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'I Yelled at Them to Stop'

U.S. Special Forces are frustrated. Kicking down doors and frisking women,
they say, is no way to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan. A report from
the front

By Colin Soloway
NEWSWEEK

Oct. 7 issue - One afternoon in August, a U.S. Special Forces A team
knocked at the door of a half-ruined mud compound in the Shahikot Valley.
The servicemen were taking part in Operation Mountain Sweep, a weeklong hunt
for Qaeda and Taliban fugitives in eastern Afghanistan.

THE MAN OF THE HOUSE, an elderly farmer, let the Americans in as soon as his
female relatives had gone to a back room, out of the gaze of strange men.
Asked if there were any weapons in the house, the farmer proudly showed them
his only firearm, a hunting rifle nearly a century old. When the team had
finished searching, carefully letting the women stay out of sight, the
farmer served tea. The Americans thanked him and walked toward the next
house.

They didn't get far before the team's captain looked back. Six paratroopers
from the 82d Airborne, also part of Mountain Sweep, were lined up outside
the farmer's house, preparing to force their way in. "I yelled at them to
stop," says the captain, "but they went ahead and kicked in the door." The
farmer panicked and tried to run, and one of the paratroopers slammed him to
the ground. The captain raced back to the house. Inside, he says, other
helmeted soldiers from the 82d were attempting to frisk the women. By the
time the captain could order the soldiers to leave, the family was in a
state of shock. "The women were screaming bloody murder," recalled the
captain, asking to be identified simply as Mike. "The guy was in tears. He
had been completely dishonored."

THROWING ROCKS
The official story from both the 82d Airborne and the regular Army command
is that Operation Mountain Sweep was a resounding success. Several arms
caches were found and destroyed, and at least a dozen suspected Taliban
members or supporters were detained for questioning. But according to
Special Forces, Afghan villagers and local officials living in or near the
valley, the mission was a disaster. The witnesses claim that American
soldiers succeeded mainly in terrorizing innocent villagers and ruining the
rapport that Special Forces had built up with local communities. "After
Mountain Sweep, for the first time since we got here, we're getting rocks
thrown at us on the road in Khowst," says Jim, a Green Beret who has been
operating in the area for the past six months. Special Forces members say
that Mountain Sweep has probably set back their counterinsurgency and
intelligence operations by at least six months.

Officers in the 82d insist their men did nothing wrong. In response to
NEWSWEEK queries, public-affairs officers characterized the Special Forces
involved in Mountain Sweep as "prima donnas" who were damaging the war
effort by complaining to the press. Yet at a time when Washington is talking
about expanding the mission in Afghanistan and increasing the number of
large-scale operations like Mountain Sweep-and when Qaeda allies are
stepping up terrorist attacks against the fragile government in Kabul-the
criticism raises serious questions about the best strategy for fighting the
low-intensity war.

Shahikot is where Al Qaeda and Taliban forces fought their last major battle
against the Americans back in March. Some 50 soldiers from several Special
Forces A teams have been operating in eastern Afghanistan's Paktia and
Khowst provinces ever since. They've been working to win the villagers'
trust and cooperation-and largely succeeding, as NEWSWEEK found while
accompanying some of them for two weeks on operations shortly before
Mountain Sweep began. "The Americans in Gardez who have Toyota trucks, they
are good guys," says Jan Baz Sadiqi, 46, district administrator in Zormat,
the valley's population center. "They don't break into houses, and they don'
t terrorize people."

'THOSE GUYS WERE CRAZY'
Then on Aug. 19, American commanders sent some 600 action-hungry members of
the Army's 82d Airborne Division, Third Battalion, charging into Zormat and
the Shahikot area. "Those guys were crazy," said one Special Forces NCO who
was there. "We just couldn't believe they were acting that way. Every time
we turned around they were doing something stupid. We'd be like, 'Holy s-t,
look at that! Can you believe this!' " Another said: "They were acting like
bin Laden was hiding behind every door. That just wasn't the way to be
acting with civilians." Special Forces working in the region say that since
Mountain Sweep, the stream of friendly intelligence on weapons caches, mines
and terrorist activity has dried up.

The Special Forces have often had a stormy relationship with the rest of the
Army. Conventional commanders sometimes regard the elite fighters as
arrogant cowboys. Special Forces members respond that the regular Army is
too rigid for the painstaking job of fighting a low-intensity conflict. "The
conventional military has a conventional mind-set," said an SF officer. "It
does not work when you have crooks and terrorists and all kinds of bad guys
who blend into the population." In Afghanistan, the A teams have been out in
the field, cultivating the friendship of villagers and tracking down
terrorists. At the same time, regular soldiers like those of the 82d were,
until August, mostly confined to their bases, just itching to get out and do
the job for which they were trained.

In Shahikot, that wasn't the job that needed doing. "The 82d is a great
combat unit," said a Special Forces NCO who took part in the mission. "A lot
of us on the teams came out of the 82d. But they are trained to advance to
contact and kill the enemy. There was no 'enemy' down there." The remaining
Taliban forces melted into the civilian population after Operation Anaconda
blasted them out of the caves of Shahikot in March. Since then, the Afghan
war has become basically a low-intensity guerrilla conflict, with Taliban
and Qaeda fighters operating in small cells, emerging only to lay land mines
and launch nighttime rocket attacks against the Americans before
disappearing once again.

MAKING THE A TEAM
The Special Forces were created to deal with precisely that kind of enemy.
Each A team is made up of 10 or fewer noncommissioned officers, led by one
warrant officer and one captain. Armed with M-4 rifles and light machine
guns, they live, travel and work with local troops. They patrol isolated
villages in ordinary Toyota pickups, talking to the inhabitants-and never go
anywhere without someone who speaks the local language. They have been
trained to assimilate local customs and sensibilities as carefully as
possible. Many of them sported full beards until a few weeks ago, when a
news photo of a whiskery Green Beret shook up the brass in Washington. A
smooth-cheeked adult male is a strange sight for rural Afghans, but the
generals ordered all troops to shave immediately.

Still, people back home-Pentagon brass and civilians alike-are asking why
terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar are still
running loose. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reportedly dressed down
Gen. Dan McNeill in July for failing to capture more "high-value targets."
Such impatience was likely a factor in launching Mountain Sweep. "It's the
victory of form over substance, substituting action for results," says a
Western diplomat who is worried about increasing complaints and warnings
from areas where conventional operations are taking place. "It's thinking if
you do a lot of stuff, something will happen. Something will, but it might
not be what you want. The unhappiness is building."

Villagers have made no secret of that unhappiness. In the village of Marzak,
several witnesses say that 82d troops chased down a mentally ill man, pushed
him to the ground, handcuffed him and then took turns taking photos of
themselves pointing a gun to his head. The office of Zormat administrator
Sadiqi was flooded with complaints about the actions of some 82d units.
"They knocked down doors, pouring into the homes, terrifying everybody,
beating people, mistreating people," says Sadiqi. He says villagers
demanded: "Why do the Americans come here and search our women? We don't
need this kind of government!"

After the mission, the two SF teams submitted an "after-action review."
NEWSWEEK has not seen the document, but sources say it describes in detail
the problems the teams witnessed and suggests ways to avoid such problems in
the future. The report set off a storm of recriminations. Col. James
Huggins, commander of Task Force Panther, of which the Third Battalion is a
part, says every platoon and squad leader in the battalion was questioned
under oath, and their statements did not support the teams' charges. "I can'
t tell you 100 percent these things didn't happen," says Huggins. "All I can
tell you is I looked, and can't find any evidence that they did." Officers
involved have been accused of leaking classified reports to NEWSWEEK, and
have been subjected to internal investigations.

Even as he defends his troops, Huggins says he's working to avoid problems
in the future by increasing "cultural awareness" training, bringing in
female military police to search Afghan women and keeping supplies of new
locks on hand to replace those that are cut off during searches. As some
Green Berets see it, the damage has already been done. Told that more
operations like Mountain Sweep are being planned, one Special Forces NCO
says: "It's over, then. We might as well go home, because we'll never
succeed with big ops like that." Even so, Mike sticks up for the
conventional Army. "Some SF guys will tell you we don't need regular forces
out here, that we can do it all by ourselves," he said. "But that's
impossible. The question is, how do you use those forces?" He recommends a
model that has been successful in Afghanistan-pairing an A team with a
company of regular infantry. "We need their muscle and firepower to support
us when we go after the bad guys. But they need our brains, experience and
skills to get the mission done," Mike says. "If you establish rapport with
the people-establish you are not an occupying army-and prove you are here to
support the transitional government, they will tell you where to find Al
Qaeda." Among the Special Forces, the hope is that the U.S. command can
learn from the mistakes of Mountain Sweep and get the job done right.

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With Mark Hosenball, Holly Peterson and Suzanne Smalley

© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.