War in the Shadows

By Tim McGirk/Khakrez

Dusk has set in on the road out of Kandahar, and Captain Jeremy Turner of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division is explaining why he prefers Afghanistan to Iraq. "The Iraqis will plant explosives and run away," he says. "But the Afghans will go toe-to-toe with you." Just as Turner, 29, starts to expand on the point, a huge explosion interrupts him. One of the humvees in his 16-vehicle convoy has been hit by a roadside bomb and explodes in a flaming whoosh. Turner and his men have driven straight into a Taliban ambush.

A car screeches toward the front of the convoy, and gunmen inside open fire on the U.S. soldiers. Through his night-vision goggles, Turner spots three men carrying rocket-propelled-grenade launchers racing toward the stalled convoy. Bullets are zinging in from fields. The gunners atop the humvees open up with their .50-cal. machine guns, and red tracer bullets carve across the darkness. "Call me a friggin' detective, but I'd say they knew we were coming!" yells Turner while radioing for a medevac helicopter. The five soldiers inside the flaming humvee, although burned and slashed by flying shrapnel, have survived. But the vehicle is still rolling straight toward a field of mines. The soldiers haul themselves out of the burning vehicle and stagger to the nearest humvee. Sergeant Jeremy Gates, 25, grabs a fire extinguisher to try dousing the flames before the 900 rounds of ammunition inside the humvee start cooking. It's of little use. Within seconds, lethal fireworks are rocketing everywhere like miniature suns, and Turner and his men run for cover.

Four years after the U.S. and its Afghan allies ousted the Taliban from power in retaliation for the Sept. 11 attacks, Afghanistan is still a country on the edge. There are some signs of progress: 50% of voters braved threats of insurgent attacks last month to vote in the first national parliamentary elections since 1969. The government of President Hamid Karzai has an army of more than 20,000 and has begun to expand its authority beyond Kabul, the capital. But much of the country is still controlled by the warlords who filled the vacuum created by the Taliban's demise. And while the Taliban commands little political support, its fighters remain tenacious: the Taliban has launched more attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces in recent months than at any other time since 2001. To some Afghans, that's an indication of the insurgency's growing strength; to U.S. commanders, it's a sign of the enemy's desperation. "We're not sitting in our base waiting for them to attack us," says Major General Jason Kamiya, the U.S.-led coalition's operational commander in Afghanistan. "We've exhausted their reserves, their leadership is fractured, and we hear young recruits complaining about how they're getting killed while their leaders are in their sanctuaries, riding around in air-conditioned SUVs."

That may be true--but for the nearly 20,000 U.S. troops on the ground, Afghanistan is still a war zone. Coalition forces have had their toughest year so far, with at least 51 U.S. combat deaths, including six last week. That brings the overall total since 2001 to 196 deaths and 601 wounded. The surge in violence comes at an inopportune time for the Pentagon, which wants to cut the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and turn over more of the combat burden to NATO, whose role is now limited to peacekeeping. Four days spent with Turner's Delta Company, 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, in the badlands of southern Afghanistan provides a glimpse of how one group of soldiers sustains its morale and mettle while up against an often ghostly enemy. Even as the military struggles to extricate itself from Iraq, it still has a fight on its hands in Afghanistan. Says Sergeant Andrew Peddycord, who has served in both countries: "I've seen more action here in four months than during a year in Iraq."

The ambush on Delta Company was just the start of a mission that illustrates the challenges and frustrations facing U.S. forces today. On the night the troops come under attack, they are headed into the craggy ridges outside Kandahar to join an operation by coalition forces to corner Maulvi Hannan, a Taliban commander with known links to al-Qaeda. But the ambush and the injuries to the five soldiers force Turner to make some split-second decisions. While an Afghan interpreter tries to clear away local onlookers, the captain is busy on the radio. The medevac helicopter for the wounded soldiers has yet to leave the Kandahar airfield despite multiple promises that the chopper was en route. Furious that his men's lives might be endangered by the delay, Turner curses over the radio, then turns to a reporter and says, "Please don't let my mother know I'm using these swear words."

Turner is a model of the modern American officer, a wry, boyish-looking West Point graduate equally versed in the works of Clausewitz and St. Augustine. As he waits for help to arrive, he directs his men not to shoot wildly at the shadows flitting through the battle chaos. "Dammit! It's civilians mixed with enemy," he shouts into his radio. "Make sure they're carrying guns before you engage." The Air Force has responded to his distress call by sending over a B-52 bomber, which could flatten the entire village, killing plenty of civilians. Turner gets on the radio again and implores the bomber crew to hold fire. After making a few passes and dropping flares, the warplane streaks away. Eventually Afghan police turn up and begin a house-to-house search in the area. Only a few men are arrested, meaning many of the insurgents who carried out the ambush have probably slipped away.

That's a recurring theme. U.S. officials say Taliban units are led by a few wizened commanders, such as Hannan, who operate in the mountains they know well enough to walk blindfolded. The commanders, the U.S. says, maintain a nucleus of 10 veteran fighters and bombmaking experts plus dozens of fresh recruits, usually teenagers from local villages and radical madrasahs, or seminaries, in nearby Pakistan. The commanders' effectiveness determines how much money and how many guns and new jihadis are doled out to them by the Taliban's secretive, 10-man military council, whose members move back and forth across the Pakistan border, Kabul officials say.

But in recent days, a U.S.-led offensive has flushed Hannan and his fighters from their hideout in the mountains of north Kandahar. According to reports of the battle, which involved coalition special-ops troops, as many as 30 Taliban fighters have been killed out of an estimated force of 165. Turner and his company are assigned to wait for the Taliban when they spill out of the ravines. It's a tall order: there are a dozen draws leading out of the mountain labyrinth, and Turner has no way of knowing which escape route Hannan and his men might choose.

Still, Turner and his men are eager to join the operation. Driving all night along riverbeds and dirt tracks, the convoy reaches its destination at daybreak. A pickup carrying Afghan troops has flipped over, injuring two soldiers, so Turner is down several men. Gates, the least injured passenger in the bombed humvee, insists on coming along. "I wasn't that shaken," says Gates. "I was just pissed that I didn't have a truck anymore. I wanted to do something."

After spreading out his company, Turner receives new orders from headquarters. Two Chinook helicopters are due to ferry 50 of his troops up to a mountain ridge to keep the fleeing Taliban from outflanking the coalition special forces, who have set up an ambush for their prey in a deep canyon. But the Afghan commander, angry that a medevac chopper is late to arrive for his two soldiers who were injured when the pickup overturned, refuses to let his men join the mission. "Look at these Afghans. Why the hell should we be fighting their war?" says a U.S. sergeant disparagingly.

With the Taliban fleeing through the ravines, Delta Company is told that the operation on the ridge will take "just several hours" and they need to haul only their weapons and ammo onto the Chinooks. But like many missions, this one doesn't go according to plan. The first night, Delta Company's men are spectators. Once special forces pin down the Taliban, A-10 Thunderbolts light up the canyon with a barrage from their Gatling guns and several 500-lb. bombs. At about 2 a.m., an Apache helicopter roars overhead, dumps out a body bag and clatters away. It takes a while before one of the soldiers dares to zip open the body bag. It's full of imported mineral-water bottles and instant meals of beef teriyaki and cheese tortellini but no blankets to protect against the chill. Later, a civil-affairs officer, Major Alan McKewan, grabs the body bag and crawls inside to sleep.

After a night in the cold, Delta Company is still stuck on the mountain. Word comes by radio that no choppers are flying over southern Afghanistan because a Chinook has gone down elsewhere. The soldiers are stranded for at least another day. A bearlike Afghan guide named Siddiq is asked if he thinks the Taliban are gone. "They'll come back for their dead," he says. Several hours later, a soldier spies an insurgent observing the U.S. position from a ridge about 1,500 yds. away. A gunner opens up with a Mark-19, which fires grenades that tattoo the far ridge with puffs of smoke but fail to kill the insurgent. Meanwhile, the special forces alert the company by radio that three Taliban fighters are moving through the canyon so the soldiers should be ready to shoot. But the insurgents are beyond the reach of the .30-cal. machine gun. That night Lieut. Mark Stein sends out a patrol with night-vision goggles to explore the ridge where the lone Taliban fighter was seen. There's no trace of him.

By the next day, rations and water are running low. Soldiers rummage through the garbage to have a second look at items in the Meals Ready to Eat bags they tossed out.

In the afternoon, an Apache returns to blast away with missiles at the canyon again, but the surviving Taliban have disappeared. Eventually a Chinook arrives, first picking up the coalition special-forces unit and then the soldiers from Delta Company. Back at Kandahar air base, the operations commander, Colonel Bertrand Jes, is satisfied with the mission. It isn't clear yet whether Hannan, the prime target, was killed in the bombardment. But as Jes says, "The Taliban had safe havens up in the mountains. They were cocky at first. Not anymore. We've destroyed their support structure." Yet many U.S. officers are worried that as soon as the U.S. forces return to their bases, the Taliban fighters will reclaim the mountains and villages. Few Afghans want the Taliban to return to power, but ancient tribal ties are not so easily broken among the Pashtun who are the Taliban's supporters.

The U.S. plans to push deeper into the mountains of Zabul and Uruzgan provinces in the coming weeks. The aim is to scatter the Taliban from their hideouts and prevent them from returning to sanctuaries in nearby Pakistan--where U.S. forces can't venture and where their ultimate prey, Osama bin Laden, may be hiding. U.S. and Afghan officials believe that the war against the Taliban will go on for months, perhaps years. The longer the Taliban survives, the tougher it will become for the U.S. to penetrate the trails that might lead to al-Qaeda's boss. That reality is more openly acknowledged by officers on the ground than by their superiors back home. Turner says when he speaks to people in the U.S., "all they say is, 'Why haven't you caught Osama bin Laden?'" He gestures at range after range of mountains soaring out of the desert floor. "I tell them, 'The Army recruiting office is just down the street. Why don't you try to find him?' It's no easy task." After four years, it isn't getting any easier. --With reporting by Muhib Habibi/Kandahar

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With reporting by Muhib Habibi/Kandahar