U.S. troops fighting uphill battle in Afghanistan
Dallas Morning News
KALAGU, Afghanistan — Sgt. Corey Tack guns the engine of the 18-ton armored truck up a snow-streaked, gravelly hill. He parks on a spot with a commanding view of the valley between white, jagged mountains. Sgt. Oscar Macias opens the 400-pound back door and jumps out.
Facing a night of midteen temperatures and heavy frost, the soldiers start digging holes for their sleeping bags.
“A mortar hits in the middle here, bang, we’re all dead,” said Macias, from Rio Hondo, Texas. “But if it hits over there, you’ll be in a hole and the shrapnel will go over your head.”
The confident, weather-burned faces of these soldiers tell a story.
They’re battle-tested and undefeated. They sense the enemy knows and avoids their truck with its red-and-white banners that read “Hooligans.”
But they also know they are not winning the battle against insurgents in Afghanistan.
“When I first rolled in, it was kill everybody and everything,” Macias said with exaggeration.
No more.
“Even if you do take their leaders out, there’s always somebody else to replace them,” Macias said.
These Cavalry Scouts say there aren’t enough American troops here to cover a country the size of Texas. They know their enemies roam unchecked across much of the bleak high plains. They know the enemy is winning on the information front, spreading propaganda about U.S. soldiers smashing down doors in the middle of the night to rape, pillage and murder.
To win, they know they have to hand over security to their Afghan counterparts, who often come to a fight ill-equipped and stoned on hashish.
The hash smoking “happens a lot — more than I know or want to know,” said Sgt. 1st Class Bruce Kobel, a Lewiston, Maine, firefighter with the Vermont National Guard who is training Afghan soldiers here. “It’s like, you learn there’s an accepted level of corruption. Well, there’s also an accepted level of drug abuse, too. It’s part of their culture.”
For more than seven years, small groups of U.S. soldiers have chased the Taliban, al-Qaida and other foes across eastern and southern Afghanistan, killing thousands of them. Yet the insurgency is stronger now than at any time since the Taliban were toppled from power in 2002.
With security improving in Iraq, the Obama administration says it plans to send as many as 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
For 11 months, Macias and the other 20 scouts of the U.S. Army’s Alpha Platoon, 1-61 Cavalry Squadron, have slept under the stars, fighting the Taliban over a 750-square-mile area of Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan. Asked if they ever use tents, the soldiers laugh.
“We don’t have time for tents,” said Tack, who is 28 and from Joliette, Ill. “Maybe a poncho lean-to for shade in the summer, but that’s it.”
They’ve trundled through muddy wadis and baking dust in Mine-Resistant, Armor-Protected (MRAP) trucks built to withstand roadside bombs. They’ve jumped off helicopters to hike through the mountains lugging mortars and machine guns to set deadly traps on Taliban trails.
The 1-61 Cavalry has counted 75 confirmed enemy killed since it arrived at Combat Outpost Zormat on March 20, 2008. Afghans in Zormat tell the soldiers that losses among the insurgents are closer to 250 to 300 killed.
But this is not a path to victory.
“The nonlethal portion is the key to success,” said Col. John P. Johnson, commanding officer of the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division, which includes the Hooligans’ Scout Platoon.
Johnson puts “information operations” at the top of his priorities for countering the Afghan insurgency. His soldiers have eight FM radio stations scattered through three eastern provinces that try to crowd out pirate broadcasts of the Taliban and counteract the Taliban rumor mill.
Sgt. Charles Gonzalez, 26, a Michigan native who is the turret gunner on the MRAP of Tack and Macias, said anti-American rumors sweep through the area quickly, thanks to Taliban sympathizers.
“They twist our words to make them believe what they want them to believe about us. Then they tell them they’re fighting for God,” he said.