TIME: Where Danger
Lurks
Monday, February 04, 2002
By TIM McGIRK / KABUL with reporting by MARK
THOMPSON / WASHINGTON and MICHAEL WARE / TARIN KOWT
On an icy, still night in Kabul, two weeks ago,
Marine guards in full combat gear at the U.S. embassy
were startled by the whoosh of a fireball exploding
underneath wintry trees at the far end of the
diplomatic compound. The resident bomb-disposal
expert decided to wait until dawn before venturing
out of the fortified embassy to investigate. That's
what makes him an expert. The explosion was only a
decoy. The real killer was a land mine that was
invisible in the dark but was spotted in the daylight
half buried. Says Corporal Matthew Roberson of the
Marine antiterrorist unit at the embassy: "It looked
like somebody did it so we'd come running out and
step on the mine."
Afghanistan's "postwar" era is hardly a peaceful one.
Last Thursday U.S. special forces engaged in a major
fire fight, one of the largest in the conflict so
far, near the village of Hazar Qadam, 60 miles north
of Kandahar. The good news is that no American
soldier died; one was slightly wounded in the foot.
The bad news is that Hazar Qadam's was only the
latest of several recent clashes between U.S.
personnel and al-Qaeda and Taliban resistance. To
date, only two Americans, including one from the CIA,
have been killed by enemy fire (17 have died in
accidents, including one who may have been a
suicide). But the potential for mayhem remains huge
and, by some Army assessments, growing as Americans
confront what General Tommy Franks, head of U.S.
Central Command, estimates to be about a dozen ever
shifting pockets of resistance. Those dangers are
exacerbated as American forces are drawn into local
feuds and warlord ambitions. As the double-bang plot
against the embassy illustrates, it is the
multiplicity of perils and the long list of suspects
that make Afghanistan one of the world's biggest
booby traps.
Who carried out the embassy attack? The Arab members
of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network have long
since cleared out of Kabul, but many members of their
Afghan cohort are at large, according to intelligence
sources in the government of Prime Minister Hamid
Karzai. The attack might also have been the work of
Taliban fighters who still roam the city--in
beardless disguise--acting on their own instead of
with al-Qaeda. A third possibility is that the bomber
was an Afghan who wanted payback for a bomb the U.S.
mistakenly dropped on his home.
Of the 4,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, 3,000 occupy
Kandahar airport and 500 are stationed at the air
base in Bagram. Al-Qaeda elements "probed" the
Kandahar airport to test its security apparatus and
were sent fleeing. At Bagram, just keeping watch over
50 detainees, among them Pakistanis, Moroccans,
Chechens and British Muslims, is hazardous duty for
the 65th Military Police company. Inmates have been
found with razors, money and pens sewn into their
clothing even after repeated searches. If a suspected
terrorist should manage to get beyond the 8-ft.-high
razor wire, the procedure is simple. "We tell 'em
three times to halt," says Specialist Tim Vernon, 22,
of Sumner, Wash. "And if they don't, we open fire. No
way we're going to chase them through the
minefields."
Initiated missions always seem to bring the biggest
perils. Last week's fight near Hazar Qadam was the
result of a raid by Green Berets--acting, unusually
in this war, without the aid of local militias--on
two suspected al-Qaeda hideouts that turned out to be
Taliban ammunition dumps. The invaders killed 15
Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, took 27 prisoners and,
with the help of an AC-130 gunship, destroyed the
ammunition. According to one account of the battle,
the two sides engaged in hand-to-hand combat amid the
shooting. "The fact that so many died shows us
they're still willing to put up quite a fight," says
a Pentagon official. The "nests" the Green Berets
attacked were just two of many the U.S. is watching
across Afghanistan. "You're going to see more attacks
like this," says the Pentagon official, "or at least
you're going to hear about them after they've
happened."
However, in Tarin Kowt, the capital of the province
where the raid occurred, different and confusing
claims are circulating. One allegation is that the
U.S. made a mistake, attacking and killing provincial
government soldiers who had gone to the area to
accept a Taliban surrender and had been guarding the
munitions stored in a local school and the district
headquarters. A man claimed that two bodies were
found with hands bound and shot in the head;
furthermore, that 22 to 40 soldiers and a number of
civilians were killed in the raid. The fear in Tarin
Kowt is that the U.S. may have acted on information
from local warlords who wanted to get hold of the
Taliban munitions for themselves.
For the U.S., a huge challenge is not to slide into
the miasma of Afghanistan's impossible politics.
Diplomats say an ambush of U.S. special forces
earlier this month in the province of Khost, in which
Green Beret Sergeant Nathan Chapman was killed, may
have been in reprisal for the U.S.'s backing an
unpopular local warlord there, Pacha Khan Zadran.
Zadran has enemies within his own tribe, including
one who claims to be Khost's new governor and whose
500 fighters captured part of Khost last week. Twice
now, Zadran's foes say, he has called in U.S. air
strikes on his enemies, claiming they were al-Qaeda
and Taliban fugitives. (Zadran denies the charge.)
Marine General Peter Pace, Vice Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, insists that the U.S. "will continue
to work with each of the tribal leaders to get to the
point where the things that we are doing in
Afghanistan alongside them are good for both the U.S.
and Afghanistan." But he concedes that all of
Afghanistan is a battlefield. And, he said, "the
battlefield will continue to be fluid."
--With
reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington and Michael
Ware/Tarin Kowt