering the very regime it had sought to undermine during the fighting itself.¹

Now, more than a decade later, with post-Saddam Iraq an exercise yard for unconventional Economy of Force attacks carried out by small groups of hit men and lone suicide bombers, yet another truth was laid bare: the modern battlefield was continuing to expand and empty out, so that it was characterized by a dispersion of forces.² Massive tank and infantry movements were of less consequence than the lethal actions of a few individuals, magnified by a global media.

In Afghanistan, too, a rapid and seemingly decisive military victory had been followed by a dirty and bloody peace. “Militant Islamic extremism,” wrote New York Times correspondents Amy Waldman and Dexter Filkins, reporting from both Afghanistan and Iraq, was proving to be an ideology that could be “contained but not defeated.”³ Small-scale eruptions of war, with few enemy troops visible, were now a feature of the Near Eastern landscape. It was something the U.S. would have to get used to, whatever party occupied the White House.

The unrest in both countries had different origins. In Iraq, the Baath party, like the KGB and the Communist party of the Soviet Union, had constituted one huge mafia. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the ruling mafia splintered into many smaller ones, leading to low-level chaos for nearly a decade, manifested in crime, murder, and corruption. The same situation obtained in Iraq, except that Iraq also offered significant numbers of U.S. troops as targets. Moreover, Iraq’s sprawling, hard-to-control desert borderlands and its linguistic and ethnic affinities with neighbors like Syria made it possible for al-Qaeda’s foot soldiers to slip inside the country and amplify the threat.

As for Afghanistan, the destruction of the state was actually less manifest than in Iraq. Even in the best of times (the mid-twentieth century, under the leadership of King Zahir Shah) the Afghan state had existed only partially, and extended to not much more than the major cities and towns, and the ring road connecting them. Contrary to popular wisdom, the Soviet invasion of December 1979 had not ignited the mujahedin uprising. That uprising began more than a year earlier, in April 1978, when the Afghan regime attempted to extend the power of the central government to the villages. However brutal and incompetent that regime’s methods were, one had to keep in mind that Afghans had less of a tradition of a modern state than Persians or Arabs.

Warlordism had always been strong in Afghanistan, bolstered in recent decades by the diffuse nature of the mujahedin rebellion against the Soviets, the destruction wrought by the fighting among the mujahedin themselves after the Soviet departure, and the bureaucratic incompetence of the Taliban, who constituted more of an ideological movement than a governing apparatus. Thus, with the state barely in existence even before the American invasion of October 2001, barring some catastrophe like the fall of a major town to a reconstituted Taliban or the assassination of President Hamid Karzai, reading success or failure in Afghanistan would be a subtler enterprise than in Iraq.

The continued turmoil in the Greater Near East, plus my desire to observe Army Special Forces in a more varied role than in Colombia and the Philippines—before I moved on to other branches of the military—was to take me on a two-month journey to Afghanistan. Iraq would wait until early the next year; I was not chasing news, but trying to understand the mechanics of America’s security commitments worldwide, on the ground, piece by piece.

Afghanistan and Army Special Forces fell within the domains of CENTCOM (Central Command) and SOCOM (Special Operations Command). Both, as it happened, were headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

CENTCOM was an unusual area command in that it was new, had few war-fighting units permanently assigned to it, and yet bore the burden of most of the fighting for the U.S. at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This was in spite of the fact that CENTCOM’s area of responsibility was significantly smaller than the other commands, for the Greater Middle East did not compare in square mileage to the vast Pacific; to South America and its oceanic environs; or to Europe, Russia, and Africa—the responsibility of European Command.

But what CENTCOM’s area of responsibility lacks in size, it compensates for in strategic importance. It stretches from northeastern Africa across the Middle East to former Soviet Central Asia and Pakistan and comprises that vast desert region which lies east of Europe, south of Russia, and west of China and India. Here the legacies of the Byzantine, Turkish, and Persian empires overlap amid two thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves and 40 percent of its natural gas.

While SOUTHCOM and PACOM boast venerable roots in American history—in the building of the Panama Canal and the old Pacific Army before World War II—and while European Command constitutes a legacy of the Allied victory over Hitler’s Germany, CENTCOM is without a storied past. It is a creature of the last phase of the Cold War and the challenge posed by extremist Islam, a granite-like ideology as dynamic, inflexible, and ruthless as Soviet communism and European fascism.[39]

Central Command was activated in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan as a successor to the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which had, in turn, been created by President Jimmy Carter in order to project power in Africa and the Middle East following the Iranian hostage crisis.[40] In 1990 and 1991, CENTCOM became a household word when under its then-commander, Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, it executed Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, respectively the defense of Saudi Arabia and the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. In 1992, CENTCOM carried out Restore Hope, the humanitarian intervention in Somalia. And throughout the 1990s CENTCOM enforced the Iraqi no-fly zone.

Along with NATO, CENTCOM had grown into the ultimate coalition manager. Its headquarters, at the point where Tampa Bay opens into the Gulf of Mexico, was distinguished not by its huge nondescript building, but by the enormous expanse of mobile homes, each flying a different national flag, which housed liaison officers from all the countries taking part in Operations Enduring Freedom—Afghanistan and Iraqi Freedom. When one walked inside the main building, not only were the desert cammie utilities (DCUs) that the American soldiers wore different from the dark green BDUs of the other area commands, so was the corridor presence of officers from a host of nations, as indicated by their distinctive uniforms. One of my briefers was not even an American, but a Norwegian army major.

CENTCOM’s pace of activity made SOUTHCOM and PACOM look sleepy by comparison. People worked longer hours than at the other commands. Most of the higher-ranking officers were not at the Tampa headquarters even, but forward deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the AOR (area of responsibility). Officially, every area command reported directly to the secretary of defense, but CENTCOM’s channels of communication to the “SecDef” (as he was called) were simply more direct and seamless.

U.S. Air Force Maj. Michel Escudi, my escort, remarked, “Here you’ve got a third of the world at your fingertips. Everything is informal with little red tape. All the nations go to the briefings, and that generally goes for the exchange of intelligence, too. If you asked me to diagram the bureaucratic chain of command as it actually works, I couldn’t. People just walk in cold on each other’s offices.”

The U.N. and NATO must have been like this in the early 1950s, I thought, before a formalized rigidity set in. Since the end of the Cold War, CENTCOM had been emerging as an international organization of the kind that elites in the major capitals and financial centers talked about but did not imagine taking shape inside the American military, amid western Florida’s tacky sunbelt sprawl. Organizations are at their most dynamic when they are in the process of becoming—when they work out of temporary structures and have the sense of the guerrilla outfit about them, disrupting the established order. That was CENTCOM (though NATO, too, had been revitalized somewhat with the entry of former Warsaw Pact countries into its ranks, and by successfully intervening and fighting wars in Bosnia and Kosovo).

Another distinctive feature of CENTCOM was the way that I was treated. At SOUTHCOM and PACOM, whose military operations were largely ignored by the media, I was an oddity, a threat, and a VIP all at once, to be handled with care and lots of planning. At CENTCOM, I was just another journalist being processed through a series of briefings. People barely had time for me.

Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, was activated four years after CENTCOM, in 1987, and thus was even newer. It was forced on a reluctant Pentagon by the U.S. Congress, through an amendment sponsored by Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and Republican Senator William Cohen of Maine.[41] The two senators had become frustrated with the military’s slowness in adapting to unconventional threats. In 1976 the Israelis had carried out a spectacular raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda to rescue hostages taken by Ugandan leader Idi Amin. The following year, the West German military, with help from the British Special Air Service (SAS), performed a similar feat, freeing hostages taken by Baader-Meinhof terrorists at Mogadishu airport in Somalia. In 1980, however, a U.S. attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran was a disastrous failure. SOCOM, like the Rapid Deployment Force and CENTCOM, was yet another consequence of that signal crisis and national humiliation.

The creation of SOCOM marked the most dramatic elevation of Special Operations since President Kennedy had awarded Army Special Forces the green beret. SOCOM comprised not only the various Army Special Forces groups, but the 75th Ranger Regiment, Navy SEALs, Air Force Special Operations squadrons, a provisional Marine detachment, and other commando-style units. The Nunn-Cohen Amendment, at least officially, made SOCOM a war-fighting command as well as a force provider—though in practice SOCOM rarely had operational control of missions in the manner that CENTCOM, PACOM, and the other area commands did.

It was the Global War on Terrorism—and particularly Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s implementation of it—that made SOCOM a war-fighting command in more than name only. SOCOM was now supposed to be an area command just like the others, but with its area the entire earth, for if al-Qaeda constituted a seamless worldwide apparatus without bureaucratic impediments, so, too, it was thought, should SOCOM.

SOCOM, in theory, was to be the executive arm for the War on Terrorism. Yet, there was an inherent conflict between area commands that had operational control over specific geographic sectors and SOCOM, which could launch operations anywhere, on anybody’s turf. Therefore, SOCOM was still a work in progress. Nevertheless, it managed to run operations of some sort in 150 countries in 2003.

SOCOM’s was the only command whose budget came directly from Congress, not from the Pentagon.[42] It dealt with a plethora of government agencies in addition to all the uniformed services and area commands. SOCOM’s bureaucratic flowchart was numbing in its complexity. Because post–Cold War challenges like nation-building were dependent on interagency cooperation, SOCOM’s success or failure as an interagency tool would provide a litmus test of sorts for how well America was able to fulfill its international obligations.

SOCOM’s activities were secret to a far greater degree than the other commands. Its “black SOF [Special Operations Forces]” missions against al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area were the dagger point of the War on Terrorism. The public affairs officer at SOCOM, Chet Justice, told me that journalists were rare there, and that was just fine with his bosses. Even the meeting rooms at SOCOM had coded locks on them. There was no buzz of activity inside SOCOM as there was at CENTCOM, just secretaries and brawny men in uniforms silently passing each other in the hallways. The command briefing I received began with these words from George Orwell:

The SOCOM commander at the time, Army Gen. Doug Brown, a four-star, had been an enlisted man, like his friend Sid Shachnow, the latter whom I had met at the horse farm in North Carolina. Both had gone to Officer Candidate School and risen through the ranks. Gen. Brown’s second in command, naval Vice Adm. Eric Olson, was a former SEAL. My conversations with them were off the record, yet the most interesting insight I obtained, oddly enough, was very much on the record. It was SOCOM’s four “enduring truths”:

• Humans are more important than hardware.

• Quality is better than quantity.

• Special Operations Forces cannot be mass-produced.

• Competent SOF cannot be created after emergencies occur.

Though they seem like clichés, they go against the grain of much of American military thinking in the twentieth century. And they go against what military historian Max Boot critically labels “the army way, the American way, the World War II way: find the enemy, fix him in place, and annihilate him with withering fire power.”⁴ Contrarily, SOCOM believed that small guerrilla-like groups of men, armed with linguistic and cultural expertise, were more effective than industrial-age tank and infantry divisions manned by citizen conscripts—the heroes of World War II. And because al-Qaeda was a worldwide insurgency, America had to fight a classic worldwide counterinsurgency. Thus, SOCOM commanders thought more about the Philippines of a hundred years ago, about the OSS units in Nazi-occupied France and Japanese-occupied Burma, and the Green Berets in Vietnam and El Salvador than they did about the two Gulf wars, Korea, and World War II.

While the area commands were still wedded to the conventional use of large armies, navies, and air forces, SOCOM was the Pentagon’s principal bureaucratic machine of unconventional war (UW). UW entailed not only commando-style raids but softer techniques like the humanitarian work on Basilan Island in the Philippines that had helped root out Islamic insurgents. Violence was not being discarded, but in the future it would be, to quote Sid Shachnow, “complementary rather than controlling.”

Success required a long-term continuous presence on the ground in scores of countries—quiet and unobtrusive—with operations harmonized through a central strategy, but with decentralized execution in the manner of the most successful global corporations, be it General Electric or al-Qaeda.⁵

The Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands were where the jurisdictions of SOCOM and the more conventionally oriented CENTCOM overlapped. How was it working?

This would be my first visit to Afghanistan and the Afghanistan-Pakistani borderlands since the spring of 2000, when I had traveled along the Northwest Frontier and did a profile of Hamid Karzai, then an obscure Afghan tribal leader.⁶ Before that, I had reported from Pakistan in the 1990s and covered the mujahedin war against the Soviet Union inside Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Whatever the maps might say, I had learned to view Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single political unit. This was not just the result of Pakistan’s intense involvement in the mujahedin war against the Soviet occupation and in the rise of Taliban extremists the following decade, but of simple geography and British colonial history.⁷

Because the transition from the steamy lowlands of the Indian subcontinent to the arid moonscapes of Central Asia is gradual, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan could never be precise. The border region—a thousand miles long and a hundred miles wide—is a deathly volcanic landscape of crags and winding canyons where the Indian subcontinent’s tropical floor pushes upward into Inner Asia’s high, shaved wastes. From Baluchistan north through the Pakistani “tribal agencies” of Waziristan, Kurram, Orakzai, Khyber, Mohmand, and Bajaur, near Peshawar—the destitute capital of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province—there is an anarchic realm of highwaymen, tribal and religious violence, heroin laboratories, and arms smuggling.

The tribal Pushtuns (also known as Pathans), who controlled the frontier zone of eastern and southern Afghanistan, never accepted the arbitrary boundary between Afghanistan and colonial India (from which Pakistan later emerged): a boundary drawn in 1893 by the British envoy Sir Mortimer Durand. Moreover, the British bequeathed to the Pakistanis the belt of anarchic territories they called “tribal agencies,” which lay just east of the Durand Line. This had the effect of further confusing the boundary between settled land in Pakistan and the chaos of Afghanistan. Consequently, Pakistani governments always felt besieged—not only by India to the east but by Afghan tribesmen to the west. To fight India, in the Pakistani view, it was necessary to dominate Afghanistan.

Afghanistan did not truly exist until the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1747, Ahmad Khan, leader of the Abdali contingent of Nadir Shah the Great—the Persian king and conqueror of Moghul India—fled Persia with four thousand horsemen, following Nadir Shah’s assassination and the collapse of his regime. Ahmad Khan and his troops fled southeast out of Persia, to Kandahar.

Kandahar was probably the only Greek place name to have survived in Afghanistan. It stemmed from the Arabic form of Alexander’s name, Iskander. In 330 B.C., Alexander the Great had led his army through the Kandahar region in search of further conquests, following his victory over the Persian forces of Darius at Gaugamela, in northern Iraq. Kandahar lay in the frontier zone between the Persian historical homeland and the Moghul territories to the east that the Persians and their assassinated leader, Nadir Shah, had vanquished. In this sea of blood and turmoil, Ahmad Khan conceived of an island of order: a native Afghan kingdom that would be sanctioned by whoever would rule next in Persia, in exchange for which he would aggressively patrol the mother kingdom’s new territories to the east.

Ahmad Khan was only twenty-four when he became King Ahmad Shah of Afghanistan. In a camp outside Kandahar, as Sir Olaf Caroe tells it, the other Abdali tribesmen “took pieces of grass in their mouths as a token that they were his cattle and beasts of burden.”⁸ Because King Ahmad Shah liked to wear a pearl earring, he became known by the title Durr-I-Durran (Pearl of Pearls). From this time on, he and his Abdali tribesmen would be known as Durranis.

From Kandahar, Ahmad Shah conquered Kabul and Herat, so the Durrani empire became modern Afghanistan. The Durranis ruled Afghanistan until 1973, when Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud, in a Soviet-assisted coup, overthrew the last Durrani monarch, King Zahir Shah. Zahir Shah would not return to Afghanistan until three decades later as a private citizen, after the dismantling of the Taliban regime by American forces and the election of his tribal kinsman Hamid Karzai as Afghan president.

Hamid Karzai, the headman of the Popolzais, a tribal subgroup of the Durranis, was himself Afghan royalty. Like the original Ahmad Shah, as well as the radical Taliban, Karzai hailed from Kandahar. Kandahar was always considered the pure Afghan homeland, unadulterated by the Persian influences in Herat to the northwest or those of the Indian subcontinent that pervaded Kabul to the northeast.

The Taliban had been so impressed by Hamid Karzai’s Kandahari lineage that in the early 1990s, before they came to power, they sought out his support, and in the first days of their rule offered him the post of United Nations ambassador, which he refused.⁹ Whereas the U.S. saw the Taliban as radical Islamists, they were also ethnic Pushtuns with deep reverence for tribal heredity. The Taliban lived by the primitive tribal creed of Pushtunwali—“the way of the Pushtuns”—a code more severe than Koranic law. It was the joining of Pushtunwali with Koranic law that produced such a savage end product.

Indeed, the moment you dismissed the importance of tribe and ethnicity you began to misread Afghanistan. From the days of King Ahmad Shah, Afghanistan constituted a fragile webwork of tribes and ethnic groups occupying the water-starved wastes between the settled areas of the Russian Empire in Central Asia, the Persian Empire in the Middle East, and the British Empire in the Indian subcontinent. The killing of 1.3 million Afghans by the Soviets in the 1980s shattered this fragile ethnic webwork. Anarchy was the result. The anarchy continued after Soviet troops departed, leading to the ideologically severe but institutionally weak Taliban government, dismantled by the Americans in order to deny al-Qaeda its principal base of operations following 9/11.

In late 2003, with the state barely functioning despite Karzai’s valiant attempts to resurrect it, Afghanistan had been reduced to its constituent ethnic parts. To the north of the Hindu Kush mountains lay the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkomens, all allied with their ethnic compatriots in the former Soviet empire. To the south of the Hindu Kush lay the Pushtuns, allied with Pushtuns inside Pakistan. The unrelenting stream of guerrilla attacks on U.S. and other coalition forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan following the collapse of the Taliban regime was meant, among other things, to drive out the American infidels from this historic Pushtun territory.

The reality of Afghanistan began five minutes away from the luxurious glitter of my hotel in the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai. One dark October morning at 4:30 a hotel shuttle transported me from a world of fine chocolates, good wines, and the animal scents of expensive perfumes and colognes to Dubai’s old terminal, the one used mainly for cargo flights. There I found a horde of Afghans in beards, massive turbans, and shalwar kameez (robes and baggy trousers) sprawled all over the departure lounge, their bare feet resting on battered suitcases, while other Afghans, their turbans off, snored in fetal positions on the floor.

In their coarse and costumed splendor, memorialized by Kipling and other writers, the Afghans were like the Yemenis: another unreconstructed people of the mountains and high plains who had never been successfully colonized. The grimy wide-bodied jet that took off from the Dubai cargo terminal, bound for the Afghan capital of Kabul, with every seat occupied, was nearly devoid of women. In the early twenty-first century, such a barren social landscape usually meant violence and unrest.

Two and a half hours later, the plane descended onto a biscuit brown tableland surrounded by ashen hills. As I left the airport in Kabul, the change wrought by American troops quickly became manifest. Near the gateway to the Indian subcontinent, Kabul had always been the most cosmopolitan place in Afghanistan. Thus, the Taliban singled it out for particularly harsh treatment. Women were stoned, banned from school and the workplace, erased from existence practically. Now hundreds of schoolgirls, laughing and smiling, in uniforms and headscarves, crowded the road from the airport. There was colorful new signage advertising consumer goods and civil society groups. Whereas the human image itself had been forbidden by the Taliban, now portraits of the martyred Ahmad Shah Massoud, who had led the guerrilla struggle against both the Soviets and later the Taliban, were omnipresent.

The metamorphosis, superficial and limited to the capital though it was, testified to the power of human agency. Had the Bush administration reacted to 9/11 in a different and less forceful manner, those schoolgirls simply would not have been present on the street.

But I saw it all from a great distance. I was inside a van, riding with American soldiers, both male and female, from the 211th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, out of Bryan, Texas. They used call signs like “chili” and “beans,” and talked about the league play-offs in baseball. From downtown Kabul the van turned east and then north across the Shomali Plain. Singular sawtooth monuments of volcanic gray rock erupted off the high desert floor, swallowed by dust, like bones swiftly disintegrating. The bleached landscape made you thankful for every primary color, whether a red pomegranate or the lapis lazuli blue of a burka even.[43] Less than an hour after I left Kabul, the snow-crenellated ramparts of the Hindu Kush, rising sheer off the tableland to a height of twenty-one thousand feet, heralded Bagram.

Bagram Air Force Base was the headquarters of Combined Joint Task Force 180 (CJTF-180), an American-led alliance of thirty-three countries. Of its 11,000 troops, 8,500 were American, and 5,000 of those were located at Bagram, so the Americans dominated the environment. (The task force was separate from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF. Whereas ISAF kept the peace in Kabul, CJTF-180 was responsible for the rest of Afghanistan at the time of my visit.)

From 1979 to 1989, Bagram air base had been the nerve center of the Soviet occupation force. The Soviets surrounded Bagram with trenches and minefields, and packed the runways with Hind helicopter gunships that incinerated Afghan villages harboring mujahedin guerrillas. That was until the mid-1980s, when the Americans supplied the mujahedin with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Thus did the tide of battle turn, triggering the endgame of the Cold War.

Minefields still littered Bagram’s perimeter, along with vast junkyards

of wrecked and rusted Soviet helicopters, MiG fighters, fixed-wing Antonovs, air-to-ground missiles, and anti-aircraft guns—the detritus of Russian imperialism.

The van passed through an obstacle course of concrete barriers, sand-filled HESCO baskets, and security checks. It takes so little to reproduce a material culture, I thought. HESCO barriers, a bit of cheap carpentry, rows of portable toilets, Armed Forces Radio, two weight rooms with Sheryl Crow CDs playing in the background, and half a dozen chow halls serving fried chicken, collard greens, and Snapple and Gatorade—and boom! You’ve got the United States. Or at least a particular country-slash-southern-slash-working-class version of it.

It was in Bosnia where Kellogg, Brown & Root had perfected the instant American military base, a signature item of the nation’s late-industrial know-how. It featured aluminum-coated balsa-wood pallets for shower floors, guard towers made of stacked shipping containers, twenty-thousand-gallon synthetic bladders for holding oil and drinking water, and acres of plywood B-huts strangely reminiscent of the tented pavilions of the Ottoman army. Bagram even had its own time zone, Zulu time, equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time. Zulu time was used by the American military at major air bases worldwide, so that they all operated within the same time zone, helpful for the coordination of air assets.

The 250-bed American hospital at Bagram had taken just seventy-two hours to erect. It was a warren of wards, blood and urine analysis labs, and portable hard-walled facilities for X-rays, CAT scans, ultrasound, and microbiology augmentation, all of which lay encased in layers of tenting and giant plenum tubing, which produces a dust-proof environment in the middle of the desert. Manned by Wisconsin reservists, the hospital offered the finest medical care in Central Asia, as well as in much of the Middle East. While it had been set up for wounded coalition soldiers, the Milwaukee-area doctors and nurses spent most of their time treating local victims of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet mines that still littered the countryside.

Except for some of the road crews and the pervasive dust, I would not have known that I was in Afghanistan. Occasionally, I heard the faint echo of the Muslim prayer call from an adjacent village. And that was the real, unspoken, subtle cultural influence working upon the Americans: an Islamic puritanism that activated the puritanical strain within America’s own cultural experience. While at Zamboanga in the Philippines troops were allowed a few beers a week and all sorts of stuff happened outside the gates, at American bases in the Muslim Near East there was “no alcohol, no fraternization, period.”

But there was another factor behind Bagram’s puritanical climate. In the world of the military, the bigger the base, the stricter the rules, and consequently the more uptight and dreary the atmosphere. It reflected the fear of the top brass that large numbers of troops would get out of control without iron discipline. I don’t remember how many times I heard it said that being in Bagram was like being in prison. Everyone had to wear rank and salute each other, something I had never seen at Special Forces outposts—or even at the Joint Special Operations Task Force in the Philippines—where rank was nothing and function was everything.

Except for a few quaint, tin-roofed concrete piles and a shrapnel-scarred control tower, you never would have known that the Soviets had ever been here. Construction was ubiquitous: the gravel pit at the base’s edge was as large as Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, and getting larger. The Americans were planning for a long stay. Now it was the Global War on Terrorism, but the border with China was close by.

The old Soviet control tower, whose basement had been used by the Taliban for interrogation and torture, constituted the true nerve center of Bagram. From this tower, a team of American Air Force personnel and private contractors directed complex nighttime symphonies of steeply ascending and descending aircraft. The C-130 cargo planes brought troops and almost all of the heavy equipment in from Germany. The CH-47 Chinooks and UH-60 Black Hawks, protected by AH-64 Apaches, helicoptered troops within Afghanistan, though most noticeable on the tarmac were the A-10 Thunderbolts, or Warthogs, which provided CAS (close air support) for ground troops in the thick of battle.

Like the B-52 bomber that has also been around forever, the A-10 is a true hall-of-fame airplane, an ancient ugly duckling with its Gatling guns and twin vertical stabilizers, that since the latter days of Vietnam often turned out to be more useful than the sexiest fighter jets. As dumpy as it looks, once in the air the A-10 is as graceful as any F-15. Because the A-10’s self-sealing fuel tank allows it to absorb ground fire without exploding, its pilots can risk flying low within a contained space and thus be instantly available to troops directly underneath. It also helps that the A-10 is slow, so it doesn’t disappear over the horizon just when ground troops need it. The A-10s at Bagram were further defined by the graffiti carved on their camera-guided bombs: “To Osama, kiss my ass.” Or: “Bought on E-Bay for $7.99.”

Without close air support and a few dozen Green Berets this entire American base complex at Bagram might not have existed.[44]

It was the capture of Bagram, orchestrated by one Green Beret A-team, ODA-555 (“the triple nickel”), that, more than any other single event, led to the collapse of the Taliban regime in November 2001. When ODA-555 had arrived here in late October of that year, Bagram constituted the front line of the war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, with the former holding the northern part of the base and the latter the southern part. It was from this control tower that ODA-555’s close air support unit called in strikes that decimated thousands of Taliban troops massed to Bagram’s south.

As ODA-555’s success at Bagram indicated, Afghanistan had been the stage for the most dramatic use of Army Special Forces since the Vietnam War.

The American invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks, had been greeted with a chorus of dire, historically based predictions from the media and academia about a looming catastrophe. American soldiers, it was said, would fail to defeat the rugged, unruly Afghans just as the Soviets and the nineteenth-century British had. The Afghans had never been defeated by an outsider, nor would they ever be. By mid-November, however, after only a few weeks of American bombing, the Taliban fled the Afghan capital of Kabul in disarray. To say that the Americans succeeded because of their incomparable technology would have been a narrow version of the truth. America’s initial success rested on deftly combining high technology with low-tech unconventional warfare.

Afghanistan represented the first time that Army Special Forces were the centerpiece of a major American military effort since El Salvador two decades earlier. But unlike in El Salvador, where, as in Colombia and the

Philippines, Special Forces did not fight so much as train those who did, in Afghanistan Green Berets were unleashed to both train and assist in combat operations. Afghanistan constituted a throwback to the early days in Vietnam.

CIA operatives had been the first to arrive: in late September 2001 they were airdropped into northern Afghanistan to prepare for the insertion of Green Beret A-teams from the 5th Special Forces Group, which covers the Greater Middle East and is based out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The CIA operatives made contact with the Afghan Northern Alliance. Dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, the Northern Alliance represented the principal opposition to the Pushtun Taliban.

The Northern Alliance had recently suffered a major blow when al-Qaeda assassinated its leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, two days before 9/11. Massoud, an ethnic Tajik and moderate Islamist, had been Afghanistan’s greatest guerrilla asset against the Soviets. The Northern Alliance was essentially an outgrowth of his own military genius. With Massoud dead, it would be the job of 5th Group’s A-teams to help fill the organizational gap within the Northern Alliance, as well as to give its Tajik and Uzbek commanders the tactical edge they required against the Taliban, an edge to be provided by high technology.

At the same time, 5th Group teams were preparing to infiltrate the Kandahar region of southern Afghanistan, to help the forces of moderate Pushtuns such as Hamid Karzai.

Upon their arrival in Afghanistan in mid-October 2001, the Special Forces A-teams traveled primarily on horseback, about fifteen miles a day, meeting local commanders and coordinating attacks. In coming weeks each of these small teams would be responsible for the destruction of hundreds of Taliban vehicles and thousands of enemy troops. They were true force multipliers.

The heart of this force multiplication was the three-man close air support units within each A-team, often composed of two Special Forces soldiers and an embedded specialist from the U.S. Air Force. The three operators would usually crouch behind a mound of dirt and set up their equipment: a rubberized spotting scope and a laser designator that resembled a pair of giant binoculars mounted on a tripod. The laser designator shot out a beam to pinpoint the target, so that a laser-guided bomb fired by an aircraft overhead could strike it.¹⁰

A typical Green Beret/Air Force team would often be surrounded by scores of Taliban troops as close as a hundred yards away in all directions. Amidst the clutter of radios, terrain maps, and mortars, in addition to the scopes and laser designators, the three men would calmly vector American pilots overhead onto the targets.¹¹ It was such sound-and-light performances that won the A-teams the crucial edge of respect they required from the Northern Alliance as well as from Karzai’s troops.

Among the more gifted of such sound-and-light experts was ODA-574’s 18 Echo, or communications specialist, Sgt. First Class Dan Petithory of Cheshire, Massachusetts. Sgt. Petithory’s adroitness at close air support in southern Afghanistan helped save Hamid Karzai’s life. Sgt. Petithory was killed forty-eight hours before the fall of Kandahar, in a blue-on-blue friendly-fire incident when a satellite-guided bomb was incorrectly programmed.[45] It is a small world that we inhabit sometimes, for Petithory was from the same area of western Massachusetts as I. His father delivered my local newspaper.

A-team members grew beards and longish hair, and wore flat woolen caps from the Hindu Kush known as pakols. They went as native as they needed to, in order to be credible in the local landscape. From my own experience living with Afghan mujahedin in the 1980s, it made perfect sense. Inside Afghanistan, no male was taken seriously if he had not grown a beard. Though many conventional thinkers inside the Pentagon were aghast at the news photos of American troops on horseback in native garb, unconventional warriors like Gen. Brown and retired Maj. Gen. Shachnow smiled and understood.

The push into Kabul by the Northern Alliance, assisted by 5th Group Green Berets, began November 11, 2001, and ended victoriously two days later. The territorial gains would be consolidated by the Marines and the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. By giving the Green Berets an active combat role, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan had closed a circle with Vietnam.

If history could stop at that point, it would have been an American success story. But history, like the intertwining of war and politics as defined by the Prussian general Clausewitz, does not stop. By the autumn of 2003 when I arrived in Afghanistan, the Taliban had regrouped to fight a guerrilla struggle against the American-led international coalition—similar to the struggle that the mujahedin had waged against the Soviets. With hit-and-run attacks across a dispersed and mountainous battlefield, and a new national army that needed to be trained and equipped, Afghanistan still constituted a challenge better suited to Special Operations forces than to the conventional military.

The Joint Special Operations Task Force that functioned within the CJTF-180 was about the same size as the JSOTF at Zamboanga in the Philippines. But after I spent the first two nights at Bagram in one of the hundreds of tents housing CJTF-180’s support personnel, the comparatively smaller JSOTF—which lay bureaucratically within, yet physically isolated from, the CJTF-180—felt intimate almost, especially after I had spotted familiar faces from Fort Bragg.[46] The food was better, as the fruit and vegetables were bought locally. “Yeah, compared to the rest of Bagram, we’re living large here,” one of the majors from Fort Bragg told me.

Technically, it was a C-JSOTF, a Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, because of the presence of special operators from not only the U.S. but the United Arab Emirates and Lithuania, too. The Lithuanians distinguished themselves by their handy decision to bring a pregnant cat along on the deployment, which produced kittens that in turn killed the field mice in their barracks.

Though the Special Operations community constituted only about 10 percent of the CJTF-180’s forces, it was responsible for half of the intelligence gathered, half the prisoners captured, and half the “bad guys” killed. This was not surprising. The bigger the military force, often the smaller the percentage of troops engaged in substantive activities. Washington, in particular, had a way of “piling on,” creating an unnecessarily large footprint with high numbers of support personnel. As I would learn upon venturing deeper into Afghanistan, Bagram had just too many upper-level officers micro-managing field operations.

The Special Operations commander at Bagram was Col. Walter Herd, a stiff-mannered Kentuckian with a short crop of iron gray hair and a hardscrabble border state accent. If the U.S. Army was stereotypical enough to have had an official accent, Col. Herd’s might have been it. In his tent, late one night, Col. Herd took less than five minutes to tersely summarize the situation in Afghanistan. As he began, I noticed that on his desk, waiting to be hung, was a black-and-white photo of Col. Cornelius Gardner, a hero of the Philippine War, who, as a commander in southern Luzon, put particular emphasis on civil affairs and indigenous self-government as a tool of pacification, and also blew the whistle on human rights abuses committed by U.S. troops.

“The north of Afghanistan is doing pretty well,” Col. Herd told me, “which in Afghanistan means that there’s not a lot of massive killing going on. In the north we can focus on political-economic activities.” The north, of course, was controlled by the Northern Alliance and by Ismael Khan and Abdul Rashid Dostum, two long-standing warlords. The south and the southeast, however, which were under President Karzai’s jurisdiction, Herd called “Injun Country,” where Special Operations had fifteen “Fort Apaches” of various sizes: “ ‘Firebases,’ we call them. From these firebases we try to spread peace and sunshine. The object is to seduce who we can and kill the rest. If we succeed, the political-economic stuff can follow like in the north.

“The enemy,” he went on, “is the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the HIG [Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, the Party of Islam faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar]. Everything we do against these ACF [anti-coalition forces] is ‘by,’ ‘through,’ and ‘with’ the indigs [indigenous forces]. So we try always to have the ANA [Afghan National Army] with us, and we try to give the ANA the credit for what we do.”

The string of Special Operations firebases was mainly located in the vicinity of the Pakistani border region. Third Special Forces Group, supported by 19th Group Special Forces National Guardsmen, manned the firebases in southern Afghanistan, while those in the southeast were manned by 20th Group Guardsmen, helped by some 19th Group members and advisors from 7th Group. As I would be headed first to the southeast, I despaired that I would be mainly with National Guardsmen. Like most Americans, I was ignorant of a subculture of National Guardsmen which was tougher and more experienced than many active duty personnel.

I had a day to kill at Bagram before the helicopter flight to southeastern Afghanistan. I spent it with ODA-2027, a 20th Group National Guard A-team, currently in isolation with a thirty-man Afghan National Army contingent, preparing together for combat deployment. “You’ll love these guys,” Maj. Jeb Stewart, their commanding officer from northern California, told me. “They’re not into the politics of active duty. All they want to do is serve their country, though they’ll never talk about it.”

Isolation meant that they lived in the same compound with the Afghan soldiers. They fended for themselves, as if already deployed in the field. They had built their own shower unit and bought oriental carpets to decorate their hootch. “They say the compound is haunted,” one of the A-team members told me. “I hope the ghosts are naked females with big boobs.”

All of ODA-2027 were self-described “guard bums,” or “guard whores.” In civilian life most were law enforcement officers or firemen, though Capt. Bo Webb, the team’s executive officer from South Carolina, had been a real estate agent whose license had lapsed. A graduate of the Citadel, he had, nevertheless, risen through the enlisted ranks by attending Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning. He told me that the team was on a nine-month rotation, including a thirty-day ramp-up and a thirty-day demobilization at the end. Since 9/11 they had been mobilized two thirds of every year. But they had no complaints. They might have been the happiest A-team I had encountered thus far in my travels. And why not: they would be going into a war zone with sufficiently loose rules of engagement as to make A-teams in Colombia and the Philippines drool with envy.

They were mainly from northern Florida—the parts of the state known as “lower Alabama” and “lower Georgia,” not to be confused with southern Florida, whose large population of Latinos and retirees from the cold Northeast made it another culture entirely. “Orlando is the DMZ [demilitarized zone] between us and them,” Sgt. First Class Chris Grall, a counter-drug instructor for the Florida State Police, told me. He, Capt. Webb, and Team Sgt. Russ Freeman had all been members of ODA-2027 since 1996. “We’ve been together for much longer than most active duty SF teams,” Grall said. Indeed, whereas the Reserve represents the generic civilian world, the National Guard constitutes the Good Old Boys.

They had all been in the regular Army or Special Forces prior to entering civilian life. They ranged in age from the late twenties to the mid-thirties. Quite a few were sons of Vietnam veterans. They were avid NASCAR fans. In college football they had intense loyalties, rooting for either the University of Florida Gators or the Florida State Seminoles. They often ate southern: grits and biscuits with gravy for breakfast. Several were divorced at least once. They were all self-described “A” personalities. As Grall explained: “There is a guy in the unit who actually hates NASCAR, and another who hates college football. In our own weird way, we’re all individualists.

“It’s a great life being a guard bum,” Grall continued. “You get to see places tourists never do. We’re like tourists with guns.” Bosnia, Liberia, Panama, and Honduras were some of the places where 2027 had been deployed.

Kyle Harth, a particularly burly and friendly member of the team, told me this story: “I was in a bar in Naples, Florida. There was this guy even bigger than me wearing a Seminoles cap. What the heck, I thought. I told him, ‘That’s a pretty ugly cap you got on.’ ’Gator fan, uh,’ he replied. ‘Yeah,’ I said. Then he extends his hand and shows me his national championship ring. The guy had actually played for the Seminoles. Wow, I was impressed. But you know what, when he lies to people, I’ll bet you he tells them he does what I do.”

The truth about these guys was that while some had college degrees, and most had jobs to return to, they defined themselves by their membership in the National Guard and Special Forces, not by what they did in civilian life. September 11 had allowed them to come into their own, to truly define themselves, giving them a social status that they had not had before. Specifically, the War on Terrorism had provided them wider opportunities for merging their law enforcement skills with their Special Forces ones. In the 1990s they had all become fluent in Spanish, hoping to deploy to Cuba when Castro fell. That still hadn’t happened. So they were constantly pulling Dari and Pushtu dictionaries out of their cargo pockets, as they instructed Afghan soldiers in the intricacies of assaulting a fort. They ate with their Afghan trainees at lunch and socialized with them at night. While the media was full of lugubrious stories about the great sacrifices being made by reservists in Iraq and Afghanistan, these guys were having the time of their lives.

Maj. Jeb Stewart had called these guys the ultimate patriots. In fact, they constituted something closely related: the great southern military tradition that had produced the gleaming officer corps of the Confederacy, without which the nation would not have been able to fight its later wars quite as well as it had. It is a tradition poignantly described in W. J. Cash’s 1941 classic, The Mind of the South.

In that book, Cash paints a lyrical and penetrating portrait of the frontier, with its “thin distribution” of population, its raggedy backcountry, and its virtual absence of effective government that the southern plantation system—by appropriating the best land in self-contained units—essentially preserved until late into Reconstruction. For a long time, the South “remained by far the most poorly policed section of the nation,” Cash writes. This unpoliced frontier bred a violent mix of romance and individualism, with its “ultimate incarnation” the Confederate soldier, who became every southern schoolboy’s “hero-ideal.”¹²

Sir Michael Howard writes that the frontier in the United States had produced a “war culture.”[47] The South, according to Cash, was that war culture incarnate. It helped explain why, for example, just two states of the old Confederacy, Texas and Florida, accounted for nearly a quarter of the men and women in the American armed forces in the first years of the twenty-first century.[48]

ODA-2027 offered the perfect introduction for what I would encounter at the firebases in southeastern and southern Afghanistan.

With troops jammed elbow-to-elbow along the sides, divided by a high wall of mailbags and rucksacks, the CH-47 Chinook, followed by its Apache escort, lifted up off the pierced steel planking that the Soviets had left behind at Bagram. The rear hatch was left open for the M-60 7.62mm mounted gun, manned by a soldier strapped over the edge. Behind the gun, the medieval landscape of Afghanistan fell away: mud-walled castles and green terraced fields of rice, alfalfa, and cannabis on an otherwise gnarled, sandpaper vastness, pockmarked by steep canyons and volcanic slag heaps. The rusty, dried-blood hue of some of the hills indicated iron ore deposits; the drab green colors copper and brass. Because of the drone of the engine, everyone wore earplugs. Nobody talked. Soon, like everyone else, I fell asleep.

An hour later the Chinook descended steeply amid twisted cindery peaks. After it hit the ground, those of us headed for the Gardez firebase grabbed our rucksacks and ran off amid the wind and dust generated by the propellers. At the same time, another group of soldiers, waiting on the ground, ran inside. The crew threw off the mailbags. Then two men placed a hooded figure with a number scrawled on his back and his hands tied in flex cuffs onto the helicopter. In less than five minutes, the Chinook, its engine still beating loudly, roared back up into the sky.

The handcuffed man concealed under a burlap sack was a PUC, person under control, the U.S. military term for its temporary detainees in the War on Terrorism. It had become a verb: to take someone into custody was “to PUC him.” The men who had firmly placed the PUC onto the Chinook, en route to Bagram where he would be interrogated, were members of an Army Special Forces A-team at the Gardez firebase. But they didn’t look like any of the Green Berets I had so far encountered in my travels. These Green Berets had thick beards and wore traditional Afghan kerchiefs (deshmals) around their necks and over their mouths. Covering their heads were either Afghan pakols or ball caps with some gas station or firearms insignia. Except for their camouflage pants, M-4s, and Berettas, there was nothing to specifically identify them with the U.S. military. They looked like the photos of the Special Forces troops on horseback inside Afghanistan two years earlier that had mesmerized the American public and horrified the old guard at the Pentagon. They were all gummed with dust like sugarcoated cookies.

I threw my rucksack in the back of one of their Toyota pickups and we drove to the firebase, a few minutes away. There was a science fiction quality to the landscape, which seemed dead of all life-forms. Near the fort were two distinctive hills that the driver referred to as “the two tits.”

The Gardez firebase was a traditional yellow, mud-walled fort with the flags of the United States, the state of Texas, and the Florida Gators football team flying from the top of its ramparts. The flags were not necessarily inappropriate. Guardsmen technically are deployed by their state governors. Surrounded by barren hills on a tableland 7,600 feet above sea level, the fort looked like a cross between the Alamo and a French foreign legion outpost. Outside the walls were the familiar HESCO barriers and mountains of “tuna cans,” filled with Chinese and Russian ammunition that Special Forces had captured from “the bad guys.”

An armed Afghan militiaman opened the creaky gate. Inside, caked and matted with “moondust,” as everyone called it, stood double rows of up-armored Humvees, armed ground mobility vehicles, and Toyota Land Cruisers: the essential elements of a new kind of “convoy” warfare, in which Special Operations was adapting more from the Mad Max tactics of the Eritrean and Chadian guerrillas of recent decades than from the cow and oxen tank armies of the passing industrial age.[49]

Hidden behind the vehicles and veils of swirling dust were canvas tents, a few pissers, a crude shower facility, and the perennial Special Forces standby—a weight room. Like my escorts, everyone here was either a muscular Latino or a white guy dressed like an Afghan-cum-convict-cum-soldier. Half of them smoked. Like Col. Tom Wilhelm in Mongolia, they put Tabasco sauce on everything. Back at home most owned firearms. They bore an uncanny resemblance to the freelance journalists who had covered the mujahedin war against the Soviets two decades earlier here.

“Welcome to the Hotel Gardez,” said a smiling and bearded Maj. Kevin Holiday of Tampa, Florida. Maj. Holiday was the commander of this firebase and of another farther south in Zurmat. “Within these walls we have ODB-2070 and two A-teams, 2091 and 2093,” he told me in rapid-fire fashion. “Next door, living with an Afghan National Army unit, is 2076. Down at Zurmat is 2074. Most of us are 20th Group guardsmen from Florida and Texas, here for nine months.” There was also a tent full of active duty 7th Group guys on a ninety-day deployment—the Latinos. “We’re the damn Spartans,” Maj. Holiday said, smiling again, “physical warriors with college degrees.”

From Firebase Gardez, Maj. Holiday’s “Spartans” launched sweeps across Paktia Province, trying to snatch infiltrators from Pakistan. “All the bad guys are coming from Waziristan,” said Holiday, referring to a Pakistani tribal agency. “Because of the threat from Pakistan, there is not much civil affairs stuff going on here. It’s too dangerous.” Officially, the Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf was an ally of the U.S. But Musharraf, like his predecessors, and like the British before them, had insufficient control over the unruly tribal areas. Pakistan is the real enemy was a phrase that I quickly got used to hearing.

“Who was the PUC they put on the Chinook when I arrived?” I asked Maj. Holiday.

“We hit a compound. It had zero-time grenades, seven RPGs, Saudi passports, and books on jihad. The PUC lived there. We’ve got more people to round up from that hit.

“Everything we do,” he went on, repeating a phrase I had heard often already, “is ‘by,’ ‘through,’ ‘with’ the indigs. The ANA [Afghan National Army] comes along on our hits. Though the AMF [tribally based Afghan Militia Forces] are the real stand-up guys. They see themselves as our personal security element. Yeah, every time we go out on a mission we try to pick up a few hitchhikers—any Afghan who wants to be associated with what we do. Give the ANA and AMF the credit, put them forward in the eyes of the locals. We have to build up the ANA, it’s the only way a real Afghan state will emerge. But it’s naive to think you can simply disband the militias.”

The mud-walled fort was a “battle lab” for Special Forces, explained Maj. Holiday. The model was El Salvador in the 1980s: build up a national army while at the same time employing the paramilitaries, then help the paramilitaries to merge with the new army. The process would take years, a prospect Holiday relished. Another Special Forces officer, Lt. Col. David Maxwell, who had helped design the Basilan operation in the southern Philippines, had told me: counterinsurgency always requires the three p’s—“presence, patience, and persistence.”

Holiday, who had just turned forty, seemed the most clean-cut of the fort’s inhabitants. A civil engineer with a master’s degree from the University of South Florida and three small children back at home, he was chatty, grammatical, and intense. “God has put me here,” he told me matter-of-factly. “I’m a Christian,” meaning an evangelical. “The best kind of moral leader is one who is invisible. I believe character is more important than education. I have noticed that people who are highly educated and sophisticated do not like to take risks. But God can help someone who is highly educated to take big risks.”

Holiday had served with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division before returning to civilian life and joining Special Forces as a Florida National Guardsman. His long months of National Guard duty had not pleased his private employer, so he left his job and went to work as a civil engineer for the state of Florida, where he could wear his Army uniform to work. “You see all this around you,” he said, eyeing the dust, the engine grease, and mudbrick walls; “well, it’s the high point of my life and of everyone else here.”

Truly, looking at the American and Texas flags, the Alamo-style fort, the high-desert landscape with its limitless scale, and the Afghan-cum–Wild West regalia of the troops, they seemed to be living an American myth.

“What about the beards?” I asked.

Maj. Holiday smiled, deliberately rubbing his chin. “The other day I had a meeting at the provincial governor’s office,” he replied. “All these notables came in and rubbed their beards against mine, a sign of endearment and respect. I simply could not get my message across in these meetings unless I made some accommodations with the local culture and values. Afghanistan is not like other countries. It’s a throwback. You’ve got to compromise and go a little native. Another thing,” he went on, “ever since 5th Group was here in ‘01, Afghans have learned not to tangle with the bearded Americans. Afghanistan needs more SF, less conventional troops, but it’s not that easy because SF is already overstretched in its deployments.”

Holiday had a tough, lonely job. He was the middleman between the firebase and Bagram. Bagram wanted no beards, no alcohol, no porn, no pets, and very safe, well-thought-out missions. The guys here wanted to go wild and crazy, breaking all the rules just as 5th Group had done in the early days of the War on Terrorism, before the CJTF-180 was stood up; before the Big Army entered the picture, with its love of regulations and hatred of dynamic risk. A monastic existence of sorts had evolved here, with its own code of conduct.

Holiday had to sell the missions and plead understanding for the beards and ball caps with the C-JSOTF, which, in turn, was under similar pressures from the CJTF-180. On one occasion, when the guys were watching a particularly raunchy Italian porn movie during chow, Holiday came in and turned it off, saying, “That’s enough of that; keep that stuff hidden, please.” An angered silence ensued, but the iron major got his way. Holiday, though an evangelical Christian, was no prude. He was only being sensible. If we are going to flout the rules, he seemed to be saying, we have to at least be subtle about it.

I found a cot inside one of the tents and unraveled my sleeping bag on it, then walked around, climbed the ramparts, talked to people, and in general let myself be amazed by the sawdust landscape and the dust devils constantly kicking up in the direction of the “two tits.” Chief Warrant Officer III Neville Shorter helped me get settled, finding me some extra blankets to put over the sleeping bag during the subfreezing nights. Chief Shorter, an African-American man with a gray beard who had been a real Special Forces stud in his younger years at the dive school in Key West, had aged into a good-natured, fine-mannered gentleman. His mastering, almost mothering type of personality, which quietly directed everything from inventories to vehicle maintenance, was the essence of what James Jones meant when he idealized those who really knew how “to soldier.”

I can’t remember whether it was Chief Shorter or someone else who warned me that I would have to pass “the sniff test.” As I had suspected, not everyone here was Special Forces. There was a sprinkling of OGAs, representatives from other governmental agencies, which usually meant the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the like. They were in a similar situation as I. To see the front line in the War on Terrorism it was necessary to stay at a Special Forces firebase. And no matter who you were, if the “boys” didn’t like you, they made sure you didn’t see much. Maj. Gen. Lambert at Fort Bragg, Gen. Brown at SOCOM, and a few others might have gotten me here, but ultimately it would be the team sergeants who decided what I could actually do. And that’s the way it should be, I thought.

I had started growing a beard a week before my arrival here. Still, the first days were a bit rough. No, I couldn’t go out on this patrol mission, it was too dangerous. No, I couldn’t go out on that mission either. While waiting to see if I passed the sniff test, I met “Big Country.” Big Country had a big reddish beard, and was from Louisiana. He sported an LSU ball cap. He lived next door in another mud-walled fort, which belonged to the local PRT (provincial reconstruction team), a civil affairs element stood up by the CJTF-180. Big Country was a “terp,” an interpreter. He spoke passable Pushtu and gave me a tour of the nearby town of Gardez.

A scraggly dust-bleached growth of eucalyptus and poplar trees in the otherwise milk-coffee color of death heralded Gardez. Then came a massive and venerable glacis, topped by a yawning line of ramparts, where the provincial governor was headquartered, and the Taliban and Soviets before him. The ancient citadel had been, for a short time in the first centuries of the Common Era, the seat of the Kushanids, a dynasty that spread Buddhism throughout the Indus Valley into China. Later, in the early Islamic period, Gardez became a base for the Kharijites, a tribal movement opposed to the centralizing tendencies of the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus. More recently, Gardez was known as a center of the Ghilzai Pushtuns, a major branch of the Pushtuns that was well represented in the Soviet-sponsored regimes of the late 1970s and the 1980s, as well as in the resistance against them.[50]

By the standards of Afghanistan in 2003, Gardez was a success story:

no massive violence, not even an atmosphere of tension. By any other standard Gardez was a wreck: crumbling storefronts lined by water channels where water had not run in decades, and which were now filled with garbage. (Besides a quarter-century of war, Afghanistan was in the seventh year of a drought.) The pungent smells of spices and rotting fruit, the wooden-poled pavilions, the turbans, the felt and topi caps with inlaid mirrors, the garishly painted Bedford “jingle” trucks, and the deep chocolate complexions of the inhabitants all indicated the closeness of India.

Run down by war though it was, Gardez still felt a lot safer than Arauca on the Colombian-Venezuelan border. Roman Catholicism provided Colombia with much less social cohesion than Islam provided Afghanistan.

Beautiful little dark-haired girls in flamboyant-colored fabrics waved at our vehicle. “They’re burka-ed when they’re thirteen, have breast-fed five kids by the time they’re thirty. By then, they look like sixty,” Big Country remarked. After the Taliban fell, the burka, which conceals a woman’s face and the rest of her body, had been really removed only in certain areas of Kabul. The fact was that the Taliban, being tribal Pushtuns, were closer to the indigenous culture than many of the Westernized Afghans favored by the Americans. In the Philippines, T & A meant “tits and ass”; in Afghanistan, as U.S. soldiers quipped, it meant “toes and ankles,” because that’s all you could see.

Big Country pointed to a firetrap of a building housing a restaurant with private rooms, where he held talks with local informers. He took me to where local timber was loaded for transport to Pakistan; the Soviets had deliberately deforested large parts of Afghanistan to deny the mujahedin cover and concealment. The process was continuing, even though it had been outlawed by Karzai’s government. “This is the most corrupt place in town,” he said.

Returning to the firebase, Big Country pointed out a village where he had gone “for shits and giggles”—that is, to climb a mountain, inspect a minefield, and talk and drink chai (tea) with the hajis, the nickname that American military personnel had given the Afghans. I noticed that Big Country was great with the local kids, stopping the vehicle, shaking hands, talking to them at length, handing out Power Bars and other treats. He wasn’t deeply read in the country’s history or culture. By academic standards he was no area expert. He had simply glommed on to the language and treated people as people. Thus he was terrifically useful.

When I arrived back at the firebase, a convoy was preparing to leave on a “presence patrol” in the direction of the Pakistan border to the north. “Could I go along?” “No, too dangerous.” Then: “Wait, give us a minute.” Finally, a sergeant emerged from the operations center and told me to pack my gear, “Yeah, you can come along.”

I threw on my body armor—a flak vest with steel rifle plates—and grabbed my helmet and day pack, in which I stuffed some MREs and a sleeping bag, in the event we didn’t return by nightfall. Cpl. Dan Johnston, a counter-narcotics policeman from Lake Tahoe, Nevada, handed me a deshmal: “You’ll need it over your mouth and nose against the dust,” he said.[51]

Knowing what to bring and what to leave behind was always problematic, something made worse by Bagram’s utter ignorance of conditions in the field. A public affairs spokesman for the CJTF-180 had told me I should “mentally prepare myself” to ruck many miles if I was to be embedded with Special Forces. But Special Forces, I learned upon arrival at Gardez, did very little rucking in Afghanistan. The desert terrain favored convoys, partly because you couldn’t carry enough water in your rucksack to sustain you. I had also been told that Gardez would be warmer than Bagram; it was colder. All I could do was keep filtering my gear. I left my computer and duffel bag behind at Bagram, and split my day pack off from my backpack when I left Gardez.

Another complication was the body armor which I could not take off during patrols, so it was impossible to remove layers of clothing as the day became hotter. With little vegetation to retain the heat, the temperature in Afghanistan dropped at night like the dark side of the moon. You had a choice: you could either freeze at night and in the dawn hours, or bake during the day. I chose to freeze at night.

We were a convoy of eight vehicles. There was one Toyota Land Cruiser filled with counterintelligence guys (the same category of Green Beret that in the Philippines had roamed the ports and whorehouses), two ground mobility vehicles fitted with M2 .50-caliber machine guns, and five up-armored Humvees: Humvees with reinforced roofs and doors and mounted guns that had the clunky look of World War II vehicles. I rode in the Land Cruiser with the counterintelligence guys.

Everyone carried M-4s and Berettas, while some of the 7th Group advisors had shotguns. “We’re a bunch of Kuchi nomads trolling for fire,” one of the counterintelligence guys remarked, referring to the funky, gypsy-like nomads whose tents littered the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. He then organized the cassette music for the trip: Latin salsa and “Afghan road rage,” or “country eastern” as they called the local tunes. We flew two flags: an American flag on one of the up-armored Humvees and the Confederate flag on another. “It’s not a racist flag, it’s a flag of regional pride,” was the explanation I got.

One Green Beret on the convoy besides Chief Shorter was black, and he joked about the Confederate flag. He told me about a deployment he had had in South Africa. “The Zulus could not believe that I wasn’t one of them, or that I wasn’t from southern Sudan. I had a white Afrikaner translator with me, who explained to them in their tribal language where I was actually from. The irony that I could only talk to my African brothers through this so-called racist Afrikaner was not lost on me. Heck, the Afrikaners are just another African tribe, though their skin happens to be white.”

Within half an hour of leaving Gardez I was matted with dust and my day pack had turned from black to solid brown. I was fifty-one years old. Why was I doing this? I was full of doubt my last night amid the pampered luxury of Dubai. In Bagram, the night before flying to Gardez, I was again doubtful. But now the past and future, and every other place on the planet besides here, did not exist. I was living completely for the moment: the ultimate happiness. Every trip followed the same pattern.

The desert receded and we entered a string of villages with fruit orchards. Aspen and poplar trees lined berms, turning golden yellow in this Afghan autumn. Girls in spectacular ruby robes smiled and waved at us. There was an unbroken line of cannabis fields, with thick bunches of marijuana drying on rooftops and piled high in trucks. The guys who worked counter-narcotics in civilian life just loved it. They could not stop snapping pictures. They saw the idea of destroying these crops as sheer lunacy that would only mire the country in deeper poverty.

There were no houses as such, only immense mud-walled forts and compounds just like the firebase, each constituting a hidden maze within. We were in the territory of the Ahmadzai branch of the Pushtuns. Two or three compounds comprised a village, with only a narrow dirt alley separating one compound from another. This was the medieval architecture of paranoia and distrust, even as it provided relief from the wind and blowing dirt. The mid-twentieth-century expert on Afghanistan Louis Dupree had referred to such compounds as “mud curtains” that kept the outside world at bay, because the outside world usually came “to extract from, not bring anything into” these enclosed universes. They made Afghanistan an “inward-looking society.”¹³ The architecture made finding terrorists that much more difficult. “Bin Laden could be in one of these villages and we’d never find him,” one of the guys told me, completely serious, gazing at one mud-walled compound after another.

A few hours later we reached Sayed Kurram, less than twenty miles from the border with Pakistan, where there had just been fighting between the Mangal and Totakhel Pushtuns. You could tell if a village was friendly by the behavior of the children: if they came out and waved you were welcome; if they didn’t you weren’t. Silent streets meant trouble. The worst sign of trouble was if a convoy stopped and the kids slowly filtered away; it might mean an explosive device was about to go off. Special Forces troops always brought along extra Power Bars for the kids on these trips and took pictures with them—anything they could think of to break down barriers.

Sayed Kurram was somewhat friendly, judging by the handful of kids hanging around us. The counterintelligence guys took the lead in talking to the local police, and exchanging some flags and uniforms with them for the sake of goodwill. Presence patrols were not only a way for the Americans to demonstrate that they were here, but also to dissuade bad behavior. The patrols often went to the remotest locations for no other reason than to show that the bearded ones (as Special Forces was known locally) could go anywhere, anytime. The call on the chief of police at Sayed Kurram had a specific reason, though: to collect a stockpile of Soviet artillery and mortars that locals were willing to hand over. Explosives, ordnance, and demolition experts who had come along with the Green Berets took possession of the weapons and would later destroy them with C-4 explosives.

There was much chai consumption. Intelligence was best gathered not by asking direct questions, but simply by establishing relationships. The problem was that the counterintelligence guys spoke insufficient Pushtu and had to work through interpreters, making the conversations awkward. Two years into the War on Terrorism, the linguistic situation was a scandal. Only when the other Special Forces groups and representatives from other government agencies could converse with the locals in exotic languages to the degree that 7th Group was able to do in Spanish in Latin America would authentic human intelligence emerge in sufficient amounts.

The real labor began only after dark, when the convoy returned to the firebase: The Green Berets went over every inch of the vehicles and weaponry with compressed air hoses, to get rid of the corrosive dust. It took hours, and was essential after every patrol. U.S. Army vehicles were designed for the soft soil of Central Europe, where it was thought the Soviets would one day be confronted, not for the pulverized crust of the Near Eastern deserts. Mechanical problems were legion, and the mechanics were the true kings of the firebase, especially as the rocks and gravel of this wasteland ruined the suspension systems of the up-armors.

Very late at night we gathered on Bukharan carpets to share in a feast prepared by the local tribal militia, which included lamb kebab, savory pilaf with raisins, spicy dumplings, sweet melons, pomegranates, and so forth. “This is the only pleasure we have. The generals have taken away the rest,” one of the sergeants observed. “No beer, no porn, no nothing. If they knew about this meal with the militia they’d probably forbid this, too.”

In fact, morale was great, as everyone knew and privately admitted, fighting as they were al-Qaeda, the HIG, and “Johnnie Taliban.” Before going to bed, we stood around a potbellied stove to warm ourselves before diving under sleeping bags and blankets in the freezing desert night. “The dismal cold reminds me of deployments in Korea,” somebody said. “No, it’s better than Korea. We can break doors down and arrest people here,” another responded.

The next morning no patrol was scheduled. I had heard that the PRT (provincial reconstruction team) in the adjacent fort was going out on a mission, so I asked Chief Shorter if he would introduce me to the PRT guys. “They don’t think much of us bearded ones,” the chief warned, “but let’s go next door to the 10th Mountain hootch and see.” Going out with the PRT was no problem. I was on the road again.

The provincial reconstruction teams were a new and trendy concept in the autumn of 2003. The PRTs did the very things that the media loved: civil and humanitarian affairs—nation-building, that is. The PRTs were interagency, combining different military units and governmental departments into a single package. They constituted a recognition that in war zones the military, rather than the civilian charities (nongovernmental organizations), was best positioned to carry out civil affairs. The PRTs, while part of the conventional Army, represented a form of unconventional warfare, for humanitarian aid, besides winning “hearts and minds,” and thus breaking the link between the insurgents and the general population, was a useful cover for informal intelligence gathering. The global media was less comfortable with this aspect of the PRTs.

The PRT mission in which I took part was composed of the 407th Army Civil Affairs Battalion out of Arden Hills, Minnesota, a combat escort from the 10th Mountain Division, Afghan National Army troops, and interpreters. The State Department representative happened to be in Kabul that day, so the only civilian besides myself was a rugged leathery-skinned official from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who with his bush hat reminded me of the Australian dinosaur hunter in the movie Jurassic Park.

We were six vehicles: two Toyota pickups and four scout trucks or Humvees, fitted with MK-19 automatic grenade launchers. The object was to drive south to a remote village in the Shah-i-Kot mountains near the Pakistan border, in order to inspect a school that was under construction. The journey was to take ninety minutes, according to the map. Maj. Dean Fremling, an Airborne Ranger from Milwaukee, was the mission commander. The brief he delivered was simple: “If we’re ambushed, lay down suppressing fire and keep moving. We’ll now have a last-minute piss break. We roll in ten.”

Ten minutes later we left the HESCO barriers behind us, and Maj. Fremling began telling me about Ranger school at Fort Benning in the same vein as Col. Wilhelm in Mongolia had done: “I have never been so cold, hot, thirsty, and tired in my whole life.” Dean Fremling was bald, hairless, utterly self-effacing, and forgettable looking. He was also lively, talkative, blessed with a great disposition, and full of interesting tales from Thailand, the Arctic, the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the Costa Rican jungles, and elsewhere on the planet, where he had either gone on a deployment or as a tourist.

Passing an encampment of Kuchi nomads, he briefed me on a PRT program of vaccinating children and animals against disease. I worried that the Americans were being too altruistic; nobody aside from the people actually helped would know about such programs, even as high-profile projects with political payoffs, like rebuilding the ring road connecting the major cities, were behind schedule.

Next we passed a rock quarry where Maj. Fremling told me he had seen a group of Afghans chipping away with only one shovel. “They said they needed new rocks. No shit, in a wasteland of rocks they needed new ones. They explained that the old rocks had too much dust on them to be mortared. So they wanted new, clean rocks. I was able to get them some extra shovels.

“Stay on the goat trail,” Fremling continued, this time into the radio for the benefit of the other vehicles. “Goat shit means we’re safe from mines.” Then the major complained about his fair complexion and that of the rest of the team. “Most of us are of Scandinavian descent, so we can never blend in with the people of these war-torn countries. We’re not like the Puerto Ricans in 7th Group, who look like Pushtuns. There are no counterinsurgencies in Scandinavia.”

Fremling took out some Copenhagen chewing tobacco. The landscape got increasingly mountainous, so bare it resembled a child’s sandpit. The familiar squads of dark-haired young girls in flowing robes waved at us in a village. “FFN,” Fremling said, “Full facial nudity. That’s all there is here. But they’re not in school. The village elders give us all these excuses. The truth is that outside of the urban areas, most Afghans don’t want their girls to go to school.” I had heard similar reports from nonmilitary experts, too, who worried that the Americans were becoming resented by the Pushtun population for forcing their values upon it in regard to women’s rights.

A stream of clear blue water appeared suddenly out of the ashen wasteland. We gasped in appreciation. Then came more mud-walled fortresses with crumbling towers. The GPS device indicated that we were still far from the school; the road that appeared on the map had been washed away in a flash flood, so we just followed the wadi. One of the pickups could not make it up a hill. As it strained and belched black smoke, the driver said, “It ain’t got enough pony, it’s on its fifth radiator, poor girl.” It had to be yanked up with a chain at a forty-five-degree angle by a 10th Mountain Humvee. A few hours more of blowing moondust and we arrived at Babukhel, the site of the school. It had taken five and a half hours instead of one and a half. No one was surprised.

The school was supposed to have been 50 percent completed, according to the bill submitted by the Afghan NGO contractor. The foundation appeared finished, along with a security wall, but they were not built correctly, said an expert with the team. “They mixed too much dirt with the cement. One winter and this whole thing is done for. It’s not even 20 percent completed. And these are not our construction standards; we certainly don’t expect that—they’re theirs, the local standards.”

Fremling commented, “We won’t get back to the base till dark. It’ll be an entire day with a convoy just to keep one contractor honest. But that’s what a lot of these days are like. The road is gone, the school is far from done. People at home have no idea how difficult the conditions are here.” I thought of a remark by a late-nineteenth-century British army colonel, C. E. Callwell, that small wars are “campaigns against nature.”¹⁴

Everything was possible in Afghanistan—with years and patience. The empires that had succeeded in bringing order and a better material life to their colonies had had both of those elements. But it was unclear if the Americans did. A decade-long presence in Afghanistan was not a pessimistic scenario, but an optimistic one.

“We represent the Karzai government,” one of the American soldiers said through a terp, as locals gathered around him. “We’re trying to get this school built for you.” Looking at the villagers with their beards and turbans, and their dead eyes and blank expressions, the fellow from the Department of Agriculture—his gnarled, tanned face caked in dust—quietly remarked: “They have loyalty to no one beyond their tribe. They are easily bent and intimidated by whoever the power happens to be at the moment. They just want to be left alone.” We were nothing to them.

On the way back we took another route—never establish patterns, never use the same route twice. This route was much faster, and dustier, if that was possible—a veritable ocean of red and mustard yellow powder, broken only by heaps of black boulders.

Returning after dark I checked in on Col. Tony Hunter, a reservist from South Kansas City, Missouri, who commanded the Gardez PRT out of the 10th Mountain fort. A police officer in civilian life, he was tall, with short gray hair and a conventionally rugged appearance. He provided more background about the PRTs.

“The PRT concept was the brainchild of the CJTF-180 staff,” he told me, spitting tobacco juice into a bottle in his hootch. “It was invented to extend the power of the provincial governments. President Karzai had said he wanted it started in Gardez, where there was a high Taliban population and a lot of tribal conflict close to the border with Pakistan. So in December 2002 we stood up four PRT teams.

“Basically,” Col. Hunter went on, “the PRT is an Army civil affairs unit that is remoted out, and employs either the 10th Mountain or the 82nd Airborne for base security, depending upon the deployment. The PRT uses humanitarian aid money provided by DOD [the Department of Defense]. It gives us influence without the stigma of occupation. The goal is to civilianize the PRTs by embedding reps from the State Department and USAID.

“You saw the road today,” he went on, continuing to spit tobacco. “You saw how bad and difficult it was. A lot of the world is like that. That’s why aviation assets will be critical for the future. There will also be a huge need for desert-worthy vehicles for this kind of stuff. We’re finding that Toyotas are better than Humvees, and that the commercially sold phones are better than the military-issue ones. We’re learning how to adapt to this new world in a low-tech style. Sure, we lose two people a week here in combat. It’s the price of doing good work.”

When I left Col. Hunter it was completely dark, with no moon out yet. Taking out my red-tinted flashlight to negotiate my way back to the Special Forces fort, I noticed small groups of soldiers holding Christian services with candles under the stars. It was not a holiday—it was something they did every night. Back at the fort, I learned that I had to move tents, as mine was being readied for a team of Navy SEALs arriving the next day for a hit. I moved in with the 7th Group Puerto Ricans, who had extra blankets and a liner for my sleeping bag.

The next morning the Green Berets kitted up for another presence patrol, this time down a road known as “sniper alley” near the Pakistan border. One sergeant downloaded the route from a computer into his GPS device. It was so dusty that Alex, one of the 7th Group advisors from Puerto Rico, had to clean not only his M-4, but his magazine loader too. Alex’s father and grandfather had fought in Vietnam and Korea, respectively. “We Puerto Ricans have done our share,” he remarked good-naturedly.

The mission brief was at 9:30 a.m. “Watch the fucking ridgelines,” warned Ed, a police officer from Dade County, Florida, with a gray beard, friendly eyes, and a permanent out-of-bed look. “It can get ugly quick. Decide in advance who the second driver will be if the driver is hit. Every vehicle is responsible for the one in front.”

I had a seat in the up-armor driven by team Master Sgt. Henry Peraza, a jocular, dark-complexioned Cuban-American who complained in jest about “white boys” who didn’t look Pushtun enough. My job was to feed ammunition to the gunner riding on top in case we were ambushed. Forget about keeping my professional distance. With this bunch, either you helped out or you didn’t go along.

“Practice feeding that ammo, Bob,” another one of the 7th Group advisors told me. “I will probably run out of ammo, because I’m going to let ’em know just who we are.”

I noticed that there were now three American flags flying atop the fort. “What for?” I asked.

“We get more patriotic by the day,” someone said.

Another soldier was cleaning his MK-19 .40-caliber auto grenade launcher on a makeshift table. “It’s a labor of love,” he told me. “It’s like a wife or girlfriend. You put all your passion into it, then you move on to the next one and forget.” It was an unwritten law, particularly among those from the National Guard, that you needed to have at least one ex-wife to qualify for membership in the Special Forces community. I recall one conversation between a colonel and a sergeant:

“Son, where is the rest of your body armor? Do you want to be killed?”

“Well, sir, according to my alimony settlements, my first ex-wife gets half my retirement income, and the second gets the other half. So I’m not sure.”

I put on my body armor and stuffed my cargo pockets with earplugs, Power Bars, and small mineral water bottles. But just as we were ready to leave the compound, the mission was put on hold. A medium-value target had just been positively identified walking into a meeting with the supposedly pro-American provincial governor of Gardez, and the decision was made to PUC him. The presence patrol was canceled in favor of this operation.

Ed, the Dade County policeman, did a “drive-by,” checking out the location where the snatch would occur. “The alleys are real narrow; we can’t use Humvees. There are lots of kids hanging around; bring Power Bars.” Instead of Humvees, two Toyota Land Cruisers were dispatched, with Master Sgt. Henry Peraza driving the lead car. Peraza wore a shalwar kameez, pakol, and deshmal with body armor underneath. On close inspection this dark-complexioned Cuban-American really didn’t look Pushtun. But for a moment or two he could fool anybody, and that was all the time that was needed.

Because only two cars went on the snatch, the rest of us suddenly had nothing to do, and people zoned out in the chow hall watching a really bad science fiction movie.

The Land Cruisers returned several hours later with four PUCs. Peraza and his crew had spent most of their time waiting around, talking to street kids, after they had decided to set up a roadblock in typical state trooper style. “Did they resist?” someone asked. “No,” Master Sgt. Peraza said. “Their hands shot up over their heads like jack-in-the-boxes.”

The PUCs were brought to a detention facility behind the fort. They were low-priority detainees. After a few days they either had to be released or sent up to Bagram for a higher level of interrogation. In Bagram they could be held only a short period as well, before they were either sent home or on to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. You could wake them every few hours, disorient them, but that was about it. Well-documented accounts of prisoner abuse by Americans notwithstanding, prisoners knew that in the vast majority of cases the Americans would not mistreat them nearly to the degree that the Soviets and other Afghans had. Usually, an Afghan willing to be uncomfortable for a few days could stiff the American interrogators with impunity. Everyone complained about this.

One of the detainees did talk, though. As a result of the information he had provided, we were suddenly going out on a nighttime hit of a compound just outside Gardez. There would be no time for the steak and shrimp dinner that had been prepared.

Every aspect of these hits was planned, and written up on either a 5-W form for low-risk operations, or in a con-op (concept of operation) for a higher risk attack: what vehicles would be in the convoy, what their order would be in the lineup, where exactly everyone would sit in each vehicle, the blood types and social security numbers of everyone, the communication frequencies (commo freeks) to be used, and so forth. This particular convoy would be searching for a large cache of weapons being held at the home of a sister of a Taliban subcommander who was an HVT—high-value target.

This time I was in an up-armor driven by Sgt. First Class Matt Costen of Austin, Texas. In the darkness the world was consumed by dust and the sound of rumbling engines. “Last piss break before we leave,” someone shouted. I was squeezed in the back with sharp points of metal everywhere. My elbows were jammed between the armored door and the ammunition boxes. The dusty boot of the gunner riding on top dangled down into the vehicle, right in my face.

“It’s okay to have diarrhea of the mouth, so long as I copy you clearly,” a voice said over the multiple-band intra-team radio.

“And away we go, boys and girls,” Sgt. Costen announced.

Soon we were amidst bazaar music and nighttime crowds of destitute people who were strolling under weak, flickering lights in the streets of Gardez. We turned into a gridwork of alleys separated by high mud walls. Then it happened like a play in slow motion. Green Berets fanned out of the vehicles covering their assigned fields of fire. Several men in black turbans and beards were PUCed under a high-wattage light along a wall, then made to sit in squatting positions, which they assumed stoically. A terp came out to interview them. When nothing unexpected happened, these operations had little more drama than pulling over to fix a flat tire on the road at night.

Our Humvee was assigned a blocking position. Thus, we spent two hours standing around in the cold as another team entered the compound. I noticed Sgt. Costen’s ball cap, “Heritage Firearms.” He explained, “It’s the place I buy my guns from.

“I was in 5th Group in active duty,” he told me, “then worked as a substitute teacher and as a cop in black projects. I’m very religious. I believe we’re all from the same creator. After 9/11, Alex Marco—you know, the 18 Delta [medic]—called me and asked if I wanted to join him and Henry [Peraza] and a group of other guys in an A-team, in the 3rd of the 20th [3rd Battalion of the 20th Special Forces Group]. It was because of Alex and Henry that I rejoined the National Guard.

“See those PUCs,” Costen went on, “they’re probably innocent. Just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The real object of the mission is to treat them respectfully, so that after they are released they’ll tell their families how different the Americans are from the Russians. They know we have to detain them; it’s how we treat them that counts. That’s what I learned working the black projects: build up rapport in the community.” Sgt. Costen then looked up at the brilliant starscape, pointing out the Seven Sisters and Taurus the Bull, with the wound made by Orion the Hunter, which lay near the horizon.

The operation yielded only a few grenades, det cords, and AK-47s. But one of the PUCs would turn out to be a Taliban general who had fought against the Americans in Operation Anaconda in December 2001. The other detainees were released immediately. “The Russians would have shot them,” Costen said. Having covered the war in the 1980s, I knew that he had a point.

Everyone was disappointed. “If you want big fish, we need to be over the border in Pakistan; that’s where most of the bad guys are,” someone repeated yet again. Back at the chow hall we devoured the steak and shrimp that the cook had kept warm, washed down by Gatorade. There was a discussion about which Gatorade flavor was better, the Cool Blue or the purple Riptide Rush. It was almost like discussing different wine vintages. The cold was so severe we could see our breaths.

One of the team sergeants announced: “All right, guys, the general and the colonel are coming down from Bagram to see us tomorrow. So hide your porn and hide your booze, and hide them well. They’ve got a hard-on for that stuff.” That set off a series of complaints against REMFs (rear-echelon mother-fuckers: a World War II acronym, actually). “Will tomorrow be a dog-and-pony show?” I asked. “Worse,” I was told, “a real ECE [equestrian-canine extravaganza].”

It wasn’t that bad, actually. Col. Herd flew down the next morning with Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, who was visiting from Fort Bragg. Brig. Gen. Jones, the quintessential towering Texan, had recently assumed Maj. Gen. Geoff Lambert’s old job as the commander of all Green Berets, and was himself slated for promotion to major general. Along with Col. Herd, Gen. Jones telegraphed his awareness of all the jokes and ribald complaining at his expense. It was part of the process, they both knew. National Guardsmen were particularly unintimidated by the brass, because as civilians they were even less career-oriented than active duty noncoms, who themselves cared little about their reputation except among their fellow NCOs. What made these guardsmen so valuable was that they had no motives whatsoever to be anything but brutally honest. The general and the colonel knew that, and appreciated it.

Maj. Holiday arranged a convoy to take Gen. Jones and Col. Herd two hours south by dust-wracked road to the Special Forces firebase at Zurmat. There, I asked one of the Special Forces trainers about the quality of the newly emerging Afghan National Army.

He told me, “They’re better than the Hondurans I’ve trained. They can do their own night patrols. They hate the Paks, which is good. They really want to mix it up and fight over the border. They’re disciplined; they’re not thugs. They won’t beat you up and steal your money. Wherever we put them, peace breaks out. The bazaar in Zurmat has doubled in size since we deployed them. The only problem is that we need more of them.”

Accompanying Gen. Jones and Col. Herd was Lt. Col. Marcus Custer of Mobile, Alabama. “The area where I’m from we call the Red Neck Riviera. Now I know what you’re thinking,” he told me in laughter. “Yeah, I’ve got relatives who live in trailers, who’ve never been thirty miles from their home. I eat grits.” In fact, Lt. Col. Custer was an ethnic Cuban who had been separated from his family because of Castro, and was adopted by southerners. “So I’m not really related to the Gen. Custer.”

Lt. Col. Custer had shown up just as it had become clear that the SEAL mission had been canceled, so he and I moved into my old tent, where we had many late-night bull sessions. Rather than return to Bagram with Gen. Jones and Col. Herd, he had remained at Gardez in order to, as he explained, “help Maj. Holiday get approval for a mission.”

Lt. Col. Custer was a 19th Group National Guardsman and a customs officer in civilian life. Like the other guardsmen, his lack of ambition made him doubly honest. “You see,” he told me, “there is almost nothing that goes on at these firebases that Maj. Holiday and the other majors are not fully capable of deciding on their own. But that’s not how the system works. As a lieutenant colonel, merely by being here I can add a little weight to his request.”

One night while cleaning an old Lee-Enfield rifle on a Bukharan carpet, Custer provided me his theory on the problem with the War on Terrorism, as it was being currently waged in Afghanistan. Later, I checked his theory with numerous other sources on the front lines, and it panned out. It wasn’t really his theory so much as everyone’s—that is, when people were being honest with each other. Sadly, it was a typical American story.

I will put what he and others told me in my own words: The essence of military “transformation”—the Washington buzzword of recent years—is not new tactics or new weapons systems, but bureaucratic reorganization. In fact, such bureaucratic reorganization was achieved in the weeks following 9/11 by the 5th Special Forces Group based out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, whose handful of A-teams, with help from the CIA and the Air Force, conquered Afghanistan by themselves.

The relationship between 5th Group and the highest levels of Pentagon officialdom had, in those precious, historic weeks of autumn 2001, evinced the flat bureaucratic hierarchy which distinguished not only al-Qaeda but also the most innovative global corporations. It was an arrangement that the finest business schools and management consultants would have been impressed with. The captains and team sergeants of 5th Group’s A-teams did not communicate to the top brass through a yawning, vertical chain of command. No, they weren’t even given specific instructions. They were just told to link up with the indigs (in this case the Northern Alliance) and help them defeat the Taliban. And to figure the details out as they went along.

The result was the empowerment of master sergeants to call in B-52 strikes. The 5th Special Forces Group was no longer a small part of a massive defense bureaucracy. It had become a veritable corporate spin-off, commissioned to do a specific job its very own way, in the manner of a top consultant.

The upshot was that con-ops (concepts of operation) were approved orally within minutes, whereas now in Afghanistan, two years later, it took three days of paperwork, with bureaucratic layers of lieutenant colonels and other senior officers delaying operations and diluting them of risk, so when attacks on suspect compounds finally took place, they often turned up dry holes.

There was no scandal here, no one specifically to blame. It was just the way that the Big Army—that is, Big Government, that is, Washington—always did things. It was the same reason a Joint Special Operations Task Force had been stood up in Zamboanga, in the southern Philippines, when a much smaller and leaner forward operating base would have done just as well. It was standard Washington “pile on.” Every part of the military wanted a piece of Afghanistan.

(Indeed, the further removed I got from Colombia, the more brilliant the Colombia model looked. In Colombia, the Green Berets were frustrated only because the rules of engagement were too restrictive. But that was a matter of high politics, not of military organization. Organizationally, the forward operating base located in the prefab cheesebox on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá and staffed by Lt. Col. Duke Christie’s A-team represented the perfect lean and mean structure for managing an unconventional war. Of course, such a bureaucratic structure threatened the Big Army.)

Soon after 5th Group had helped the Northern Alliance take Kabul, the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan was consolidated by the 10th Mountain Division, among other branches of the conventional military. By 2002, a Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF-180) was stood up, with a Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (C-JSOTF) built inside that. Bagram became a base of thousands of troops, many of them REMFs. The days of the innovative flat hierarchy were over. It was back to the dinosauric, vertical bureaucracy of the industrial age, the greatest single impediment to America’s ability to wage a successful worldwide counterinsurgency.

As Lt. Col. Custer explained patiently to me: “It’s simply tragic. We don’t need Bagram. We have many more people there than we need, and they’re clogging up operations. Half of Bagram should be at K2 [Karsi-Khanabad] in Uzbekistan, where people like me wouldn’t be draining aviation resources needed by the firebases. CJTF-180 is located just too far forward. Bagram should be a lean FOB with a few shower units; that’s it. And these firebases should be AOBs [advanced operating bases] for even smaller garrisons of special operators located even further out. That’s UW [unconventional war].”

People referred to Bagram as “the self-licking ice cream cone,” which existed for the sake of PT (physical training) in the morning and a PX. If you visited only Bagram, nobody in Special Forces considered that you had even been to Afghanistan.

Custer continued, articulating better what so many others told me: “Big Army just doesn’t get it.” He smiled, like a persevering parent dealing with the antics of a child. “It doesn’t get the beards, the ball caps, the windows rolled down so that we can shake hands with the hajis and hand out Power Bars to the kids, as we do our patrols. Big Army has regulations against all of that. Big Army doesn’t understand that before you can subvert a people you’ve got to love them, and love their culture.

“The National Guard units of SF are more like the original SF and OSS than the active duty units,” he went on, “because the guard tolerates personal peculiarities. You can’t be effective in the War on Terrorism unless you break the rules of the Big Army. Army people are systems people. They think the system is going to protect them. Green Berets don’t trust the system. That’s really why you see us with all these guns. We know the Kevlar helmets may not stop a 7.62mm round. As they’ll tell you in 1st Group, you might as well wear a Thai Buddha around your neck. So we wear ball caps, they’re more comfortable. When you see a gunner atop an up-armor, bouncing up and down in the dust, breaking his vertebrae almost, let him wear a ball cap and he’s happy. His morale is high, because simply by wearing that ball cap he’s convinced himself that he’s fucking the system.

“Maybe in the future we’ll be incorporated into a new and reformed CIA rather than into the Big Army. Any bureaucracy that is interested in results more than in regulations will be an improvement. You see, I can say these things—I’m a guardsman.”

Custer explained the upcoming proposed mission, for which he was helping Maj. Holiday with the con-op. In northern Paktia, a certain Maulvi Jalani was making a lot of trouble for the Karzai government.[52] Jalani was an ally of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former mujahedin leader associated with Saudi Wahabi extremists such as Osama bin Laden. Maj. Holiday wanted to hit Jalani’s compound near Sayed Kurram, where I had gone on the presence patrol a few days earlier.

But Bagram was risk-averse. It wanted helicopters employed in the mission, to reduce the risk of casualties. However, due to bureaucratic changes a generation earlier, Special Forces no longer had its own dedicated air support at the battalion level. It now had to fight for “air” with other Special Operations elements. Since the 10th Mountain Division “owned” helicopters, a piece of the mission could, according to Custer, be farmed out to 10th Mountain in order to get them. This was how different parts of the Big Army did business with each other these days. As the saying went, Amateurs discussed tactics, and rank amateurs discussed grand strategy, while the professionals discussed logistics.

Another freezing night sleeping in all my clothes. In the morning I got word of a mission that ODA-2076 next door was executing with its Afghan National Army contingent. I grabbed my body armor and fell in with a crew in a ground mobility vehicle. I rode in the back with two ANA soldiers: an ethnic Tajik and an ethnic Hazara manning a PKM, a Russian general purpose machine gun.[53] This really was a national army taking shape, I thought. It was not as if the government had merely recruited local Pushtuns and called it a national army.

Outside the sand barriers, the eight-vehicle convoy halted on the road. After five minutes had passed, one of the gunners peered up at the front of the convoy and proclaimed in a bored, knowing manner: “A cluster fuck. That’s what they call this in proper English. They’re waiting for final approval by radio from Bagram, even though the mission was chopped last night. Too many fucking layers. Too many chiefs, not enough Indians,” he said, as though stealing Lt. Col. Custer’s thoughts. “Bureaucracy. Big Government,” he went on. “By the time we get moving, every Afghan for miles will know we’re going to hit a compound. Fuck.”

Passing through Gardez we were mobbed by cheering kids—a good

sign. Two years on, the Americans were still welcome in Afghanistan. “Thank you,” they kept saying in heavily accented English. We drove through the grit for almost two hours, till we had passed Zurmat. Our skins were like dirty brown shrouds. Five minutes out from the compound a piss break was declared. “A leak in the moondust—the rigors of modern warfare,” somebody muttered.

Two compounds were to be hit. Elements of the Afghan National Army and the 10th Mountain Division would man the roadblocks. I was impressed with the efficiency of the ANA soldiers; they moved quickly out of the backs of the vehicles and set up fields of fire in the rice fields. I jumped out of the ground mobility vehicle with Sgt. First Class Cormac Meiners of Raleigh, North Carolina, and followed him along a chain of mud walls inside one of the compounds. There was absolute silence.

It was a typical Pushtun fortress housing several families. In the courtyard lay a vegetable plot and a peach and apricot orchard. Against one wall, near the firewood, stood a bunch of cows decked out with ornamental bangles. The lower level of the rambling mudbrick house was reserved for the animals and for the food stores. The families lived on the upper level, a world of oriental carpets with pillow-lined walls and blankets piled in the corners. We passed through the empty underground storage rooms and stomped with our boots on the carpets upstairs, found nothing suspicious, and were faced with the anxious stares of the women and children in tribal robes. Sgt. Meiners told me, “This is like a bad Vietnam War movie.”

“What can we do not to offend them culturally?” Sgt. First Class Steve Outlaw of Tallahassee, Florida, asked when it became clear that this place was a dry hole. After handing candies to the kids, the Green Berets cleaned their soles before walking on more carpets. The man of the house had been one of the detainees snatched earlier by Sgt. Peraza’s team. “We should have hit this place several days ago,” said one soldier, complaining about the delay getting the con-op approved.

Only two rifles were found: an AK-47 and a Chinese-manufactured SKS. The women protested that they needed the rifles to defend themselves. After all, there was no law here of any kind, and such rifles were quite common in Afghanistan. A discussion ensued. They were allowed to keep one rifle. The other would be turned in to the office of the provincial governor and could be reclaimed later, which I certainly did not believe. To win hearts and minds, they should have let the family keep both of the guns.

There had been more success at the other compound, though. Passports and a large quantity of arms and cash were found. A boy came over to us and said that he had seen large numbers of rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons stashed in a third compound. A GPS grid was taken of this third compound, but it couldn’t be hit until a 5-W or con-op was submitted and approved. “By that time the weapons will have been moved,” one Green Beret told me. “The thing that is really worth doing today we’re not allowed to do.”

Between patrols I read, did laundry, practiced shooting at the range, observed the mechanics at work on the vehicles, and listened to life stories. Not everyone was a law enforcement officer or fireman. One of the 18 Delta medics was a nurse practitioner, another a museum manager, another—as he put it—“practiced law to support my SF habit,” and another had two post-graduate degrees and three ex-wives. Quite a few had drifted from one unsatisfying job to the next, and only truly found their métier after 9/11, when they started being called up for duty on an almost permanent basis.

One night, after the moon had gone and it was so black that shooting stars were everywhere, and Mars was particularly prominent in the sky, I was talking to Sgt. Dave Kellerman of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, an air marshal in civilian life. His nineteen-year-old son had recently been awarded a Bronze Star for valor in Iraq, for taking out a machine gun nest while serving with the 3rd Infantry Division. He recited the citation to me by heart almost. “I was so proud, chills still go up my spine,” he said. “What more could a father ever want of a son?”

Everyone was a gun aficionado, especially Lt. Col. Custer. The morning after I spoke with Sgt. Kellerman, Lt. Col. Custer took me inside the secured room that held the confiscated firearms: a true dog’s breakfast of vintage weaponry, with stacks of rusty chambers and rotting wooden stocks. There were pre–World War I British-built Lee-Enfields, French-built Mosin-Nagants issued to the czarist army, a variety of Russian medium machine guns from both world wars, and so on, all still in use in Afghanistan.

I took one of the oldest Lee-Enfields, known as the SMLE or Smelly (Short Magazine Lee-Enfield), to the range for a hands-on history lesson. What a revolution in weaponry it was! With its “cock-on closing” bolt and stripper clip innovation, this Lee-Enfield could fire almost as fast as today’s semi-automatics. “It could drop a man at four hundred yards all day long,” Custer said enthusiastically. Yet it was the Soviet-manufactured Kalashnikov assault rifle that truly got the lieutenant colonel going; after he had taken hold of one of the AK-47s and briefed me on every part, I realized that you might learn as much about a culture from its weaponry as you could from its literature.

As Custer demonstrated, while stripping the AK-47 down to its constituent parts, it was a rifle designed for use by fifteen-year-old illiterates whose life was valued cheaply by the designer. “Illiterates won’t clean a gun, or at least not meticulously, so the parts are measured to fit loosely. That way the gun won’t jam when it’s filthy with grime. But it also makes the AK-47 less accurate than our M-16s and M-4s, which have tight-fitting parts and must be constantly cleaned. And because illiterate peasants aim less precisely,” he continued, “the lever of the AK-47 goes from safety directly to full automatic, for spraying a field with fire. With our rifles, the lever rests on semi-automatic before it goes to full auto.”

The sites on the Russian rifle could not be adjusted for greater accuracy, unlike on American rifles. The Kalashnikov had a bullet magazine that had to be gripped before it could be released, so it wouldn’t be lost in the dirt, because magazines were dear in the old U.S.S.R. That made changing magazines slower, and thus further endangered the life of the soldier in combat. In the old Soviet Union, soldiers were more easily expendable than bullet magazines. By contrast, American magazines dropped onto the ground and could be lost, but it made for a faster, more fluent performance by the rifleman.

“The M-4 can hit a man at several hundred yards every time,” Custer explained. “The AK-47 is more of an area weapon. We value our soldiers as individuals with precision skills; the Russians see only a mass peasant army.”

Custer also observed the evolution of the bullet over the just-departed century, from the “30-odd-6” (.30-06 caliber, or 7.62mm) in the 1890s to the smaller, sleeker 5.56mm. The manufacturers had learned that smaller bullets were faster, and with just a little increase in velocity you got a disproportionate increase in force at impact. Smaller bullets were also lighter, and thus the individual soldier could carry more along with him onto the battlefield. This was Progress.

Alas, the mission with which Lt. Col. Custer was helping Maj. Holiday had been altered and stripped of its teeth by Bagram. What had begun as a hit against an important “bad guy” was transformed into just another presence patrol.

Chief Augustus, another of the warrant officers, provided the background to a crowded chow hall: The CJTF-180 informed President Karzai of the plan to hit Maulvi Jalani’s compound. Karzai then told the CJTF-180 to wait; he wanted to try to reason with Jalani. Karzai told Jalani to start behaving or the Americans would punish him. But American intelligence indicated that Jalani, rather than heed Karzai, turned around and told the police at Sayed Kurram to get out of town, or he would kill them. Nevertheless, the CJTF-180 approved only a presence patrol to Sayed Kurram, with only twelve Green Berets. When Maj. Holiday indicated that was too small a number to have on hand in the event of an attack, the CJTF-180 said that the number of Green Berets might be increased to twenty-two, but this enlarged patrol was authorized to circle the town only, and stay far from Jalani’s compound.

The route we took to Sayed Kurram was different from the one we had taken there on the previous patrol. We drove up a wadi bed into gray draperies of hills, tinged purple at the edges and bearded with scrub pine. The whole vista, noted Cpl. Dan Johnston, reminded him of hunting trips to Wyoming. Here and there groups of Afghans would emerge from a village and smile at us.

“The Afghans are just great,” one soldier said. “They’re unfazed by anything, unimpressed, just themselves.”

“Yeah, they love guns and love to fight. All they need are trailer parks and beer and they’ll be just like us,” said another.

The convoy descended from the mountains through cannabis fields and newly tilled poppy plantations. A massive mud-walled fort with Turkic-style towers loomed in the distance, with marijuana leaves drying on its ramparts. I thought of the poppy fields before the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

We halted in the middle of the road, in front of what looked like a mine. It wasn’t. But the halt led us to a local Afghan intelligence officer, who invited me, one of the counterintelligence guys, and two other Green Berets into his house for green tea, while the rest of the convoy stood guard outside. He served the tea in a carpeted room heated by a dung-fired stove, with aspen beams overhead. I stared at the dust drifting into the tea. The Green Beret from counterintelligence engaged our host in the same kind of conversation that journalists have all the time with their sources, so I felt comfortable joining in.

The journalist and the intelligence officer have different audiences to please: that of the intelligence officer is smaller, narrower in vision, more elite in knowledge, and more technical in scope. But their methods are often similar: get to know someone, get him talking, and some of the truth may dribble out—more truth than if you asked a direct question. You don’t question people so much as hang out with them, and get to know them on their own terms. So the counterintelligence guy and I took turns with the man.

The man eventually told us of Maulvi Jalani’s informal alliance with the former mujahedin leader in Paktia and Khost, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and of the opium profits that were funding the Islamic opposition to Karzai. He believed that the Taliban would not return to power. As pessimistic analyses went, that one was simplistic, he implied. More likely was the coalescing of an Iranian-brokered coalition of anti-American and anti-Karzai forces to include Haqqani, Hekmatyar, and other radical ex-mujahedin leaders, along with disaffected elements of the Northern Alliance, some remnants of the Taliban, and al-Qaeda.

The man wanted us to stay for a meal, but we politely declined, as we had hours of traveling ahead. As usual, the map was useless. The dendritic pattern of dirt roads dissolved into incomprehensibility, so that we found ourselves—in spite of the orders from Bagram—driving smack into the center of Sayed Kurram near Jalani’s compound, amid the sickly sweet smells of mint and hashish.

The idea that the CJTF-180 could determine what roads we turned down, in a land where roads were virtually nonexistent, suddenly struck me as ludicrous. Twenty-first-century communications technology worked toward centralization of command, and thus toward micro-management. But the War on Terrorism would be won only by adapting the garrison tactics of the nineteenth century, in which lower-level officers in the field forged policy as they saw fit. Meanwhile, Custer and Holiday were like the ablative tiles on the bottom of the space shuttle, absorbing the bureaucratic heat for everyone. As it turned out, though we had driven right next to Jalani’s compound, nobody challenged us.[54]

The following evening, approval came for a hit near Gardez. Rather than wait, an eleven-vehicle convoy was immediately stood up, and around 9 p.m. we were off. By now I had been on enough raids to know the drill, so after the compound was hit, I drifted away from my assigned vehicle in the dark and proceeded inside the compound itself, to see how the search was progressing. By the outer gate, I ran into Cpl. Johnston, who lent me his night optical devices for a moment.

“Look up into the sky, you won’t believe it,” he said.

In the Philippines, I had never thought to do that with them. It was a revelation: what you might imagine seeing through a high-powered telescope. The sky was crowded with several times more stars than before.

I returned to reality in the courtyard, where several Green Berets were searching with flashlights for two grenades that one of the occupants had just thrown at them and that hadn’t gone off. “Watch where you walk,” I was warned. Along the courtyard were darkened rooms, illuminated by blue Chemlites that the Green Berets had left, to indicate which rooms had already been cleared. Inside the house, I peeked into a room where two Green Berets were kneeling on a carpet, going over a pile of documents they had found with a flashlight, being careful not to wake two children who miraculously were sleeping through all this mayhem.

Upstairs, the roof gave on to another series of rooms, where I watched Lt. Col. Custer go through several strongboxes with a bolt cutter. He found soaps, candies, cheap calico cloths, and other family possessions that only to us seemed meager and without value.

As I left the compound, I noticed a counterintelligence officer interrogating one of the male inhabitants. They were both squatting against a section of mud wall illuminated by flashlights attached to the M-4s held by other Green Berets, who had formed a semicircle around the Afghan. He had a long white beard and brown hood over his pakol. He looked stoic, unafraid. The counterintelligence officer was asking him simple, stock questions in English: Had he seen anything suspicious? Who were his friends?

Each question elicited a long conversation between the man and the terp. It was clear that the intelligence officer was missing a lot. He didn’t speak Pushtu beyond a few phrases. Finally, all he could say to the man was “If you ever have a problem, come and see me at the firebase,” as if the man would feel comfortable forsaking his kinsmen and trusting this most recent band of invaders passing through his land, invaders who couldn’t even communicate with him.

Here was where the American Empire, such as it was, was weakest. With all of its technology and willingness to send the most enterprising of its soldiers to the most distant parts of the world, it was woefully incompetent in linguistic skills, especially in places and in situations where it counted the most. This was another neglected part of defense “transformation” that had nothing to do with the latest weapons systems.

Early the next morning an eleven-year-old boy who had just stepped on an old Soviet land mine was brought to the front gate of the firebase in the back of a pickup. Suddenly the profanities stopped in the shower unit and in the chow hall, and everything went quiet and efficient, as several of the 18 Delta medics quickly brought the boy into the field clinic, injected him with morphine and a regimen of antibiotics, and went to work on his leg and shoulder. One of the medics did nothing but talk to the boy, telling him through a terp that he would be playing soccer the following week. Within a few minutes, about a third of the boy’s body was bandaged, a space blanket was wrapped around him, and internal e-mails to Bagram had spun up a chopper to medivac him there for an operation.

The boy was lucky. His accident had happened close to an American firebase. His limbs were saved in the operation, which took place later that day. He recovered fully. “That’s the gold standard,” said Maj. Holiday, “what that boy tells people back in his village about how the Americans helped him.”

The overwhelming reality of Afghanistan in 2003 was still the Soviet occupation, which had destroyed the tribal infrastructure, deforested the landscape, and sown it with as many as thirty million mines, all in places that the Soviets had not bothered to map.¹⁵

That day I heard bad news. An internal e-mail had arrived from the firebase at Khost, which lay closer to the border with Pakistan. It was where I wanted to go next. The e-mail, from one of the team sergeants at Khost, informed Lt. Col. Custer that the firebase there was not owned by Special Forces, but by OGAs (people from other government agencies), and that they would have a shit fit if I showed up. In plain English, it meant that the CIA might be using the Khost firebase as a platform for cross-border infiltration into the Pakistani tribal agency of North Waziristan, possibly the “most evil place on earth,” as one U.S. military official had put it to me.

North Waziristan was where many of the HVTs (high-value targets) were thought to be hiding. It was where, by all logical standards, the Special Forces firebases really needed to be but weren’t, because of the fear of offending Musharraf’s regime. From the vantage point of the Gardez firebase, it seemed that the Bush administration policy toward a radical and nuclearizing Pakistan had become as feckless as the Clinton administration’s policy toward Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

The CIA platform at Khost probably, I surmised, was part of an Afghanistan-Pakistan border operation that included the “black,” or secret, side of Special Forces, as well as the Army’s Delta Force and the SEALs. These elite units, dedicated to the hunt for high-value targets, of whom Osama bin Laden was the foremost, were not subject to the bureaucratic dysfunction that Custer and many others complained about. They functioned much like the 5th Group A-teams in the weeks following 9/11, before the CJTF-180 was stood up. They had their own dedicated air support, and were relatively unfettered by the Pentagon’s vertical, at times Soviet-style, bureaucracy.

But this did not solve the larger problem for these reasons:

• Catching high-value targets (HVTs) was dependent on catching middle-value targets (MVTs), and even low-value targets (LVTs), since the MVTs and LVTs provided intelligence on the HVTs. It was like the subway turnstile phenomenon. When New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani was first elected, he arrested significant numbers of young men for low-level crimes such as jumping turnstiles. In many cases, they turned out to be wanted for more serious crimes, or at least could provide information on those who were. So as long as the Big Army impeded the hunt for MVTs and LVTs, the chances of catching HVTs were reduced.

• If more MVTs and LVTs were not apprehended, HVTs who were killed or captured would quickly be replaced by persons who were currently MVTs and LVTs. Indeed, it was the hunt for MVTs that was the real bread and butter of the War on Terrorism and the effort to stabilize the Afghan regime.

In any case, I was not welcome at Khost. Despondent, I hitched a ride on the back of a truck that was part of a convoy headed for Bagram. It was a bone-breaking, freezing journey in the dust, through a dizzying, almost vertical landscape of sheer rock, a crazed tangle of soft-shouldered hills that heaved upward into winglike formations of gray granite. Then we entered a wide valley of villages that might have been mistaken for archaeological ruins. The road was crowded with jingle trucks carrying vast quantities of timber off to Pakistan. We got into two accidents. In the second, a jingle truck smashed into us sideways, tearing off the iron rail on which I was leaning and sending me flying from one end of the truck to the other. Because of the body armor and helmet I was wearing, not only wasn’t I hurt, I barely felt a thing.

In Bagram, it was back to Zulu time, in which noon was 7:30 a.m. and sunset was 1:30 p.m. I began casting about for another trip, which meant hanging around, listening to conversations at the C-JSOTF, until fate intervened.

I had conversations with several civil affairs officers who had just returned from Herat in western Afghanistan and Mazar-e Sharif in the north. In both places, they told me, under the tutelage of the warlords Ismael Khan of Herat and Abdul Rashid Dostum of Mazar-e Sharif, there was relative order and a lot of rebuilding going on.

“Mazar is booming. There really isn’t much for the American military to do in those places,” one civil affairs officer told me. I was not surprised. It was common knowledge at Bagram that the least stable parts of the country were those ruled by the democratic, internationally recognized government.

In the chow hall, I ran into Col. Herd, and told him my problem with getting to Khost. He had a better idea. He would get me hooked up with the “Third of the Third”—the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Special Forces Group—currently manning firebases in southern Afghanistan.

The next day, I hiked over to the airfield with my backpack, body armor, and helmet, in order to catch “Flash 43,” the next C-130 cargo plane flight to Kandahar.

At the C-JSOTF I had been warned about the departure procedures for the C-130 flights. “When they call your name, if you don’t answer immediately, or if you’ve gone to the head for a minute, they’ll scratch you from the flight. The Air Force NCOs [noncommissioned officers] there are bastards,” an Army guy had told me. I had to appear four and a half hours before departure; sometimes the planes left early, sometimes late, so you waited six or seven hours. I was shouted at and given contradictory instructions. But so was everyone else. There was nothing to eat. It was like the departure lounge of a dysfunctional third world country. Getting on the aircraft was like being released from forced confinement. REMFs, I thought.

The C-130 is one of the most venerable, dependable aircraft in the history of military aviation. But flying in one is not comfortable. Without windows, the enormous fuselage looks and feels like the darkened hull of a bobbing ship, or the backstage area of a run-down theater, or a creepy basement. It got even darker when the palettes were slid in and the hatch door closed. The plane steeply lumbered into the air, heavily vibrating. The descent after an hour of flying was steeper still, in order to avoid possible ground fire.

The hatch opened at KAF (Kandahar Air Field). In the smoky, glazy heat lay mountains that appeared like crouching dinosaurs on an immense pie-crust plateau. From previous trips to Kandahar fifteen and thirty years ago, I recalled this awesome flatness, periodically interrupted by singular rock sculptures, rising up hundreds and thousands of feet, which defined southern Afghanistan.

Outside the plane, I was grabbed by someone from the 3rd Special Forces Group and driven to the part of the airfield that served as the 3rd Battalion’s forward operating base, commanded by Lt. Col. Rand Binford of Houston.

Unlike the original 10th Special Forces Group, which grew out of the legacy of the OSS in Europe, and the 1st, 5th, and 7th groups, all of which were associated with particular parts of the world, 3rd Special Forces Group for a long time had been consigned to Africa, a nonstrategic second-rate theater for a long time in the eyes of the American military. But in recent years, 3rd Group had gotten its area of responsibility extended to the Middle East, and was lately on a roll. It was deployed to northern Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, where it had linked up with the Kurds to attack elements of the Iraqi army’s 5th Corps, and it had been deployed twice to Afghanistan following the departure of 5th Group in early 2002. Third Group’s profile was now hard-bitten and aggressive.

Lt. Col. Binford’s FOB (forward operating base) was the former airport hotel for transit passengers during the bad old Taliban days, a ratty line of arched chambers and grim rooms with fluorescent lights, and cracked and cobwebbed toilets, that seemed perfect backdrops for interrogation and worse. Nearby was a junkyard of destroyed Soviet vehicles and aircraft.

Binford, with short gray hair and an in-your-face expression, told me, in a very deliberate manner: “I’m a blessed commander. I have bust-your-ass, hard-working soldiers, and our job is to kill these fuckers: to kill, capture, destroy, and disrupt the activities of the ACM [anti-coalition militias]. You’ll be with a DA [direct action] weapons company. It does smashmouth combat, often unilaterally, without ANA or other indigs. You may find these guys terse, standoffish, and hard on each other. Remember that their job is combat only, and they are professionals at it. Then they come back to their loved ones, retool, retrain, and go back on deployment. I look each wife in the eye before we deploy and say, ‘We’ve done everything we can to train your husband, in order to bring him back safely.’”

On September 11, 2001, Binford had been in the wing of the Pentagon that was destroyed by one of the hijacked jetliners. He had been all over Africa and the Middle East. We talked about the exploits of the Eritrean guerrillas, whom we both knew well. That got us on to the fighting qualities of the Taliban.

“Guns, drugs, and thugs come out of the opium trade,” Binford told me. “Between the drugs and the availability of weapons, the Taliban does not really need outside donors. The drug network sends couriers in and out through a ratline that leads right back to the Central Highlands,” he said, pointing on a map to a cluster of mountains in the center of Afghanistan, just north of Kandahar, near where the firebases under his command were located.

“What’s with the short hair and clean shave?” I asked, looking at him, feeling out of place because I was heavily bearded at this point in my trip.

He frowned. “You know Bagram,” he replied. “They made us shave.” He went on: “We’re launching a mission in a few days that you’ll be on. Yeah, we’re going to let you go out and play. The train-ups begin after midnight. The site is called Newark. It’s on the southeastern tip of the Central Highlands. A recon element has just gone out there—they were able to wear beards and indigenous garb. You’ll hear the details in the briefs and train-ups. Meanwhile, Commander Sherzai of the AMF has invited us to an iftar reception tonight. [Ramadan had recently begun with the new moon.] Go along. Look at who’s there. Don’t ask questions. Just observe. You’ll find it interesting.”

The reception was just outside the air base at Commander Abdul Raziq Sherzai’s fancy new headquarters, distinguished by a full-sized plastic palm tree decorated with Christmas lights: it looked like a prop from Disney World. Sherzai’s brother had been engaged in a power struggle of sorts with President Karzai; nevertheless, the Americans had found a need for his brother’s militia. The evening was a typical Middle Eastern attempt to seem Western, with awkward, uncomfortable chairs and couches, and tissues in place of napkins at the table. I noticed that beside Afghans and 3rd Group soldiers in uniform, there was a group of Americans, including a woman, all of whom were armed with rifles and guns. They dressed like Pushtuns, with beards and shalwars; the lady wore a traditional local dress. Some of them spoke Pushtun. They were referred to somewhat jokingly as Peace Corps workers. I asked no questions.

I had a few hours’ sleep before the mission train-up.

The brief was delivered by the mission commander, Maj. Paul Helms of Bossier City, Louisiana, a graduate of Louisiana State University at Shreveport. A tall and dark-haired Air Force brat who had lived around the world, Maj. Helms had a deep, gravelly voice reminiscent of George Clooney rather than a southern accent. He would be in charge as per standard operating procedure; Lt. Col. Binford would remain at the forward operating base.

The mission, Newark, Helms explained, would be serviced by Task Force Hawk, consisting of two CH-47 Chinooks to transport us to the strike zone, and a UH-60 Black Hawk and two AH-64 Apaches to serve as “aerial blocks,” and also for close air support if it was needed.

“We’re looking for a phone,” Maj. Helms said casually, describing the purpose of the mission: “a Thuraya cell phone that we’ll dub ‘moonbeam.’” Signals Intelligence had picked up a number of interesting calls on the Thuraya regarding Taliban finances and supplies. The user of the phone was a male whom Helms code-named “Nawab.” Nawab, apparently, was a legitimate businessman by day and a Taliban moneyman by night.

“We do not know what he looks like. We only know what he reveals in traffic,” Helms said. “He walks out into the fields to the north and south of his compound to make his calls, obviously searching for a strong signal. There is a long line of karezes issuing from the compound, which may contain contraband and which could take us hours to search,” he added, referring to a system of wells and tunnels, originally built for water storage, that are found in Afghanistan, Iran, and western Pakistan.[55] “Nawab is a facilitator rather than an operator. He’s not from the muscle end of the ACM [anti-Coalition militias], so he’s not likely to resist. Thus, Newark is considered a CSS [combat service support] site, approved for SSE,” sensitive site exploration, which meant a slow and deliberate site search as opposed to a “kinetic strike.”

Because women and children had been seen in the compound, any shooting would have to be extremely discriminatory—another reason for a unilateral mission, without Afghan National Army or Afghan militia help.

The dress rehearsal in full kit took place at a mud fort. By the time we arrived everyone was so full of dust, it was as if we had been dipped in a sticky vat of flour. With six A-teams that would each split into two sections, it was like watching a complex work of art. The rehearsal began with “unasseting”—that is, leaving the helicopters—followed by “collapsing in on the target” and the “extraction piece.” There were various “button back” maneuvers in and around the compound walls. Rappelling up and down deep water wells while being pulled by an all-terrain vehicle that would come along on the Chinook was also practiced.

The 18 Echo, or commo specialist, in each unit communicated on five separate radio frequencies: the command network which linked the section leaders with Maj. Helms, two separate lines of communication for each section within each A-team, the air net to communicate with the Chinook and Black Hawk pilots, and a fire net to communicate with the Apache pilots for close air support.

The rehearsal was only the beginning of the buildup to Newark. In the afternoon came the “rock drill,” when little rocks were moved along a floor to review the mission pattern. The rock drill also went over the operations schedule, a list of several pages of small print that covered each detail of the mission as it was likely to progress, with various fragments built out for everything that might conceivably go wrong. During the rock drill it was decided to bring along two females from the 10th Mountain Division to body search and interrogate “burka babes,” if that proved necessary.

Later on in the day, there was a separate rock drill, or back-brief, just for the section leaders, and a third drill for the helicopter pilots. During the section leaders’ back-brief, the chain of custody for the PUCs was rehearsed: how the PUCs would be transferred from the assault teams to the Army aviators; and how to manage “courtyard control” in the event of large numbers of women and children at the compound. At this meeting each building in the compound, of which there were aerial reconnaissance photos, was given a matrix number in case close air support was necessary. Included in the assault package was an Air Force embed, who carried over a hundred pounds of communication gear on his back, with no extra room for meals ready to eat or a sleeping bag even.

All this was for one operation, involving one MVT (middle-value target), the kind of operation that the battalion did all the time. It was no big deal. It was work.

The guys were not standoffish, as Lt. Col. Binford had warned they might be. In fact, I went through no sniff test at all. I learned later what had happened.

When the battalion found out there would be a journalist among them, there were rude complaints, another fucking left-wing journalist. Then an 18 Delta medic, Master Sgt. Corey Russ of Miami—whose family, he told me, were among the city’s early settlers in the 1920s—used the NIPRNET to check me out online. He downloaded some of my articles and pronounced me “okay” to the others.

Thus, I became immediately privy to what by now were familiar critiques:

With all this in mind, it came as no surprise to anyone that Newark was postponed for twenty-four hours, because the helicopters had been reassigned elsewhere. Then it was postponed another twenty-four hours, because Bagram was having second thoughts about the whole operation.

Meanwhile, the cycle of presence patrols, cleaning equipment with compressed air hoses, and guard duty continued unabated. The 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Special Forces Group, with its seven A-teams consisting of only about eighty troops, garrisoned at a few far-flung firebases and backed up by two B-teams, had most of southern Afghanistan to cover. Lt. Col. Binford wanted to expand the battalion’s influence farther still, up to the Iranian border, by erecting firebases in Farah Province, west of Kandahar and Helmand.

I used the postponement of Newark to visit Kandahar and Firebase Gecko north of the city, which had been Mullah Omar’s base of operations before 5th Group captured it two years earlier.

Kandahar looked more primitive now than it had when I first saw it, in the autumn of 1973. It was still a pungent confection of dust and woodsmoke over broken-down streets, with few buildings more than one story high. A quarter century of war had left it as much a ruin as a proper city, crowded at dusk with trishaws and rickshaws squeezing themselves between a maze of crumbled mud walls. The water channels that had run thirty years before were now dry, and filled with dirt and garbage. All the women except for young girls were hidden under lapis-blue burkas. Kandahar had been the Taliban stronghold. It remained the most conservative city in Afghanistan, the rebuke to Kabul’s relative cosmopolitanism. It was strange, I thought, eyeing the ratty storefronts separated from each other by aspen poles, and the sidewalks crowded with foodstuffs in old cooking pots; elsewhere in the world, the cities I had seen in my youth had become mostly unrecognizable because of demographic growth, suburban sprawl, and globalization. Yet Kandahar stood still, inside a time capsule of unending conflict.

Beyond Kandahar to the north loomed a Planet of the Apes landscape of strangely shaped buttes and mesas, sweeping up from a bright yellow desert that appeared to have little depth, on account of the thin atmosphere and stagy plateau light. Here two A-teams and a B-team had turned Mullah Omar’s rambling fortress into a warren of sand barriers and concertina wire.

Mullah Omar’s fortress had been the first site objective of the War on Terrorism. At Firebase Gecko, as it was now called, I met Maj. Tony Dill of Pensacola, Florida, the base commander, yet another major with prematurely gray hair, who was at once super-articulate and physically capable—he had parachuted into a stadium during a NASCAR race in North Carolina. I didn’t realize when I said goodbye to Maj. Dill inside Mullah Omar’s private air-raid shelter that I would be seeing him again a few days later, under very different circumstances.

The next day I walked into the operations center for another briefing on the postponed Operation Newark. But rather than the usual personable atmosphere, everyone was sitting around silent, with long faces, listening intently to scratchy voices coming over the command net.

A presence patrol manned by ODA-371, working out of Firebase Gereshk, to the west of Kandahar in Helmand Province, had been “engaged” by anti-coalition militia, and close air support had been called in.

“Are there casualties?” a voice asked.

Silence. Static. Then: “Yes.”

“How many? How bad?”

“One.”

“How bad?”

A long silence. “He’s seriously hurt.”

The room went more silent, if that was possible. “Seriously hurt” was code language in the Special Operations community. If you were KIA (killed in action), your widow got only $200,000 and had to move out of military housing in several weeks. But if you had been “medically retired” before death, your wife got a pension and your children’s schooling was paid for through college, among other benefits. It was a cruel system, the curse of Big Government, to such an extent that the law was to be changed. But that hadn’t happened yet. So when someone had been critically wounded, the race was on to keep him alive, sometimes for only a few hours, until Washington issued a “control number” which began the retirement process. The nipper net for personal e-mail was immediately shut down and all satellite phone calls forbidden; no chances could be taken that anyone in the U.S. could know what happened until that control number was issued. Only then could the news get out.

The good news was that a control number was issued in time. The bad news was that Staff Sgt. Paul A. Sweeney of Lake Ariel, Pennsylvania, died a few hours later.[56] War, like travel, was life in compression. You expected one dramatic event, Newark, and you got another, a memorial service.

When ODA-371’s dust-ridden convoy of ground mobility vehicles and up-armors arrived at the forward operating base bearing Sgt. Paulie Sweeney’s flag-draped coffin, the B-team was there to greet it, and many quiet embraces ensued among grown men. At 7:30 a.m. Zulu (noon local time), everyone walked silently to the airstrip and gathered for the “ramp ceremony” that would transfer Sgt. Sweeney’s remains from Mortuary Affairs to the C-130 for the trip home.

It marked the first time that I saw Green Berets actually wearing Green Berets, rather than helmets, ball caps, boonie caps, or patrol caps. Nearby was the old terminal building, where little stone monuments had been erected by President Karzai’s new government to the victims of 9/11, and to Special Forces, the British SAS, and the Canadian Light Infantry Princess Patricia’s Regiment—“damn good regiment, real ass-kickers,” an American sergeant told me quietly.

Ramp ceremonies were known to combine spareness and brevity with deep emotion. This was no exception. The coffin with the American flag was placed on a simple plywood dais in front of the C-130’s open fuselage. The plane’s engine droned throughout. Capt. Lee Nelson, the 3rd Battalion’s chaplain, as well as the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Apalachicola in the Florida Panhandle, wearing a camouflage stole, told the assembled uniformed mass: “We gather together to say goodbye to our brother, fallen comrade, staff sergeant, husband, father, and American: Paul Sweeney. Paul’s lord and savior, Jesus Christ, believed that nothing is greater than giving life for one’s family, country, justice, and the liberation of the oppressed. Here are the words of another warrior, named David, written some three thousand years ago.” In a mild southern twang, Capt. Nelson, an awkward and intense man, then recited the Twenty-third Psalm:

The chaplain said a few more words, linking the warriors of the Bible with those of Special Forces. Here, according to W. J. Cash, was the “essentially Hebraic” spirit of the evangelical South, which demanded

the Jehovah of the Old Testament: a God who might be seen, a God who had been seen. A passionate… tyrant, to be trembled before, but whose favor was the sweeter for that. A personal God, a God for the individualist, a God whose representatives were not silken priests but preachers risen from the people themselves.¹⁶

Preachers like Capt. Nelson, for instance. For the spirit of the United States military was fiercely evangelical, even as it was fiercely ecumenical. While meals ready to eat were provided that were both kosher and halal, and soldiers of all races, religions, and regions of the country were surely welcomed into the ranks, the fact was that not all races, religions, and regional types joined up in equal numbers, so it was that the martial evangelicalism of the South gave the U.S. military its true religious soul.

This was part of a logical historical pattern, for as Cash informs us, southern evangelicalism has always followed the same steady direction—back to the stern Mosaic ideal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.¹⁷ American power in Afghanistan and elsewhere may have had universalist motives—the advancement of women’s rights, a liberal social order, and so on—but the American military, by necessity, played a significant role in that enterprise. And like all militaries, its ranks required a more aboriginal level of altruism than that of the universalist society it sought to bring about.

The moment that Capt. Nelson finished reading the Twenty-third Psalm, the sound system played the thumping, rousing song from the John Wayne movie The Green Berets, written by author Robin Moore and Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler in the early Vietnam days, as an honor guard bore Sweeney’s coffin into the C-130’s cavernous belly:[57]

There was no playing of “Taps,” no national anthem, only this song—one that, at the moment, only the cynical would view as corny.

“It never gets any easier, that’s why they pay us the big bucks,” one of the warrant officers half joked as we all walked back to the forward operating base. Then everyone got back to cleaning and repairing vehicles. The men of ODA-371 rejected a suggestion from the upper echelons for a longer memorial service the following day. They would all pay their tributes in person to Paulie’s family when they got home. Meanwhile, they told me, the best tribute to their fallen comrade was to return to their firebase.

Later, at chow, I was sitting with Maj. Helms, lamenting the postponement of Newark, when an aide walked over to say that the major was wanted immediately in the forward operating base. The aide whispered something else to Helms, who then told me to quickly pack my gear.

There was heavy “green-on-green” fighting—Afghans fighting Afghans—going on in the town of Gereshk, located on the strategic ring road west of Kandahar, in Helmand Province. The fighting was moving closer to the firebase, which was held by only seven Green Berets, because the rest of ODA-371 and -375 had driven to Kandahar with Sweeney’s remains for the ramp ceremony. It would take three or four hours for them to drive back, during which time the base might be overrun. Thus, two Chinooks with Special Forces troops would fly immediately to Gereshk, to secure the base.

We were stacked tightly into the back of a small truck with all our gear and driven to the airfield, where the Chinooks, which had finally been secured for Newark, were now to fly to Gereshk instead.

“Where’s my gun bitch?” someone shouted, looking for the person carrying extra magazines for his squad assault rifle.

When the choppers took off, I was sweating. An hour later, prior to landing, night had descended and I had begun to freeze. Amid the darkness and the loud beating of the rotors, there was the usual frantic fiddling with straps for the web gear, rucksacks, and mounted guns. Night optical devices were adjusted. “Hot landing zone,” we all thought we heard the pilot say, meaning there was gunfire.

The hatch opened and we lumbered into the ruler-flat blackness of the Helmand desert. The light of the half moon briefly caught the rotors of the Chinook as it climbed back into the sky. Actually, it was a “rock landing zone,” full of small boulders. But less than two miles away we saw the tracer bullets and rocket-propelled grenade fire—and heard the explosions—of the battle currently under way in Gereshk between rival Afghan factions.

“I apologize, I shouldn’t have had beans for lunch,” someone shouted after we had heard different noises. “At least I’m calling my own shots.” We hiked the several hundred yards to the gate of the firebase, where Maj. Helms directed different squads to fan out around a 360-degree perimeter.

I stumbled in the dark behind Helms into the operations center of the firebase, a large whitewashed room, its walls lined with plastic-covered terrain maps and leadership diagrams of the various local tribes. Laptop computers and communications gear lay cluttered on unfinished plywood desks, with camp chairs all around.

“The AMF [Afghan Militia Force] is fighting the local police in the bazaar near the center of Gereshk,” an intense-looking chief warrant officer with a long black beard who was manning the comms told Maj. Helms. “The AMF commander is dead with a bullet to the head. His number two is all messed up with multiple wounds. I have no line of communications at the moment with the AMF because the AMF guy with the comms is dead. I’ll give you the grid coordinates for the base in case we need CAS [close air support]. We can use the UHF [ultra-high frequency] to vector the gunships. The fighting has moved closer to here.” Continuing, he said:

“Take off the fucking body armor, get comfortable; if they overrun us with all the firepower that has just arrived, they can fucking have us.”

I threw my backpack, body armor, and helmet in a corner, took a Gatorade from the fridge, and walked over in the dark, using my red-tinted flashlight, to the medical shack, where two 18 Deltas were working on an Afghan covered with whip marks. He also had internal bleeding from being beaten with a rifle butt. “Fluid in the right lung,” one medic mumbled, giving the man more morphine. There was blood all over the floor where discarded bandages and guns had been piled up. The room smelled strongly of peroxide. The wounded man was an Afghan Militia Forces member caught and tortured by the police who had just arrived here in the back of a pickup truck.

Soon, two other casualties arrived, one with gunshot wounds through his rectum, the other through his back. It would be a long night, as more casualties were expected to stream in from the fighting.

I decided that I would spend the night shuttling between the operations center and the medical shack rather than at the guard posts; I was not in the mood for a soliloquy from a bored and lonely soldier atop a guard tower. I wanted to understand who was really fighting whom, and why.

When I returned to the operations center, the warrant officer had left, and another intense, darkly bearded noncom, whose right arm was full of tattoos, was manning the communications. “It was the local police who ambushed and killed Paulie,” he said. “This freaking firebase is in the middle of the biggest Taliban concentration in the country. Last night there was a heated exchange between the local police and our AMF buddies; the bullets started flying today.” Then, he spoke into the radio:

“Corn-day, what’s on the freek? I really need some more Copenhagen [chewing tobacco].”

I wasn’t comprehending. My confusion increased when a third Green Beret, also with dark hair and a beard, with a studied rabbinical look, stumbled in and began talking breathlessly about an AMF commander who was linked to the radical HIG.

“How can there be HIG in the AMF?” I asked. After all, the HIG was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was pro-Taliban and pro–al-Qaeda, and the Afghan Militia Forces were pro-American.

Looking at me impatiently, as though I were some idiot, he responded: “How can there be HIG in the AMF? How can there be Taliban in the fucking Karzai government we’re supporting? Because there are, you know.”

Like the others who had remained at the firebase, his eyes were red and dilated. They had all been up for seventy-two hours, and this was going to be another long night. Paul Sweeney’s death had been part of a series of events now unfolding in this area of Helmand, a sparsely inhabited desert region where the Taliban did much of its planning, where it rested and resupplied. Nobody had time to sit down and put the pieces together for me. It wasn’t until morning that I understood what they all were talking about.

The sprawling Pushtun areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan were not, in fact, under the control of the internationally recognized government of America’s ally, Hamid Karzai. In reality, Pushtun Afghanistan was like a loosely administered tribal agency. Karzai had no more control here than Pakistani president Musharraf had in Waziristan—even less, in fact. Karzai and President George Bush had both made uplifting speeches about democracy, the rule of law, and the adoption of an Afghan constitution, even as the Afghan leader had to fall back on tribal allies, who, in turn, were sometimes connected to the very Taliban regime that Bush and Karzai had deposed.

“To maintain power,” one of the noncoms explained calmly to me, as though speaking to a child, “Karzai has to work with people who are not optimal, the same way we had to work with Dostum,” the Uzbek warlord who had helped America topple the Taliban in 2001.

Gereshk over the past few days and hours illustrated how there were no clear lines between friends and enemies here. “Our experience with the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Pushtuns in southern Afghanistan is like night and day,” explained Capt. Ed Croot of Long Valley, New Jersey. “The Kurds had a defined and organized political structure. Here such structures simply don’t exist.” Gereshk illustrated yet another aspect of unconventional war: the willingness—the fervor even—of the Green Berets to engage in ambiguities, which these fatigued and frustrated but keenly sentient noncoms and executive officers were doing, it turned out, magnificently.

Though the U.S. was developing an Afghan National Army to provide Karzai’s government with further legitimacy, each Special Forces firebase still required an alliance with a tribal militia indigenous to the area, for the daily work of intelligence gathering, base security, and other tasks. These Afghan Militia Forces were crucial to the hunt for middle-value targets, even as the Bush administration, under pressure from both the global media and the Karzai government, wanted to phase them out.

As one noncom at the Gereshk firebase complained: “We are not allowed to give the AMF blankets, food, uniforms, ammo, guns because we are officially phasing out the AMF. What the fuck are they thinking in Washington? The AMF are the only ones protecting our firebases.”

The fact that the U.S. supported Karzai did not mean that their interests always coincided. In certain places, Karzai needed to weaken the very same Afghan Militia Forces that the Green Berets needed to strengthen in order to perform their mission.

The militia forces here at Gereshk had proved particularly effective under the leadership of one Haji Idriss, described by a Special Forces warrant officer as “small of size, yet great of stature,” to such an extent that Idriss was known locally as the akhund, the “wise man” in Pushtu. “Idriss’s men were quite successful at scarfing up bad guys for us. They helped us PUC twenty-four Taliban. That upset people here, because the Taliban is in leadership positions throughout this area.”

The regional governor, Sher Mohammed, was known to have Taliban connections. The police fell on both sides of the pro- and anti-Taliban divide—that is, if such a divide was even definable here. There were indications that the local police were involved in the ambush that killed Sgt. Sweeney. One piece of intelligence even indicated that Sweeney was killed by mistake: the police had shot at the unmarked Special Forces vehicle he was riding in, thinking it was the Afghan Militia Forces.

Signal intercepts told Special Forces that Haji Idriss and his Afghan militia assistant, Jan Mohammed, were picked up by the police in Gereshk and told to disarm. When they refused, Idriss was shot in the head and Mohammed was severely wounded. Interrogation of detainees indicated that the order to go after Idriss was given by the chief of police, Bader Khan, and carried out by the assistant chief of police, Haji Aruf. The police chief, Bader Khan, was a tribal ally of President Karzai.

To avenge Idriss’s death, the pro-American Afghan Militia Forces deserted the firebase in order to attack the police inside the town of Gereshk—the fighting that we had witnessed upon our helicopter arrival. Haji Aruf was now calling for American intervention to save him and his police troops from the militia forces. Some of the new detainees that the Green Berets had grabbed this very night were, in fact, captured originally by the militia forces. The Americans asserted control over the detainees for the sake of the prisoners’ own protection.

With the arrival of Maj. Tony Dill, whom I had met briefly at Firebase Gecko—Mullah Omar’s former fortress—the discussion intensified as to what to do next.

As one of the Green Berets told me, “We have no real friends on the outside.” Yet in another sense, it was agreed, the recent fighting had created opportunities. “The last thing we want to do now is to bring the various factions together for a powwow. That could blow up in our faces; these guys are not ready for peace and love.”

Maj. Dill spoke:

“The governor knows that we know that he has ACM [anti-Coalition militia, or Taliban] ties. Because of what has just happened, he is in an exposed position. If we let him think the police are all to blame, he can give up the police as low-grade dog food. That’s how we’ll co-opt the governor. Let’s meet alone with him, make him think that we think he’s now on the up-and-up.”

It was also agreed that the Afghan Militia Forces had to be convinced to remain inside the firebase once the fighting died down, with the promise that Special Forces would, in return, exact some retribution on the local police. New alliances would have to be built up. As in the Philippines, where the Green Berets were faced with rampant corruption on all levels of the indigenous government, no one at this firebase was unduly discouraged. Rather than the clean, black-and-white, zero-defect universe of success and failure through which the Washington and New York power elite often discussed far-flung events, here, amid the field mice and the mud-walled flatness of the Helmand desert, there was only constant trial-and-error experimentation in light of the mission at hand.

The smashmouth combat that Lt. Col. Binford had spoken of had not occurred during my visit. Instead, there had been, as Binford later admitted to me with a wry smile, something equally useful: adaptation to the tribal reality through unconventional war.

Here in this unstable borderland where high desert began its descent into plain, warfare was continuous, of low intensity, and inconclusive. U.S. Army Special Forces were facing the same sorts of challenges that the British had faced with the Afghan tribes on the Northwest Frontier of India in the latter part of the nineteenth century. From Waziristan north through Khyber and Malakand, the British used lightly armed militia and friendly tribal auxiliaries as their first line of defense—exactly as the Romans had done against the Germanic tribes—even as they built forts and improved roads to expand their influence.¹⁸

The British colonialists, like the Americans I had met, were eminently practical men. While they had conquered parts of this wild territory, “they did not despise it.”¹⁹ They knew from personal experience that traditional society, while not necessarily living up to their own values, was nevertheless admirable in its own peculiar way. And so they “did not pretend that their military conquests had produced anything more than the ascendancy of a particular dynasty.”²⁰ They took men as they found them. As Sir Mortimer Durand of the Indian Army once remarked, “Half of my most intimate friends are murderers.”²¹

The young Winston Churchill was reading into America’s own imperial future when, in 1897, he thus described Afghanistan in The Story of the Malakand Field Force:

But, then, what was our alternative?

“The unpractical,” Churchill replied, “may wonder why we, a people who fill some considerable place in the world, should mix in the petty intrigues of these border chieftains.”²³ Some, whom Churchill calls “bad and nervous sailors,” would simply cut and run, even though that would be impossible in the circumstances, whereas others call for “full steam ahead,” that is, a dramatic increase in military and other resources until the frontier valleys “are as safe and civilized as Hyde Park.” But, as Churchill intimates, there are usually neither the troops nor the money nor the will to do any such thing. Therefore, he concludes, the “inevitable alternative” is a system of “gradual advance, of political intrigue among the tribes, of subsidies and small expeditions.”²⁴

And that, too, was fraught with difficulties. Consider the eerie similarities between the current challenges and those in the Waziristan of the late 1930s and 1940s, when British troops tried and failed to capture the Faqir of Ipi, a radical cleric who, because of his narrow tribal base, appealed to pan-Islamic ideals in the struggle against colonialist occupiers. Well educated and traveled, the faqir, nevertheless, was able to charm the most primitive tribesmen with a wooly messianic message devoid of any specifics. The faqir, or holy man, whose real name was Mirza Ali Khan, hid out for many years in the network of caves that straddles the Afghan-Pakistani border, inspiring his troops with sermons on religious war. Despite aerial bombardments and the most aggressive infantry tactics, the Faqir of Ipi was never apprehended, dying a natural death in one of his cave hideouts in 1960.²⁵

Given the resemblance between the Faqir of Ipi and Osama bin Laden, it was undeniable that in Afghanistan the United States had found itself in a situation for which the only comparisons were with other empires of the past.

But was the U.S. really following the British model?

To an extent, yes. Unfortunately, it was also to an extent following the Soviet model. Rather than power down to the level of small units and expand their activities, the U.S. was maintaining a vertical, multi-layered bureaucracy ruled by conventional general officers with conventional mindsets that was undermining the British-style firebases. In Col. Callwell’s Small Wars, published in 1896, there is an emphasis on the decentralization of command, the need for mobility, and the need to stay outside the base perimeters and among the local population as much as possible.²⁶ The CJTF-180 at Bagram was violating all of these principles.

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, declared victory, and then were gradually chewed up by unconventional Afghan guerrillas called mujahedin, operating from bases inside Pakistan’s tribal agencies. Likewise, the Americans had swept through Afghanistan, declared victory, and were now encountering resistance from “bad guys,” whose principal sanctuaries were over the border.

In Washington, everyone droned on about military “transformation.” But transformation lay in the past, ever receding, since those precious weeks after 9/11 when the unleashing of 5th Group’s A-teams from the bureaucratic straitjacket of the Pentagon allowed for a situation truly up to British imperial standards, as well as to America’s own nineteenth-century small wars tradition.