Fighting Taliban — if US patrols can find them

Sunday, May 31, 2009 at 9:55 PM Posted by Beijing News


TATAR, Afghanistan – Lt. Eric Schwirian speaks softly, smiles a lot and shakes many wary hands during his platoon's three-day trek deep into an Afghan valley, looking for a fight with the Taliban.

But while thousands of extra troops have poured into Afghanistan this year in an escalating conflict, this unit in the central Afghan province of Wardak has barely had a sighting of its quarry.

It's frustrating for these infantrymen to feel as though they're chasing ghosts among the villages and terraced fields, but their daily routine — patience, presence, tea-drinking and handshakes — is central to America's counterinsurgency strategy.

The platoon is part of a 3,000-strong brigade from the New York-based 10th Mountain Division that deployed in the provinces of Logar and Wardak, at the gates of Kabul. The brigade came in after the Taliban started wreaking havoc on the roads, ambushing convoys, killing government officials and feeding a perception that the capital was under siege.

The fight in Wardak province now involves more roadside bombs and less direct confrontation than what other troops are facing in the eastern provinces bordering Pakistan and the south. That's where the insurgency is the strongest and where most of the 21,000 extra troops sent by U.S. President Barack Obama will deploy.

The U.S. military expects roadside and suicide bombings to spike by 50 percent this year. Taliban bombings killed 172 U.S. and other soldiers last year, according to military figures, and far more Afghan civilians.

"It is more like playing 'dodge the bomb,'" says Capt. James McCuney, the 40-year-old Pittsburgh man supervising the platoons that patrol the valley. Almost all attacks on his men have been roadside bomb blasts, but no one has died, McCuney says.

The Taliban have learned that firefights with better trained and armed U.S. troops get them killed. So American units have to go hunting for them, even make sitting ducks of themselves to lure the Taliban out in the open. "It's incredible what one has to do to get into a scrap," McCuney says.

As Schwirian's platoon readies for a night patrol under a rising moon, last orders are given. A few men smoke cigars. Barely in their 20s, the soldiers are already veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Hallelujah, lock and load," is stenciled on the windshield of a heavily armored truck, alongside "Never going home."

The men drive off slowly for several miles along bumpy dirt roads, lights dimmed, night-vision goggles on. Midway, Schwirian stops the convoy. He leads a squad on foot, looking for weapons caches near a village graveyard. Nothing is found.

They're near the spot where weeks earlier a roadside bomb blew up a vehicle of Afghan guards, killing three of them. The twisted and blackened wreck still lies by the road.

At the edge of the bazaar of the village of Omar Kheil, the patrol fords a river and beds down, some sleeping under the trucks, others inside them, curled in fetal position. It's uncomfortable.

Next morning the platoon moves through the Nerkh Valley, stopping to chat with villagers. The squads walk for hours through creek beds and over a punishing terrain of boulders washed down from the high mountains. The heavy guns mounted on their vehicle shadow them all the way.

Each time they reach a village, the routine is the same: First to approach them are children, sent by the grown-ups to check out the strangers. Then the fathers follow, and conversation begins.

Schwirian's gut tells him the Taliban are around. "I can sense they have influence here," says the 24-year-old from Collegeville, Pa.

Few of the villagers hide the fact that insurgents are around. At the mosque in Tatar, a village of mud and stone houses, terraced wheat fields and apple orchards, Schwirian asks Gul Wali Tatar, a 35-year-old father of six, whether the Taliban harasses his people.

The tense moment passes, and then orders arrive to return to base. Awaiting them are showers, hot meals and bunk beds. Soon they'll be back on patrol.





An unidentified worker checks sprinklers, at sunset. AP Photo/Hasan Jamali

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