Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  From the outside, their fortress base would have looked right at home in a nineteenth-century lithograph of the Khyber Pass. True, it bristled with sophisticated antennae and every so often a column of Humvees would come barrelling out of the gates, machine guns poking through the windows. But the basic idea was the same: high walls thick enough to withstand bombardment, no windows, and a massive gate strong enough to resist attack.

  Six months before our visit this had been bandit country. Remnants of the Taliban and other antigovernment forces were controlling the countryside, raiding at will, while corrupt police officers had been extorting money from the locals. Now the venal police chief had been sacked for embezzlement and the US Army had set up a Provincial Reconstruction Team or PRT, a robust military presence to protect the civilians doing the actual reconstruction, disarmament and electoral registration. By the winter of 2003 there were four of these PRTs in Afghanistan, manned by small detachments of troops from the US, Britain, Germany and New Zealand, and there were plans to open up others all over the country. As in Iraq, one of the principal problems in Afghanistan has been security. Without it, nothing gets done.

  The Americans had made themselves at home in Gardez fort. They had had twenty-four-hour generators and big Texan steaks flown in from Ramstein Airbase in Germany. In their tiny mud-walled rooms, some of the officers even had their laptops hooked up to the internet. Down in the makeshift canteen there were fridges full of Dr Pepper soda drinks, and DVDs of Hollywood blockbusters showing in the evenings. You had to hand it to the US military, they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable in a war zone.

  We were in Gardez to report on how Coalition troops were trying to help rebuild Afghanistan after numerous wars and a period of paralysis under Taliban rule. In a way, we hoped our film would be a microcosm of the wider challenge this country faced. If peace and prosperity could be extended to the whole of Afghanistan then the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda partners would have little chance of returning. But if conditions for ordinary people were no better than they had been under Taliban rule then there was an increased risk of this country slipping into anarchy, a situation Al-Qaeda would be bound to exploit in the hope of re-establishing its Afghan foothold, which might make it logistically easier to plan major attacks on the West.

  We had spent the afternoon at a half-built schoolhouse, watching the American soldiers on a ‘presence patrol’, standing around in their wraparound sunglasses supervising construction while bearded labourers shovelled gravel and slapped on wet concrete. They seemed to be in a hurry to finish by dusk. The trouble with foreign troops getting involved in civil reconstruction in a country that is still suffering from low-level conflict is that the distinction between the troops and those they are trying to protect can easily become blurred, in this case making both fair game by those who wanted the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai to fail. As far as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and their sympathizers were concerned, Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century was a nation under foreign military occupation, and they believed they had a duty to resist every aspect of that occupation. While we were in Gardez we learned that a Taliban spokesman had given an interview in the town of Spin Boldak on the Pakistani border, in which he denounced all Western journalists and aid workers in the country as ‘CIA spies’ who were therefore ripe for punishment by having their throats slit. (The Taliban’s outlook on life also included banning all music and television, ending women’s education, forcing men to wear beards and blowing up the centuries-old Bamyan Buddha statues.) A few days later gunmen on a motorbike rode up alongside a car carrying a French aid worker in Ghazni and shot her dead through the window. Ironically, these kind of threats meant that in Afghanistan the safest place for a Western journalist to be was probably under the protection of the Coalition military; it did not mean you agreed with their military aims, it just made you a harder target to access.

  In its effort to make Afghanistan a safer place, the UN had set up the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programme, a scheme to try to disarm the notoriously powerful and violent warlords and find useful, civil jobs for their newly unemployed militias. While we were in Gardez we had a chance to see it at first hand. On a flat, sun-beaten plain just outside town we found a few dozen bearded Afghans in scruffy military uniforms milling around a collection of weapons that they had just handed over to the UN. There were heavy mortars, field guns, anti-aircraft cannons and heavy machine guns, all of Soviet era and some frankly belonging in a museum. A young ex-British Army officer working for the UN, Stephen Romilly, was dashing around with a clipboard, stooping and squinting down barrels while the Afghans wrestled with their weapons to prove they worked, thereby earning them a few dollars from the UN. Sometimes he would tell them to put more oil on and try again, sometimes he would reward them with the coveted splash of yellow paint which meant they had passed. Cheers would then go up and the warlords would manhandle the weapons over to a UN lorry that was waiting to tow them away.

  At this point the US Army showed up, driving on to the plain in their armoured jeeps in a swirl of dust which settled on the small armoury of surrendered weapons. The vehicle that pulled up next to me had rock music playing inside. Some of the infantrymen got out to greet the plain-clothes US Special Forces soldiers already there. ‘What’s goin’ on, man?’ said one of the new arrivals. ‘Do they take credit cards for this stuff?!’

  Back at Gardez fort we discovered that the Special Forces had their own secretive base attached to the one we were staying in. They were working closely with the Afghan Militia Forces or AMF, going out on night-time missions to investigate reports of Taliban activities or suspected arms caches. As journalists, we were not allowed to go near them or speak to them, but within our own mud-walled fort there were a number of curious characters lurking around. You could tell by their clothes that they occupied that murky netherworld halfway between soldiers and civilians. Bearded and dressed in beige cargo trousers, desert boots, dark jackets and woollen caps pulled right down to their eyebrows, they spoke in an American drawl and wore no rank. One of them told us he was ‘with the State Department’, another was ‘attached to the UN’. Sure. We just assumed they were all CIA paramilitaries masquerading as reconstruction advisers. Up on the watchtower parapet, admiring the galaxy of stars, I got talking to one of these types. I am always deeply suspicious of any information coming from someone who won’t tell me their full name or who they really work for, but this man certainly knew how to get my attention. US intelligence, he said, reckoned they had Osama Bin Laden boxed into a corner to the north of here and they were about to go after him with everything they had got. ‘Where?’ I asked. ‘Oh, somewhere up north. It’s a big one, they’re even diverting some air assets over from Iraq and the Horn of Africa.’

  That would be just our luck, I thought. Here we were, miles from Kabul, and they were about to capture Bin Laden. Great. The story of the year and I was not going to be there for it. I hurried down the ladder and went in search of my producer, Dominic Hurst. When I told him what this spook had let slip, his face displayed a mixture of excitement and fear. Missing the capture of Bin Laden would not have been great for his career prospects, either. We decided to get back to the capital the next day then head on up to the big Coalition base at Bagram to sniff out what was going on.

  In Kabul we just had time to squeeze in an interview with the Interior Minister, Ali Jalali, in his newly painted office. In the Gulf Arab States I had grown used to such ministers giving out a Panglossian vision of their countries, insisting that everything was for the best, but Ali Jalali was refreshingly candid. Corruption was rife, he said, and there were serious problems with terrorism, crime, drugs and factional fighting. In the south and east the threat was from Taliban/Al-Qaeda-related terrorism, in the north it was from factional fighting between warlords, and everywhere there was crime and banditry. Like many Afghan officials, the Interior Minister blamed Pakistan for harbouring Taliban fighters
; he denied they were gaining ground but insisted they were conducting hit-and-run raids from their logistical bases just across the border.

  It was time to get over to Bagram, a huge, sprawling airbase and tented city on the Shomali plain. Once a major Soviet base and prize target for the mujahideen fighters in the 1980s, it now served as the Coalition headquarters in Afghanistan. On the way we passed an entire camel train of Afghan nomads winding their way south to warmer pastures for the winter. With camels and donkeys adorned with bells they plodded past us, the women in bright-blue and silver dresses, their eyes rimmed with antimony. It was a fleeting glimpse of an ancient world, one that pre-dated Al-Qaeda, joint taskforces or the so-called War on Terror. A distant burst of gunfire brought us back to the twenty-first century; a pair of Apache helicopter gunships was strafing a barren mountainside, getting in some target practice before lunch.

  Once through security and inside Bagram airbase we passed the US military’s interrogation block, a large windowless building with no identifying signs. This was where the US Army brought in what they called their PUCs (Persons Under Control), which could be a hapless Afghan farmer who simply happened to be too close to a Taliban arms cache, or someone of major interest to the CIA such as a suspected Arab member of Al-Qaeda. The US administration has been extremely secretive about where they have been holding their ‘high-value’ prisoners, such as the self-confessed Al-Qaeda operatives Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh. But secrecy does not always equate to security and some time after our visit a major Al-Qaeda captive from Indonesia managed to escape from Bagram base. Adding insult to injury, Al-Qaeda released a video of him boasting how he and others had got away, to the huge embarrassment of the Pentagon and the annoyance of the Indonesians, who now feared he would be back to bomb them.

  We arrived at Bagram just in time for a press conference, held outdoors in a gravel compound with a large-scale map pinned to a board.

  ‘We have launched Operation Mountain Resolve,’ announced Colonel Rodney Davis, a big, bald, black officer from Virginia. ‘Our troops are operating in some of the toughest terrain that the Coalition has ever been in here.’

  ‘OK, but what about Bin Laden?’ I asked.

  The colonel exchanged glances with a junior officer. ‘We can make no comment on his whereabouts at this time . . . but we think he’s in Afghanistan.’ Gosh, well that narrowed it down then.

  After the press conference we followed Colonel Davis up to his office, where he sat back in a swivel chair and eyed us coolly. Dominic Hurst, my producer, had been joined by our cameraman, Phil Goodwin, an old Afghan hand who had covered the Taliban’s taking of Kabul in 1996. We told Colonel Davis that we were hoping for a ‘facility’, a chance to film how US forces were tackling Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces close to the Pakistani border. Colonel Davis wanted us to go away.

  ‘You BBC guys are not my favourite people,’ he drawled. ‘I consider you pretty much left of centre. You were against the war in Eye-rak, if I recall. So I would put Fox News out here on one side with the good guys and you over there on the other. So why should I give you a facility?’

  It took several days to thaw Colonel Davis out, and then he arranged what was obviously a test to see if we could behave ourselves. He allowed us to film, under close escort, in the Joint Operations Centre, a huge airconditioned tent from where the Coalition’s operations all over Afghanistan were being run. First we had to wait outside while he went in and ordered all the analysts to sanitize the displays on their computers of any classified information. Then we were ushered into a secret world where row upon row of operators sat behind terminals in various clusters: air operations, fire support, logistics, intelligence officers, meteorological and terrain experts, and numerous Coalition liaison officers. There were over thirty nations and fifteen thousand troops involved in Afghanistan but it was clear that the Americans were doing the bulk of the combat operations in the unstable south and east. I caught a glimpse of a large, classified map detailing the routes and flightpaths for Operation Mountain Resolve, which of course meant nothing to me. An officer in charge of helicopter operations explained how these were usually conducted. Often, he said, Special Operations troops would go in first to survey the terrain on the ground, and their reports would be combined with satellite imagery to give commanders a good idea of what they were going into. Increasingly, UAVs or pilotless drones were being used to fly over an area and take pictures prior to an operation.

  Colonel Davis decided we had passed the honesty test – we had not filmed anything we were not supposed to – and Dominic, Phil and I were summoned up to his office. It felt like being called to the headmaster’s study.

  ‘I can offer you three choices,’ he said, enjoying our obvious eager anticipation. ‘I can send all three of you down to Kandahar for a “presence patrol”, which I can’t promise will be very exciting. I can send one of you – just one of you – to Kandahar for an indefinite attachment to US Special Forces.’ The colonel was looking pointedly at me now, so I asked him what this would entail. ‘Well, you would be going into villages, checking them out, inoculating tribesmen and camels and trying to befriend the locals. You know, hearts-and-minds stuff, but who knows what you might see. But there’s only room for one of you, you’ll have to keep up with the Special Ops guys and I can’t promise when the mission will be over.’ I glanced at Dominic, who was firmly shaking his head. ‘Which leaves the third option,’ said the colonel. ‘I can get you by chopper down to the firebase at Shkin on the Pakistani border, but I can’t promise you when we can lift you out.’

  After a cold night in the tent we awoke soon after dawn to the sound of helicopters taking off en masse from Bagram airbase as part of the ongoing Operation Mountain Resolve. We had slept badly, since it had been rather like trying to take a kip at the end of a Heathrow runway. A-10 Warthog attack aircraft were taking off one after the other, while some of the transport planes coming in were so heavy we could feel the vibrations right through our camp beds. The Coalition was clearly throwing everything at this operation up in the mountains of Kunar and Nuristan. Then there was Colonel Davis, beaming his Hollywood smile as he saw us off. ‘You’re going to the worst place in the world!’ he shouted above the roar of the rotors with an air of smug satisfaction. ‘That place Shkin is evil, man, there are some b-a-a-a-d people down there on the border.’ But we were happy; after days of negotiating, we were finally getting out of Bagram’s depressing tented camp and heading for the wild frontier with Pakistan.

  On a grey, misty autumn afternoon, the sort of day that would have held a whiff of bonfire smoke back in England, we lifted off the tarmac at Bagram in a Blackhawk helicopter and headed due south. Shadowed by an Apache helicopter gunship for protection, we flew fast and low over barren, desolate mountain ridges. Strapped in next to the window, I watched eastern Afghanistan slide by so close I felt I could almost touch it: brown, parched ravines; grey, dried-up riverbeds; the occasional shepherd staring up at us; abandoned, mud-brick villages; the rusting, burned-out carcass of a tank. This was still what much of twenty-first-century Afghanistan looked like outside the cities.

  To the east the mountains soared to nearly fifteen thousand feet, their jagged crests laced with the first snows of winter. There seemed to be no sign of life here at all. But then, south of Khost, as we neared the Pakistani border, the landscape changed. Short, alpine fir trees sprang up on the slopes and as we swooped low over a ridge a broad, sunlit valley unfolded beneath us, ringed by mountains. Every single building was a fortress, surrounded by a high mud-brick wall a metre thick and surmounted by look-out towers. An hour into the flight we began to drop down towards Shkin firebase and the door-gunners readied their weapons, swinging their machine guns out through the windows on pivots, aiming them at the desert floor, fingers on the triggers. For the Americans this was hostile territory where the writ of the Kabul government ran thin and local loyalties were hard to divine.

  In a swirl of dust and wind-blo
wn bushes, we put down on the landing zone just outside the base. Like the fort we had stayed in at Gardez, it was a big, four-square mud-brick fortress, rather like the toy Red Indian fort I used to play with as a child. The base had a detachment of artillery, Special Ops soldiers (whom once again we were forbidden to speak to) and a huge radio mast for communicating with Coalition HQ in Bagram or for the soldiers stuck out here to make calls back to the USA. We drove through a huge gateway and were greeted by the base commander, a softly spoken Irish American who seemed to relish being out here on the frontline.

  At dusk we went up to the look-out post, where the duty guards were scanning the horizon through binoculars, watching a lone pickup truck jolt unevenly over the rocks before it slipped out of view. The Pakistani border lay just six miles away along a low mountain ridge, and that, they said, was where most of the attacks came from at night. The Americans could not usually tell who was shooting at them until they returned fire and identified the bodies the next day. Mostly, they said, it was Afghan and Pakistani insurgents, but they had also come across Arabs and Chechens, remnants of a whole network of Al-Qaeda-run training camps that had flourished here in the 1990s. The previous year, before all the base’s defences were in place, a force of nearly thirty Taliban/Al-Qaeda fighters tried to overrun it, rushing headlong at the fort in a suicidal charge. A US sergeant grimaced as he recalled how easy it was to beat them back, catching their attackers out in the open with machine-gun fire in a scene reminiscent of the First World War.