GIs Battle 'Ghosts' in Afghanistan

KHUSHAI LALMI GHAR, Afghanistan – The three men were acting suspiciously, running back and forth, pointing and ducking and carrying something into a streambed. Watching from a nearby hill, 1st Lt. Quinn Eddy and his men decided they could be hostile and prepared for a firefight.

Instead, the three men ran away. The Americans, weighed down by 23 pounds of body armor plus many more pounds of assault equipment, could hardly give chase from 650 yards away. And since the suspicious men never pointed a weapon at them, under the rules of engagement, the soldiers could not shoot them. "That's one of the frustrating parts of being over here," Eddy sighed later. "You can't tell who's who."

Seven months since the United States began fighting in Afghanistan, that kind of fleeting, long-distance encounter has become more common than the massive airstrikes or large-scale ground assaults of months past. With no known large concentrations of al Qaeda or Taliban fighters to attack, the U.S. campaign has evolved into a sometimes frustrating search for a scattered, hit-and-run enemy that travels more easily and furtively than its pursuer.

During a three-day operation called Operation Iron Mountain, more than 100 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were flown into the brutally hot mountains here near the Pakistani border last week to put a stop to regular rocket attacks on a nearby U.S. base. In the end, they found mortar-firing stakes apparently planted by the three suspicious men and succeeded in preventing another attack from the area. But the enemy simply moved a few miles away and fired on the U.S. base anyway.

The operation clearly demonstrated that U.S. forces can move at will and control any territory they choose, scaring off Islamic guerrillas unwilling or unable to mount a sustained counterattack. Yet for all their numerical and technological advantages, the Americans and their allies have yet to figure out how to battle a foe so practiced at concealment.

The Americans are not the first to encounter such a dilemma in the mountains of Afghanistan. During their long, futile war here in the 1980s, Soviet soldiers referred to their Afghan adversaries as dukhi, the Russian word for ghosts, invisible spirits who attacked without notice only to disappear again into the countryside. Now American, British and Canadian ground troops deploy around the country for targeted strikes searching for their own dukhi.

During three days here, not far from the volatile east Afghan city of Khost, the soldiers of the 101st Airborne, accompanied by a Washington Post reporter, inspected houses, discovered caves, set up roadblocks and even delivered humanitarian aid to woo local Afghans who might betray the enemy. They slept on rocks in the open air, waiting to ambush anyone setting off rockets. They were shot at only a few times and opened fire only to scare off wild dogs.

"It's a frustrating war," Lt. Col. Patrick L. Fetterman, the commander of Operation Iron Mountain, said at the beginning of the mission last weekend. "The reason it's so frustrating and aggravating is because the enemy is not fighting. We're trying to find him and he's trying to avoid us. So any time we go out, he fades away. It's just like Vietnam. Any time he finds a weak spot, he flows in like water."

Hostile Intent

On Friday night, a dozen or so officers and top enlisted men gathered in Fetterman's tent at Bagram air base to go over the plan for the mission that would commence the next morning. Maps were handed out, some in Russian.

Three platoons from Fetterman's 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment – 129 men in all – would descend from the skies to scour an area southeast of Khost designated Crocodile. Fetterman, 40, an affable, introspective West Point graduate and 18-year veteran officer, wanted to make sure his young soldiers did not get carried away in an area with many civilians and took pains to drill in the rules for shooting.

"It's not acceptable to just kill anybody who wanders into our firing area," he lectured. Soldiers could fire only at those who demonstrated hostile intent. "Hostile intent means if he points in your direction or communicates it in some other means. It doesn't just mean he has a weapon. Everybody in this [expletive] country has a weapon."

The soldiers would set up nighttime roadblocks to search every car coming north from the Pakistani border, a particularly dangerous task. "If the vehicle tries to roll through a roadblock that is clearly marked as a roadblock . . . they are now hostile," Fetterman told his subordinates. "That's hostile intent. They could hurt you with the vehicle. You are allowed to engage. I spoke to the lawyers about this."

Capt. Patrick Harkins, the Bravo Company commander, and Capt. Richard Leach, the unit intelligence officer, described the new operation. Over the last several weeks, unknown assailants had been firing rockets at the small U.S. base located at the Khost airstrip, which the Americans have dubbed Chapman Air Field after a Special Forces soldier killed in the area in January. Intelligence reports suggested that al Qaeda operatives had been crossing the border from Pakistan and paying local Afghans to launch the attacks.

The enemy weapons were hardly technological wonders – just Chinese-made 107mm rockets launched by a homemade timing contraption made of two coffee cans, some water, aluminum foil and two D-cell batteries. The missiles had not hit anything, but Special Forces operating at Chapman had found four launch sites, and intelligence reports showed a pattern indicating that the enemy would try again over the coming weekend.

The U.S. soldiers would search for weapons caches, set up an ambush and wait. "If we find the caches," Harkins said, "we've found the enemy. Then they come to us."

'A Little Hunting'

"Hey, fellas, everything okay?"

It was 6 a.m. on Saturday and Fetterman was checking on the mood of his troops gathering on the tarmac at Bagram. Each was wearing body armor, 60 to 80 pounds of gear and a heavy helmet covered with burlap and green ribbon for camouflage they call "iron hair." Armed with M-4 assault rifles and 9mm handguns, they also carried night-vision goggles, knives, binoculars, canteens and some smoke grenades.

"We're going to have some fun," Fetterman told them. "Maybe do a little hunting. Just listen to your NCOs [noncommissioned officers] and we'll all be back here slapping high fives in two, three days."

Piling onto three CH-47 Chinook helicopters, the soldiers appeared impossibly young. Some had been reading "Harry Potter" novels in their tents just the day before. Yet they betrayed no hint of fear. As the choppers lifted off at 7:08 a.m. and headed south, many drifted off to sleep. Most knew better than to look out the windows to see how the choppers appeared to be flying straight into cliffs. Still, the ground-hugging, roller-coaster flight would take its toll: Two vomited.

After a 55-minute flight, the three choppers settled down one by one in a flat, rocky area at the base of a mountain and unloaded. Fetterman had been irked that he was not provided an escort by AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and now he was doubly annoyed to discover that the Special Forces and Afghan soldiers who were supposed to meet him had gone to a wrong landing zone.

"This is typical," he groused.

Eventually, the Special Forces escorts showed up and provided trucks to take the soldiers to the areas where they would operate. They started in a southern area designated Texas and began marching toward a small compound of mud buildings flying the Afghan flag. It was not yet noon, but the sun was already scorching. By the end of the day, Harkins's thermometer read 126 degrees, some of the battalion's equipment had melted and three days' supply of water was gone.

"Get that gun up and trained on that vehicle up there!" a soldier shouted as they approached the mud building. Several men were jumping into a white pickup truck near the building and getting ready to leave. The Special Forces troops ran to intercept it; the men turned out to be aid workers from UNICEF.

They had no more luck inside the compound. The Afghan men herded the women and children outside and made them wait under a tree while the soldiers searched. No weapons, no indications of enemy presence. Not far away, another squad found four caves but they too were empty of everything but trash and animal dung.

"Damn it! Nothing here," Fetterman exclaimed. "We'll come back one more time in the morning just in case he thinks it's safe."

'Good Work'

A family walked by, oblivious to the U.S. force, a man in a white shalwar kameez, a woman balancing a red sack on her head and a small boy in yellow. The American soldiers stared as if they had never seen Afghans before, and, in fact, they had not. Locked in their bases in Bagram or Kandahar, most U.S. infantrymen fighting the war have had no real interaction with the local population. And so all appeared potentially hostile.

"I feel like I'm on a safari," one soldier said as their truck rumbled down the desert road.

Sitting under a tree a little later, eating a Meal-Ready-to-Eat (MRE), the unit's chief NCO, Sgt. Maj. Jim Smith, spotted a group of shepherds in the distance. "There was a bunch of Habibs over there a few minutes ago," he said, using the soldiers' name for Afghans. "I bet I could take down four with my M-4 and two more with my 9 millimeter before they could chamber a round. What do you think?"

Smith, 43, a 24-year veteran, could be the sergeant major in any Hollywood war movie: gruff, gleefully profane, politically incorrect, and yet the young boys he shouts at revere him as a father figure. And just like the young soldiers, he was disappointed not to find an enemy to engage.

"We watched 'Black Hawk Down' before we came and that's what we expected," said Staff Sgt. Michael Young, 26, a squad leader from Washington. Now if he talked with friends shipping out, "I'd tell them not to expect any major battles because that's pretty much done. To me, it seems more like a peacekeeping mission to keep what we have."

The two roadblocks the first night turned up a few weapons but not much else. Overnight sentries reported eight to 10 rounds fired in their general direction at 1:30 a.m. but not close enough to pose a serious threat. The three suspicious men at the objective area designated Oregon got away, and nothing much was found in the Kansas objective area either.

On Sunday, Fetterman tried a different tactic, joining Special Forces at a local school where the 400 students meet outside every day because they have no building. The soldiers strung up three old parachutes to provide a shaded class area, and donated pens, pencils, notebooks and ground mats.

"It's good work," Fetterman told the Special Forces commander, "even if it's not what we came here to do."

"You're probably doing more today to go home soon than humping around all the mountains around here," answered the Special Forces commander, a major who gave his name as Jon M.B. "They see you doing this one day and the next they come to you and say, 'You're the guys looking for caves, right? I know one with weapons the Taliban left there.' "

Uncovering such caves, however, can be easier than destroying them. The four found in the Texas area the day before refused to collapse. Lt. Jason Bartlett first threw a grenade in one, to no effect. Then his team of engineers tried four more times, loading the largest cave up with more than 50 pounds of C4 explosives and 63 mortar rounds and even firing rocket-propelled grenades to set them off.

The result?

"We made it bigger for them," Bartlett sighed. "Now you know why they beat the Soviets."

'Like Vietnam'

The sound of an explosion cut through the silence at 3:40 a.m. on Monday. Most of the soldiers were asleep on the ground, but Smith, the sergeant major, was up in an instant.

"Is that an explosion?" he called out into the darkness.

"Yes, Sergeant Major," answered Spec. Brian Buss, the radio man.

Within moments, information came over the radio. Another rocket had been fired at the U.S. base at Khost – this time landing just 400 yards from the target, closer than ever before. With the CIA's unmanned Predator and other reconnaissance airplanes flying overhead, it did not take long to pinpoint where the rocket came from – about five miles to the west, well outside the Crocodile operation area.

"They felt pressure from us here so they launched from somewhere else," Smith said. "Can't stop a three-man team from running around. All they did is move further west. . . . How do you stop that?"

More details began trickling in. Fetterman was up, as were most of his top staff members. There was nothing for them to do but seethe. They had no vehicles to go chasing the assailants and, besides, intelligence reports indicated that the rockets were generally set several hours before going off, meaning the enemy was almost certainly long gone.

Several of the soldiers offered their ideas, which mostly revolved around putting more men on the ground. Smith focused on the rules of engagement, which prevent soldiers from shooting unless they are being threatened. The three suspicious men they saw did not qualify.

"The only way is to say if they act stupid take them down," he said. "Problem is you can't do that. Not in this country. 'Cause everyone acts stupid."

"[Expletive] bastards!" fumed Leach, the intelligence officer.

"Life was a lot easier when everyone wore a uniform," Fetterman said.

"Then you know who you can kill and not kill," Smith agreed.

Fetterman got a report from aides. Not a single car came through the two roadblocks overnight. "We had no movement in here last night. That means their 'intell' is better than ours. They know where we are and we didn't know where they are."

Fetterman sat back and reflected some more. "It's very much like Vietnam – partial success," he said. "We pushed them out but they're smart enough to figure out how to react to what we're doing."

"It's one of those times when you accomplish your task but fail the mission," added Capt. Daniel Kidd, 28, a top aide to Fetterman.

Smith did not like that assessment. "We didn't fail our mission," he retorted sharply. "Our mission was to search and clear Operation Area Crocodile. We did that."

But he did not sound all that convinced. He scrunched up his face in frustration. "Well, it could have been worse. They could have launched from right over there."

The sun began to creep above the horizon. The soft dawn light revealed a field filled with rustling soldiers with no enemy to fight. The temperature began to rise, hinting at the broiler to come. And the infantry men continued to hash out what had happened.

Smith was still perturbed. How could they do their job, he wanted to know, if the military was not prepared to do what was necessary? "Our job is to close with and destroy the enemy," he said. "You can drop bombs on them all [expletive] day. But until we're ready to accept putting out squads . . . "

"We're not willing to do that," interjected Fetterman.

"I know that."

"We got into their decision cycle," Fetterman offered, again searching for the positive outcome. "We made them do something they didn't want to do. We got some more intell."

"But bottom line, we didn't kill the [expletives]," Smith said. He scowled again. The conversation faded to grim silence. Off in the distance, they suddenly heard a burst of machine-gun fire. And then another. It came from the direction of the city, miles away, possibly factional fighting among the locals. Nothing related to their mission. Nothing for them to do. They sat down again and waited for the helicopters to come take them back to their base.

"Ah, this sucks," Smith sighed. "Didn't get to kill nobody and they still got to fire their rocket."

Then he posed the ultimate question to the group. "When have we completed our mission in Afghanistan?"

No one had an answer.