The Ghost HuntersBy Yochi J. Dreazen
Friday, December 3, 2010 | 12:10 p.m.
MUSHAN, Afghanistan—It was just after 2 p.m. when the first bomb went off. A U.S. route-clearance convoy was leaving a small outpost on the outskirts of this remote Afghan farming town when one of the vehicles ran over a homemade bomb, spiraling a column of mottled gray smoke into the sky. Three hours later, the convoy hit a second bomb, wounding a soldier and destroying one of the heavily armored vehicles.
“There’s a bomb maker out there,” Army Capt. Chris Watson said that evening, tapping on a map pinned onto a mud-brick wall in the makeshift command post of his base. Both bombs had exploded on the same stretch of dirt road, and Watson—a veteran of tours in Somalia and Iraq—was certain that it was no coincidence. “They’re putting them into the same spot every damn time. It’s time to go there and give them a holler.”
~snip~
At the end of a long and largely fruitless day, the soldiers finally spotted something suspicious near an abandoned patch of farmland Panjwai district of southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. A pair of black wires sticking out of the ground looked as if they might be part of a homemade bomb. The soldiers withdrew a safe distance while a bomb-disposal expert carefully dug out the wires. Instead of a bomb, he unearthed a trio of playing cards, including an ace of spades, buried carefully in the dirt. “It almost feels like they’re taunting us,” Watson said, brushing off the cards.
It might be a metaphor for the whole American enterprise in Afghanistan. The U.S.-led NATO offensive in Kandahar is supposed to prove that Gen. David Petraeus’s muscular counterinsurgency strategy can turn around the floundering war effort. Watson’s men—Alpha Company of the 1-187 Infantry Regiment—have one of the most important missions: to secure western Panjwai, which has been under de facto Taliban control for more than three years. Other U.S. forces are working to push the Taliban out of strongholds in the nearby districts of Zhari and Arghandab. If everything goes according to plan, Kandahar—the Taliban’s spiritual birthplace and top battlefield target—will gradually come under the control of the Afghan central government, dealing a significant blow to the militants.
Yet gauging success in Kandahar—as in the rest of Afghanistan—is fiendishly difficult. Watson’s troops openly admit that they don’t know if they have Panjwai’s militants on the run or if the insurgents have simply decided to wait out the offensive. With U.S. troops slated to start returning home next summer, Petraeus has only a few more months to demonstrate that his strategy is working. But if even Watson can’t figure out whether his elusive Taliban bomb makers are gone for good, how can NATO? When the White House begins a high-level Afghan strategy review later this month, President Obama and his team will need to answer a truly vexing question: What, exactly, does success in Afghanistan look like? And who is to say it will last?unhappycamper comment: The Afghanistan quagmire continues to resemble Vietnam quagmire says this Vietnam veteran.
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