For more than two hours on the night of July 31, the Americans searched the mud-walled compound, smashing doors and breaking the locks on the brightly painted chests that store family valuables.
Uddin was not there. Nor were any Al Qaeda operatives. Instead, the soldiers took away a brother of Uddin, a 14-year-old nephew and three seasonal farmhands who had been sleeping outside.
They left behind a dead man. Niazi Mohammed, 27, a neighbor and father of four who had been in the fields protecting his newly harvested wheat, was hit apparently by mistake when the helicopters opened fire.
And so another day passed in the Afghan installment of the U.S. war against terrorism, another day on which U.S. forces failed to find what they were looking for, but left behind a community in uproar.
A familiar pattern is emerging.
In the year since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon triggered the world’s biggest manhunt, the U.S. military has achieved much in the war in Afghanistan. But Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile deemed responsible for the attacks, has not been found, dead or alive.
Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, ticks off the achievements: The swift ouster of the repressive Taliban regime last fall; the establishment of a measure of stability across vast swaths of Afghanistan; the absence of any major Al Qaeda attacks during the past year. Some Al Qaeda leaders have been killed or captured, including Mohammed Atef, bin Laden’s head of military operations who was killed in a December air strike, and Abu Zubaydah, the man thought to have replaced him, who was arrested in Pakistan last March.
In addition, there are 598 prisoners, mostly Arabs and Pakistanis who were captured in Afghanistan and are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Many hundreds of enemy fighters are also thought to have died in the early stages of the war in aerial bombardments that helped topple the Taliban and the battle of Tora Bora in December.
Although the Pentagon claimed as many as 700 died during Operation Anaconda in March, the first occasion on which U.S. ground forces were used, only a few dozen bodies were discovered after the battle. U.S. forces have suffered 40 deaths, 12 in combat. Hundreds of Afghan civilians also have died; at least 800 between October and December last year, according to Global Exchange, an American non-governmental organization.
Bin Laden’s fate uncertain
Bin Laden might have been among those who died during the aerial bombardment of the caves at Tora Bora last December, but top U.S. officials say they have no evidence that he is dead. Privately, some officials acknowledge they are acting on the assumption that he is alive.
Most of his key lieutenants also survived, along with perhaps hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban allies, including the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.
At least some are still assumed to be hiding in southern or eastern Afghanistan, and many more are thought to have taken refuge in Pakistan or Iran.
“If you ask me to show you the bodies, no, we don’t have lots of dead Al Qaeda,” McNeill said at Bagram air base, headquarters of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. “But we have achieved a degree of success in the stability that has produced some comfort for the people of this country.”
Little of that comfort has reached the harsh, rocky mountains and dusty gray plains of the east and south, where the hunt for Al Qaeda is now focused. Since Operation Anaconda in March, an uneasy impasse has settled over a conflict that has produced neither high-profile captures of Al Qaeda operatives nor high-profile attacks on U.S. forces.
It is a war being fought largely in the shadows, mostly out of the glare of media scrutiny and mostly, though not exclusively, by U.S. Special Forces soldiers who live in the fields among the Afghans they are at once hunting and trying to befriend.
The war pits 8,000 soldiers of the world’s mightiest army equipped with the best technology against perhaps a few hundred fugitive fighters of bin Laden’s terrorist network.
In addition, there are around 2,000 coalition soldiers, including Turks, Australians and French, mostly serving in a support and peacekeeping capacity. The small contingents of British and Canadian combat troops that participated earlier in the war have gone home.
It is a war U.S. officials realize is likely to go on for a very long time.
“In a strictly military sense we could keep searching and searching and never turn anything up because it is such inhospitable territory,” said Sgt. Maj. Dennis Carey, who has overseen operations for conventional troops since November.
“The biggest lesson we have learned over here is patience. It’s not a technological war. It’s a boots-on-the-ground war. It’s people manning checkpoints. It’s people on patrols. That’s what will find them,” he said.
Increasingly, the hunt for Al Qaeda is starting to look like a series of drug raids–many of them fruitless.
On the one hand, there are the heavily armed and highly trained U.S. forces who hurtle through the countryside in their unmarked vehicles with the smoked-glass windows.
They scud over rooftops in attack helicopters, swoop through villages and raid homes, carting off caches of weapons and occasionally detaining residents. Ranged against them is an enemy that seems to be more ill-defined and elusive with each passing month, an enemy that knows the local terrain far better than its pursuers, that almost certainly has many friends among the ordinary Afghans and which has demonstrated an ability to use them to outwit and outmaneuver their better-armed pursuers.
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Uddin, whose home was raided in July, may or may not have ranked as Al Qaeda’s friend. A prominent and relatively wealthy local farmer renowned for offering assistance to the poor, Uddin says he was framed by personal rivals bearing a grudge against him for his wealth. He said he was at his sister’s house the night of the raid.
“It was a mistake,” he said of the raid. “Someone gave the Americans false information to cause trouble for me.”
While declining to discuss details of the operation, U.S. officials say the raid was no mistake. According to a local Afghan commander, Uddin had offered shelter to Al Qaeda fugitives during Operation Anaconda in the nearby Shah-e-Kot Valley.
He was not home when U.S. forces came calling, said local commander Noor Mohammed, because the Al Qaeda gathering had been switched to a different location.
But the charge that U.S. forces have frequently been fed deliberately misleading information by Afghans seeking to settle scores with rivals or gain political advantage is a common one. It contributes to resentment in the Pashtun tribal areas where the hunt is focused.
U.S. officials dismiss the suggestion.
Confidence in intelligence
To his knowledge, McNeill said, U.S. forces have never acted on a faulty piece of intelligence. A lot of effort goes into checking the reliability of every tip, he said. But a pattern is emerging in which U.S. forces return empty-handed from most of their raids, either because their targets have moved or because they have been tipped off,
In the latest instance, a force of 2,000 U.S., coalition and Afghan soldiers launched Operation Mountain Sweep, the biggest mission of the war since Operation Anaconda.
Military commanders said there were indications that the mission, which ended last week, had been compromised by leaks. Eight days after the raid on Haji Uddin’s home, U.S. forces returned to the village, this time looking for one of Uddin’s neighbors, Amir Mohammed Ahmadi, a former local Taliban official who had appeared to rally behind the new government.
This time the troops came by daylight and politely asked neighbors to take them to the man’s home.
Ahmadi wasn’t there.
“Someone came and told him, `You should not stay here anymore or the Americans will take you away.’ He disappeared, and he hasn’t come back yet,” said his cousin and neighbor, Haji Sugur.
One of Ahmadi’s daughters said he had gone to Pakistan, underscoring perhaps the biggest single frustration for U.S. forces: The realization that most Al Qaeda fighters are not in Afghanistan but just across the border in Pakistan.
“For a soldier, it is frustrating because you can’t go after the enemy,” Carey said. “But you have to respect the international border.”
Many of the leaders who got away are assumed to have taken refuge in Pakistan’s cities or elsewhere in the world. U.S. officials believe that Al Qaeda fighters–numbering perhaps in the hundreds–have regrouped in the tribal regions of Pakistan.
Although reports of attacks on U.S. troops are routine, the attacks tend to be ill-aimed and random.
“They hide well, but they’re scared, and they are on the run, definitely,” said Monty, a sergeant, who can be identified only by his first name in keeping with military rules.
Since April, he has been based in the dusty town of Urgun, 30 miles from the Pakistan border, and has had little contact with enemy forces.
For Monty and other Special Forces comrades camped out in an austere, barbed-wire-ringed encampment on a bleak plain, life has settled into a routine.
“We go on a few combat patrols, and we have been shot at a few times,” he said.
But he spends far more time accepting the many dinner invitations he receives from local tribesmen, in accordance with the Pashtun custom of hospitality, than chasing enemy forces.
Winning over the hearts and minds of Afghans has become a key component of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan.
These days, U.S. forces are likely to be found digging wells and teaching Afghan children to play baseball.
Wooing seems to be working
In most parts of the country, the strategy is working. The U.S. presence remains popular, and the biggest fear among most Afghans is that the U.S. will lose interest and go home.
But in the south and the east, where the military effort is concentrated and where the Taliban originated and can count most on local sympathies, matters such as the death of Niazi Mohammed and the detention of Haji Uddin’s relatives raise questions over the ability of U.S. forces to retain the support of the local populace.
“No one speaks openly against us,” Monty said. “But this is a Taliban area.
“There’s a lot of Taliban still around. A lot of people like America and want us to stay, but there’s a lot of people would like to kill Americans. It’s kind of split.”
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To our readers
This story is part of a Tribune series looking back at the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and looking ahead at the challenges facing our nation. As part of the coverage, the Tribune will include a commemorative CD-ROM in Sunday’s paper and will publish a special section on Sept. 11.
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