Out of the Mountains (2 page)

As our column snaked down the valley, a car going the other way pulled onto the dusty shoulder of the road. We were lumbering along in a slow-moving convoy of mine resistant vehicles called MRAPs that look like huge coyote-brown garbage trucks.
2
A yellow bicycle leaned against the concrete barrier on the left-hand side of the bridge, no owner in sight.

The leading MRAP reached the bridge, drew level with the bike, and passed it.

At that instant the ambushers opened fire from the hillside with rocket-propelled grenades, long bursts from two machine guns, and rifles firing in support.
3
They concentrated on the head of the column, most likely trying to disable the leading vehicle, block the bridge, and trap us. Had they succeeded, we would have had a bad day out. Strung out on the valley floor, we could not have maneuvered: they could have worked us over at leisure until nightfall let them slip away. Exactly this had happened to two of my friends in the past couple of years; it was something of an occupational hazard in the Afghan hills, where a sparse road network and mountain terrain made our movements predictable.

The RPGs passed close to the cab of the front gun truck but exploded harmlessly in the creek bed. Having failed to stop us in the first burst, the attackers had lost the element of surprise. Our patrol was now fully alert, laying down heavy suppressive fire as it rolled across the bridge. The ambushers had lost any chance of blocking the road.

Our column brushed past the ambush at a steady pace, neither pausing nor hurrying. The gunners traversed right, angled up, then fired, each vehicle hosing the ambush down as it moved through the killing area. Long streams of red tracer fire slid across the valley in a flattened arc, splashing onto the hillside. The enemy shooters fell silent, the dry grass and pine scrub caught fire, and smoke obscured the hill, ending the fight before it had properly begun. Our leading MRAP was hit by rifle fire but suffered no other damage, and we lost nobody killed or injured. The whole thing was over in less than three minutes. It was all very halfhearted: in fact, by the standards of eastern Afghanistan in the early autumn of
2009
, it barely even qualified as a firefight at all.

It wasn't a great ambush site, either. I say this as something of an involuntary connoisseur: in Iraq and Afghanistan I'd seen ambushes of varying severity, including so-called complex attacks that combined bombings with ground assaults. Earlier, as an Australian officer seconded to teach tactics at the British Army's School of Infantry at Warminster in the mid-
1990
s, I'd taught ambush and counterambush techniques on a series of intensive four-month battle courses for infantry platoon commanders.

If these guys had been my students on the battle course, I would have failed them on their ambush plan. The ambush was too far down the valley to be sure of stopping us, too far from the road for the RPGs to be accurate, too high above the killing area for the machine guns to achieve a flat field of fire. The ambushers made no serious attempt to block the road, they sited themselves on a forward slope that made withdrawal impossible once things began to go wrong for them, and they had no cut-off, early warning, or backup. Their choice of a site on the forward slope meant that the ground rose up behind them, so there was no clear back-blast area for their RPGs. The dust that the RPGs kicked up made their position very obvious and probably cost them several dead and wounded. It was all rather incompetent.

Thirty minutes later and five miles farther down the road, we circled the wagons among the gray pebbles and scrappy trees of the riverbed and got out to wait for the helicopters.

The patrol was from the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province. They'd been in-country just over two months, and this was their first significant firefight. The guys were clearly relieved to have made it through unscathed, and to have acquitted themselves well. The presence of news media—the experienced war correspondent Lara Logan, her producer, Howard Rosenberg, and a
60 Minutes
film crew were there, along with Ambassador Hank Crumpton, the legendary CIA officer who'd masterminded the
2001
invasion—probably elated them further, and they talked over the firefight with excitement. Listening to the discussion, I was reminded of Winston Churchill's comment on a cavalry patrol he watched returning from an ambush in the Mamund Valley, thirty miles east of here, in September
1897
: “They were vastly pleased with themselves. Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
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“How many Taliban do you think we killed?” one of the drivers asked his gunner as they sat smoking. I was five feet away, leaning back against the riverbank to take the weight off my assault vest, and taking a long drink from my Camelbak.

“I don't know, five to seven? We'll know for sure when we get back and clear the site.”

“How do you know they were Taliban?” I asked the soldiers, who both seemed to be in their early twenties.

They looked at me.

“Dude, they were
shooting
at us.”

“Fair enough.”

II

The two Black Hawks popped over the skyline with a sudden rotor thump, flaring to land on the dry watercourse in a cloud of grit and pine needles. Over the engine noise, we shouted our goodbyes and I headed for the rear aircraft, crouching with eyes half closed in the instant dust storm.

Flying back to Kabul, we followed the stupendous southern edge of the Hindu Kush, our minuscule helicopters hugging the giant mountains like dragonflies skirting a rockpile. We dropped down into the Alishang Valley, following the terrain, picked up the Kabul-Jalalabad road, then flew above it, the pilots using the highway as a handrail to guide us home. The sun was setting, and I gazed out the helicopter door, arms tightly folded, chin tucked into my chest against the cold, watching the clean rock of the mountaintops scroll beneath my climbing boots. The peaks threw long, sharp shadows in the clear tawny light of late afternoon. They seemed close enough to touch.

Something didn't add up. Despite what the MRAP crew had said, the more I thought about it, the less this seemed like a Taliban ambush. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but something was wrong with the picture.

For a start, Dara-i-Nur district, where the firefight happened, is
99
percent Pashai. The Pashai aren't Pashtun; they speak their own language and keep to themselves. They're not aligned with the government (that deep in the Afghan countryside, virtually nobody is “aligned” with anyone but themselves), but neither do they support the mainly Pashtun Taliban. In fact, like mountain people all over the world, the Pashai are militantly self-sufficient and can be suspicious and hostile toward outsiders, whatever their origin. This district, though only fifteen miles from the Pakistani frontier, had seen little Taliban activity to date, and it was a part of Nangarhar province that never really supported the Taliban even when they were in power during the late
1990
s. Of course, Taliban fighters could have slipped in without the locals' knowledge, but that would have been unusual this late in the season—there were only a few weeks left till the first snowfalls began to close the highest passes, making it harder for guerrillas to move in the mountains or cross over from their safe havens in Pakistan.

For another thing, these weren't the usual Taliban tactics. The insurgents were creatures of habit—they set patterns, doing things the same way over and over again.
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But within the bounds of their tactical repertoire, they were tough and competent. In any serious ambush, a Taliban main force column, even just a local guerrilla group (known as a
delgai
), would first have blocked the road, blowing the bridge or blocking it with a vehicle, then shot us up with RPGs and machine guns from the crest line and mortars from the valley behind, perhaps with a ground assault force waiting in reserve behind the crest.
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They'd done it this way a hundred times—but not today.

Some of our group had speculated that the car that pulled off the road, or the bicycle on the bridge, might have concealed a roadside bomb that had failed to explode. Nobody stopped to check, of course, as we were focused on “getting off the X,” but it didn't seem all that likely. Suicide car bombs weren't uncommon in Afghanistan, of course, but they were more an urban than a rural thing at this time—in the countryside it was more usual to see homemade fertilizer bombs, clusters of Russian mortar bombs, or stacks of Italian antipersonnel or antitank mines buried in the roadway or dug into the side of a cutting. And the bike, even with a pannier, would have been too small to hide the size of improvised explosive device needed to blow the bridge or disable an armored vehicle.

No, the bicycle was either a coincidence or just an aiming point—a distinctive object placed at a known distance to help the ambushers set the range for their weapon sights.

And it was unlike the Taliban to site an ambush so poorly, on the forward slope of the hillside, with no escape route. With their Pakistani advisers, decent equipment, and years of practice, the Main Force Taliban in eastern Afghanistan were getting pretty good by this stage of the war. The previous year, just northeast of here, they'd mounted a sustained assault with two hundred fighters, foreign advisors, the collusion of village elders, and supporting fire from the local Afghan National Police detachment against an outpost of the
173
rd Airborne Brigade near the village of Wanat in the Waygal Valley. The attack killed nine Americans and wounded twenty-seven, along with four soldiers from the partnered Afghan National Army unit, and turned out to be one of the most intense and sustained fights of the entire war. Taliban positioning of support weapons at Wanat had been textbook perfect, and their maneuver had been aggressive, competent, and determined—nothing like the amateurish effort we'd just brushed off.
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So, on balance, the evidence suggested this probably wasn't a Taliban ambush. What was it, then? Perhaps, I thought, it might have had something to do with what the patrol had been doing that day.

Provincial reconstruction teams were specialized units created for reconstruction and stabilization purposes early in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They typically included three or four civilian experts, a combined civil-military command group, military reconstruction specialists, and fifty to seventy soldiers to provide protection, mobility, and logistical support. The first teams emerged in an ad hoc way in late
2002
, but by
2009
they were part of a sophisticated, multinational reconstruction infrastructure; in Afghanistan there were twenty-seven teams at this time, twelve of which were American-led. PRTs were usually based in the provincial capital and were responsible for projects across the whole province. That afternoon we'd visited two such projects: a micro-hydroelectricity plant and a slaughterhouse. Both were highly impressive feats of engineering.

Despite the name, there was nothing exactly “micro” about the hydro plant in the village a few miles up the valley. On the contrary, it was a major construction effort, built into the side of a ravine, with a catchment canal and holding tank at the top of the hill to contain snowmelt diverted from upriver. Water flowed down the canal into a stone basin the size of a small house, then fed into a pipe that dropped one hundred feet straight down into the gorge, to a turbine shed housing a forty-kilowatt generator. The orange turbine, about the size of a ride-on lawn mower, produced enough electricity to light more than half the village. I scrambled down the precipitous hillside to look at the turbine, climbing carefully over boulders, scree, and dirt, dazzled by the sun, with trickles of sweat itching inside my body armor in the afternoon air. Troops from the PRT perched behind trees and rocks on top of the hill, scanning the other side of the valley through their weapon sights.

After a few minutes the Afghan engineer who supervised the project joined me, followed by Lara Logan and Ambassador Crumpton. All of them were dusty from the climb into the ravine, and the engineer carefully wiped his shiny black oxford shoes before describing the design of the micro-hydro turbine and generator system. He explained that the project had taken eighteen months, cost more than a million dollars, and employed twenty local men. He was rightly proud: the thing was beautifully engineered, and it was constructed to exacting standards. This engineer had built hydro plants all over Afghanistan, mostly for the narcotics affairs section at the U.S. mission. Installations such as this were part of a set of projects designed to offer alternative livelihoods to farmers who stopped growing opium poppies, and so were funded with counterdrug money.

A few miles farther down the road, the slaughterhouse had just been completed. It was the main project in this area for an agribusiness development team (ADT) of the Missouri National Guard. ADTs were small units that usually cooperated with the PRT in their province, came from National Guard units in farming areas of the United States, and had a relationship with a land grant college or agricultural university in their home state. The teams made a practice of rotating back to the same area on every tour, and as farmers themselves, team members could bond with local farming communities. The ADTs' parent National Guard units, hometowns, state governments, and universities often struck up partnerships with Afghan districts or colleges, making the ADT program useful both in a practical sense and for the political goodwill it generated. In the case of Nangarhar, where the Missouri National Guard pioneered the ADT concept in Afghanistan, the State of Missouri had committed to a five-year collaborative program that included a partnership with Nangarhar University, in Jalalabad, and dozens of projects across the province.