- Colonel Scott McBride had gathered together the villagers
of Daychopan, a Taliban stronghold in the mountains south of Kabul, to
make them an offer they could not refuse.
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- The villagers were on edge. Two hours earlier the Americans'
had arrived in terrifying style. Three giant Chinook helicopters, each
the size of a bus, had dropped out of the sky at dawn and landed in boiling
clouds of dust and sand thrown up by the rotors. Startled farmers emerged
blinking from their mud fortress-homes to see what was happening.
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- Assault guns pointing in every direction, young American
soldiers began methodically searching for arms caches and Taliban suspects,
barging into homes and training machine guns on the streets as their radios
crackled out instructions.
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- "The Taliban aren't here," said one surly shopkeeper.
"Perhaps they are up in those mountains," he said, pointing to
spectacular ranges of sun-baked jagged rocks in the middle distance beyond
the valley's almond fields.
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- The morning before two teenagers with AK-47s had been
shot as they tried to make a run for it during a raid on a village in a
neighbouring valley. One boy's head was blown apart by a burst of gunfire.
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- So the atmosphere across the cups of green tea and plates
of banana creme biscuits was tense at first as the American officers sat
awkwardly cross-legged on the carpet in kevlar helmets and bullet-proof
jackets addressing a collection of anxious-looking men in huge turbans.
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- What happened next left the villagers bemused. What did
they want the most, Colonel McBride demanded - a new school, a well to
be dug, a doctor for the derelict clinic? "Just tell us what you want
and how we can help you," he urged while the villagers furiously stroked
their long Taliban-style beards and stared as if unable to believe their
luck.
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- "Have you come to build or come to destroy?"
one of them had nervously asked before the meeting. They remember Soviet
soldiers whose policy was to carpet-bomb villages, not build schools for
them.
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- On the roof above were snipers in position, watching
the scruffy bazaar where GIs in sunglasses tried smiling and waving at
scowling tribesmen in a charm offensive. The soldiers have been warned
to tone down the raids and ensure fewer doors are kicked in and suspects
handcuffed. The military is here to make friends as well as hunt down enemies.
-
- The days of "smoke 'em out" must seem like
long ago for the 17,000 US combat troops still scouring Afghanistan for
Al-Queda and the Taliban, whose insurgency refuses to die and is probably
growing. The military, overstretched in southern Afghanistan's endless
barren mountain ranges and facing often hostile populations, accepts that
it will never by itself beat the Taliban, a stubborn if disorganised enemy.
-
- They are still fighting a vicious war 235 Charlie Company
has suffered 11 casualties since it arrived in April and the tactiturn
FBI men who took charge of blindfolded suspects were evidence of the ongoing
hunt for Al-Queda and the Taliban.
-
- But now the emphasis is on building up Afghan security
forces and winning over the conservative Pushtun tribes who have always
been the Taliban's main supporters.
-
- The hope is that development projects funded by the US
government - the Vietnam-era phrase Hearts and Minds is meticulously avoided
- will win friends while security sweeps force the Taliban into the high
mountains.
-
- The guerrillas' hold is based on fear, the Americans
insist. Villagers sick of war and Taliban banditry are increasingly tipping
them off about hideouts, ambush plans and arms caches - usually of weapons
supplied to anti-Soviet guerillas by the CIA's 1980s covert operation and
now turned against American boys in scrappy firefights.
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- In the complex world of Pushtun tribal politics, however,
where hedging your bets and saying what your listener wants to hear are
strategies for survival, finding the right people to make friends with
does not always prove easy.
-
- District police chief Mohammed Wahid was the man chosen
to do business with in Daychopan, although the meeting with him and the
other villagers was a case of American can-do spirit versus Afghan inertia.
-
- Mr Wahid was doubtful that any doctor would dare to come
to his village, deep in lawless Zabul Province, and he was sure that teachers
would be killed by the Taliban. He liked the idea of a new well but didn't
think the Americans would find a contractor brave enough to dig one.
-
- Outside his delapidated headquarters the soldiers inquired
about bullet holes sprayed in the police chief's pick-up truck, obviously
the result of a kalashnikov magazine being emptied into the vehicle from
dead ahead.
-
- It was a Taliban ambush that killed one of his twenty
men, Mr Wahid said vaguely. The Taliban had also killed a man last week,
a government employee.
-
- Exactly how Mr Wahid managed to survive in such a Taliban-afflicted
area was not explained. One of the American's Afghan translators didn't
like the village and wasn't taking any chances. He kept his checked scarf
wrapped around his face at all times, even while conveying the colonel's
generous offers of help.
-
- "The people here are scary motherfuckers,"
he said later in Afghan-accented GI-speak. "I have a nice life in
Kandahar city. If they come there and recognise me, I'm dead." The
US officers admit that four months in-country they can rarely be sure who
is a friend, who is an enemy, and who can be both at different times.
-
- Last month the American's difficulties were graphically
exhibited when a police chief and district chief in the nearby Khak-e-Afghan
valley were caught playing both sides of the street, lending four US-provided
cars to the local Taliban to use at night.
-
- When rumbled the administrator fled with most of the
USD 100,000 cash he'd been given for building a school and paying the salaries
of his men, presumably over the border to Pakistan, while the policeman
is now in jail pleading that his survival required an accommodation with
the enemy.
-
- "Even these guys who aren't pro-Taliban, they are
still with the Taliban because they have no choice," said Captain
Mike Berdy. One of the grunts put it another way. "They smile at you
in the morning, and at night they might be planting a mine in the road
or firing a rocket at your ass."
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/ asia/story.jsp?story=553274
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