thedrifter
06-20-07, 05:40 AM
The perils of carving a path to the Taliban's front door
By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY
JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Shane Middleton had a simple question: Was he going to get killed trying to build a road through Taliban country to Tora Bora, the mountain range where Osama bin Laden slipped away in 2001?
So last September, the Irish engineer went to Jalalabad provincial governor Gul Agha Sherzai. Middleton, 30, had doubts about a man Sherzai had installed as district chief along a dangerous stretch of the proposed 26-mile road between Jalalabad and Tora Bora. "Is he strong enough to make sure I don't get blown up?" Middleton asked.
Sherzai lauded his security team. "They will make sure you don't get blown up."
But within five weeks, Middleton had fled Afghanistan and the district chief was dead.
The episode highlights the challenges the United States faces against a revitalized insurgency nearly six years after toppling the Taliban regime. U.S. and NATO forces continue to hunt Taliban fighters, but Afghanistan's long-term prospects rest in large part on a U.S.-funded campaign to build a network of roads. U.S. officials believe roads, such as the one through rugged terrain to Tora Bora, could knit a frayed country together, improve the lives of Afghans in remote villages by giving them access to markets and hospitals and strengthen President Hamid Karzai's fragile government.
Taliban leaders, who regrouped across the border in Pakistan after their fundamentalist Islamic regime was overthrown in 2001, are determined to stop road construction and sow chaos. The former U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, summarized the importance of the roadwork: "Where the road ends, the Taliban begins."
The story of the road to Tora Bora shows how frustrating and perilous it can be to try to build a nation with asphalt and tar. Middleton's boss, Stephen ******on, left Afghanistan in February, convinced that international efforts had stalled.
"We aren't getting any traction," ******on said. "The (Afghan) government is too corrupt, and the international community doesn't have the stamina to finish the job."
The international team assigned to the $4 million project has been targeted with roadside bombs, hunted by killers and kidnappers, menaced by mobs and viewed warily by locals who think the team wants to destroy their opium crops.
The attacks, threats and missteps have been costly: The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which is overseeing the project, has scaled it back from 26 to 18 miles. So far, the team has managed only to clear and widen the rocky dirt track. Not a single foot has been paved. UNOPS is struggling to complete the road by a Nov. 1 deadline.
Across Afghanistan, fewer than 10% of road miles are paved, leaving many villages cut off from markets, hospitals and schools. The isolation is damaging: The typical Afghan dies before age 45; nearly two-thirds of adults can't read; and more than 160 Afghan babies die for every 1,000 born — the highest infant mortality rate in the world.
With vital services beyond the reach of most Afghans, road construction has become a cornerstone of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has spent $1.5 billion paving Afghan roads since 2002 — $418 million in the current fiscal year.
The job of planning routes and laying asphalt is handled by UNOPS. Since 2002, nearly 100 members of its road crews have been killed by bombs, beheaded by kidnappers, gunned down in drive-by shootings or killed in traffic accidents.
'It's my baby'
Last August, Middleton marveled at the audacity of the road he planned across southern Nangarhar province. It would link the dusty villages of Kaga, Hakimabad, Wazir and Karmakhell to Jalalabad, the biggest city in eastern Afghanistan with 100,000 people.
"I proposed it, I designed it and now I'm going to build it," he said then. "It's my baby."
At UNOPS headquarters in Kabul, ******on was trying to meet an ambitious USAID mandate: The agency wanted 550 new miles of road by the end of 2007. ******on had asked Middleton to identify worthy projects. Middleton decided on a two-lane road linking Jalalabad with Tora Bora — "a road in Osama's back garden," he called it.
The Tora Bora road would serve 250,000 people. Starting outside Jalalabad, the route runs southwest for 5 miles before turning south for 7 miles through desolate terrain. The countryside changes at Kaga, the main market town for the Khogyani district. Six miles south, water gurgles in irrigation channels. Fields of wheat and poppy push close. Okra, eggplant, pomegranates, grapes and apricots are abundant; the hills are rich with marble and talc. Bad roads keep much of it from getting to market.
Middleton wanted the new road to fork north of Kaga. The main prong would continue south through Kaga, Wazir and end at Karmakhell at the feet of the Tora Bora mountains. Another leg would run 8 miles east to a place called Manu. It didn't work out.
Meeting with the village elders
Elders from across the Khogyani district met in Kaga early last September to hear from Middleton.
Sharing water from a tin cup, they wore sandals, loose-fitting pants and turbans, prayer caps or pakul, flat Afghan hats.
Middleton was in boots, jeans, a T-shirt and sunglasses. With him were the Khogyani district chief Abdul Jabar and Jerry Raley, an American supervising construction. Nepalese guards protecting the engineers weaved through the crowd.
"We've had some trouble down here," Middleton said through an interpreter. "We need to be reassured that everything is going to run smoothly."
"You will not have any problems," promised Daoud Shah, a village leader from Wazir.
Raley, wearing jeans, vowed to appear in Afghan attire next time. "I will be here every day," he said. "Come and talk to me."
Within weeks, Middleton, Raley and Jabar would be gone.
'A huge flash of light'
Later that month, a UNOPS convoy drove out to inspect the proposed route to Manu. Middleton rode in an armored Land Cruiser. Nepalese and Afghan guards trailed in three pickups.
Heading back, they stopped on a hill near a desolate, nearly uninhabited place called Bar Kalakhel. It was where Middleton planned a causeway, a structure that would let water flow beneath the road.
Middleton climbed out to take photos.
"Just as the last vehicle was stopping, I saw the wheels rising up. … I thought: 'That was weird,' " he said later. "The next thing was a huge flash of light. And the next thing was like a baseball bat to my chest, and I fell next to the Land Cruiser."
One pickup had flipped. The driver was hanging out the window. Someone else was crumpled next to the truck. "I thought, 'Oh my God, that was an IED,' " Middleton said, referring to the improvised explosive devices responsible for many U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Zargai Khan, 22, a lanky Afghan guard, had been sitting in the front passenger seat of the pickup. The blast threw him out the window and ripped open his legs. Guards radioed for help; Middleton was put into the Land Cruiser and taken to a U.S. special forces base nearby.
Within an hour, an ambulance arrived to take Khan to the U.S. military hospital near Jalalabad. From there, a helicopter flew him to Kabul. But he had lost too much blood. He died that afternoon, leaving a year-old daughter and a wife two months pregnant.
Middleton had escaped injury. The next day he sent out an e-mail: "I am still alive and OK," he wrote. "Can't kill a bad thing." He added a small smiley face.
Back at the compound, though, the engineer went six nights without sleep. He talked to a United Nations psychiatrist who advised him to leave.
Middleton threw his things together and bolted to Pakistan. There, he caught a flight to Dubai, then on to Germany and his girlfriend's apartment. He collapsed and slept for 20 hours.
He would never return.
Big changes after attack
Everything changed after the bombing. UNOPS dropped plans for the 8-mile section to Manu, partly to save money. Afghan Construction, hired to pave south of Kaga, refused to start work.
The firm, based in a neighboring province, had upset locals by not consulting them about where to store machinery and house its crews. A "night letter" — one of the warnings the Taliban leaves in village mosques — had circulated, threatening Afghan Construction. Soon the company's machinery was targeted by rocket fire.
Back at the UNOPS base in Kabul, ******on was frustrated. He sacked Afghan Construction and hired the only contractor he thought had the clout to get the job done: Jamal Baba Construction, owned by the Nangarhar provincial governor, Gul Agha Sherzai.
Sherzai had made one misstep. Abdul Jabar, his choice for Khogyani district chief, had alienated people with an imperious style and had used his position to dabble in business. On Oct. 9, Jabar and his security chief set off to look into reports the Taliban had torched a school near Kaga.
The tip was a setup. On the way, the men drove over a bomb detonated by remote control. Jabar, his security boss and two others died.
Meanwhile, the UNOPS team was in turmoil. Raley lost his job after brawling in a Kabul bar. Raley, now working in Iraq, says that when he left Afghanistan in late fall, security along the Tora Bora road's route had gone "to hell."
Javed Khan, 26, one of four Afghans working for UNOPS as community development officers, was key to security. Together, the men pressed their sources in the villages to identify potential threats.
"If we didn't have Javed and his guys, we'd be nowhere," says project supervisor Ben Akari, a former New Zealand army commando.
On Jan. 27, a UNOPS convoy was driving near Wazir. Javed Khan, in the lead truck, answered his cellphone. A local elder called to tell Khan a bomb had been spotted a few hundred yards ahead. Khan stopped the truck, climbed out and halted the convoy.
"He looked white as a sheet," said Akari, who was in the convoy. Police found an IED.
Three weeks later, the team had an even closer call: A Land Cruiser carrying Akari and two engineers between Wazir and Karmakhell rolled over a potentially powerful explosive built from two mortars and an anti-tank shell. It turned out to be a dud: Only one of the mortars partially detonated. Akari's truck was slightly damaged.
The string of incidents prompted Noel McCarthy, a New Zealander who was UNOPS security chief, to hire 30 Afghans at $3 a day. He sent them out on bicycles to scour the road's path for hidden explosives.
More bad news
One day in early March, the UNOPS crew found itself confined to its compound. Demonstrators planned a march in Jalalabad to protest the alleged killings of civilians a day earlier by U.S. Marines. Previous demonstrations in Jalalabad had turned violent.
By afternoon, police had quieted the demonstration, allowing Akari to drive to Karmakhell. His worry then was the drug-eradication effort underway nearby. The Afghan government, under U.S. pressure, had been destroying fields of poppy, which is used to make opium for heroin. Akari feared locals would link the road builders with the anti-poppy drive that threatened their livelihoods.
The eradication effort four days earlier had been halfhearted. Instead of plowing up fields, Afghan authorities had trimmed the poppy plants. Villagers already were replanting as Akari drove by.
Heading back to Jalalabad, he stopped in Wazir and got out to walk. Then his cellphone rang. Javed Khan was on the line: A Taliban commander, Qari Badar, had been seen in Wazir. He was looking to kidnap a Westerner to barter for the release of his brother, a prisoner of the U.S.-led coalition.
Akari knew Badar could be anywhere. Still, Akari wasn't an easy target. He had Nepalese and Afghan guards and an M-5 rifle. "I'll not go willingly," he said. He continued his stroll another 10 minutes. "We have to go home."
Rain, strikes cause delays
Today, Shane Middleton is far from the road he conceived. He works with an Irish aid group in Kenya, patching up schools, building dams and digging wells.
"You have a lot more freedom," he says. "You don't need security clearance. … You don't need an armored vehicle." Middleton says he has no regrets. He spent 16 months in a country where most expatriates last no more than 12. "It literally took a bomb from the Taliban to get me out of there."
In December, Afghan authorities arrested a local man, Lala Agha, for the bombing that killed Zargai Khan and sent Middleton fleeing. McCarthy, the UNOPS security chief, learned that Agha confessed and was paid $1,200 by the Taliban. Agha said he had not singled out the UNOPS road crew but was looking for Western targets. He'd rigged two 122mm artillery shells and detonated them with a device resembling a garage door opener.
In March, McCarthy learned Agha had been released. "We'll be watching him," McCarthy says.
On April 24, Zargai Khan's widow gave birth to a daughter.
During the spring, the road builders lost local laborers to opium traffickers paying three times the UNOPS rate of $3 a day. "All our unskilled labor just walked off the site," said Arnold Fox, an Australian who replaced Middleton.
Work was delayed in winter by heavy rains. Meanwhile, the Afghan contractors have been late paying workers, leading to strikes. The cost of the road swelled from $3 million to about $4 million — even as the project was cut to 18 miles — because UNOPS underestimated the need for culverts and causeways.
Javed Khan said he's worried the project won't meet its Nov. 1 deadline. Fox is optimistic the road to Tora Bora can be paved on time — if contractors throw enough resources at it. But the contractors are struggling. Sherzai's firm took on so many other jobs that it has to lease equipment in Jalalabad.
Ellie
By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY
JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Shane Middleton had a simple question: Was he going to get killed trying to build a road through Taliban country to Tora Bora, the mountain range where Osama bin Laden slipped away in 2001?
So last September, the Irish engineer went to Jalalabad provincial governor Gul Agha Sherzai. Middleton, 30, had doubts about a man Sherzai had installed as district chief along a dangerous stretch of the proposed 26-mile road between Jalalabad and Tora Bora. "Is he strong enough to make sure I don't get blown up?" Middleton asked.
Sherzai lauded his security team. "They will make sure you don't get blown up."
But within five weeks, Middleton had fled Afghanistan and the district chief was dead.
The episode highlights the challenges the United States faces against a revitalized insurgency nearly six years after toppling the Taliban regime. U.S. and NATO forces continue to hunt Taliban fighters, but Afghanistan's long-term prospects rest in large part on a U.S.-funded campaign to build a network of roads. U.S. officials believe roads, such as the one through rugged terrain to Tora Bora, could knit a frayed country together, improve the lives of Afghans in remote villages by giving them access to markets and hospitals and strengthen President Hamid Karzai's fragile government.
Taliban leaders, who regrouped across the border in Pakistan after their fundamentalist Islamic regime was overthrown in 2001, are determined to stop road construction and sow chaos. The former U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, summarized the importance of the roadwork: "Where the road ends, the Taliban begins."
The story of the road to Tora Bora shows how frustrating and perilous it can be to try to build a nation with asphalt and tar. Middleton's boss, Stephen ******on, left Afghanistan in February, convinced that international efforts had stalled.
"We aren't getting any traction," ******on said. "The (Afghan) government is too corrupt, and the international community doesn't have the stamina to finish the job."
The international team assigned to the $4 million project has been targeted with roadside bombs, hunted by killers and kidnappers, menaced by mobs and viewed warily by locals who think the team wants to destroy their opium crops.
The attacks, threats and missteps have been costly: The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which is overseeing the project, has scaled it back from 26 to 18 miles. So far, the team has managed only to clear and widen the rocky dirt track. Not a single foot has been paved. UNOPS is struggling to complete the road by a Nov. 1 deadline.
Across Afghanistan, fewer than 10% of road miles are paved, leaving many villages cut off from markets, hospitals and schools. The isolation is damaging: The typical Afghan dies before age 45; nearly two-thirds of adults can't read; and more than 160 Afghan babies die for every 1,000 born — the highest infant mortality rate in the world.
With vital services beyond the reach of most Afghans, road construction has become a cornerstone of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has spent $1.5 billion paving Afghan roads since 2002 — $418 million in the current fiscal year.
The job of planning routes and laying asphalt is handled by UNOPS. Since 2002, nearly 100 members of its road crews have been killed by bombs, beheaded by kidnappers, gunned down in drive-by shootings or killed in traffic accidents.
'It's my baby'
Last August, Middleton marveled at the audacity of the road he planned across southern Nangarhar province. It would link the dusty villages of Kaga, Hakimabad, Wazir and Karmakhell to Jalalabad, the biggest city in eastern Afghanistan with 100,000 people.
"I proposed it, I designed it and now I'm going to build it," he said then. "It's my baby."
At UNOPS headquarters in Kabul, ******on was trying to meet an ambitious USAID mandate: The agency wanted 550 new miles of road by the end of 2007. ******on had asked Middleton to identify worthy projects. Middleton decided on a two-lane road linking Jalalabad with Tora Bora — "a road in Osama's back garden," he called it.
The Tora Bora road would serve 250,000 people. Starting outside Jalalabad, the route runs southwest for 5 miles before turning south for 7 miles through desolate terrain. The countryside changes at Kaga, the main market town for the Khogyani district. Six miles south, water gurgles in irrigation channels. Fields of wheat and poppy push close. Okra, eggplant, pomegranates, grapes and apricots are abundant; the hills are rich with marble and talc. Bad roads keep much of it from getting to market.
Middleton wanted the new road to fork north of Kaga. The main prong would continue south through Kaga, Wazir and end at Karmakhell at the feet of the Tora Bora mountains. Another leg would run 8 miles east to a place called Manu. It didn't work out.
Meeting with the village elders
Elders from across the Khogyani district met in Kaga early last September to hear from Middleton.
Sharing water from a tin cup, they wore sandals, loose-fitting pants and turbans, prayer caps or pakul, flat Afghan hats.
Middleton was in boots, jeans, a T-shirt and sunglasses. With him were the Khogyani district chief Abdul Jabar and Jerry Raley, an American supervising construction. Nepalese guards protecting the engineers weaved through the crowd.
"We've had some trouble down here," Middleton said through an interpreter. "We need to be reassured that everything is going to run smoothly."
"You will not have any problems," promised Daoud Shah, a village leader from Wazir.
Raley, wearing jeans, vowed to appear in Afghan attire next time. "I will be here every day," he said. "Come and talk to me."
Within weeks, Middleton, Raley and Jabar would be gone.
'A huge flash of light'
Later that month, a UNOPS convoy drove out to inspect the proposed route to Manu. Middleton rode in an armored Land Cruiser. Nepalese and Afghan guards trailed in three pickups.
Heading back, they stopped on a hill near a desolate, nearly uninhabited place called Bar Kalakhel. It was where Middleton planned a causeway, a structure that would let water flow beneath the road.
Middleton climbed out to take photos.
"Just as the last vehicle was stopping, I saw the wheels rising up. … I thought: 'That was weird,' " he said later. "The next thing was a huge flash of light. And the next thing was like a baseball bat to my chest, and I fell next to the Land Cruiser."
One pickup had flipped. The driver was hanging out the window. Someone else was crumpled next to the truck. "I thought, 'Oh my God, that was an IED,' " Middleton said, referring to the improvised explosive devices responsible for many U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Zargai Khan, 22, a lanky Afghan guard, had been sitting in the front passenger seat of the pickup. The blast threw him out the window and ripped open his legs. Guards radioed for help; Middleton was put into the Land Cruiser and taken to a U.S. special forces base nearby.
Within an hour, an ambulance arrived to take Khan to the U.S. military hospital near Jalalabad. From there, a helicopter flew him to Kabul. But he had lost too much blood. He died that afternoon, leaving a year-old daughter and a wife two months pregnant.
Middleton had escaped injury. The next day he sent out an e-mail: "I am still alive and OK," he wrote. "Can't kill a bad thing." He added a small smiley face.
Back at the compound, though, the engineer went six nights without sleep. He talked to a United Nations psychiatrist who advised him to leave.
Middleton threw his things together and bolted to Pakistan. There, he caught a flight to Dubai, then on to Germany and his girlfriend's apartment. He collapsed and slept for 20 hours.
He would never return.
Big changes after attack
Everything changed after the bombing. UNOPS dropped plans for the 8-mile section to Manu, partly to save money. Afghan Construction, hired to pave south of Kaga, refused to start work.
The firm, based in a neighboring province, had upset locals by not consulting them about where to store machinery and house its crews. A "night letter" — one of the warnings the Taliban leaves in village mosques — had circulated, threatening Afghan Construction. Soon the company's machinery was targeted by rocket fire.
Back at the UNOPS base in Kabul, ******on was frustrated. He sacked Afghan Construction and hired the only contractor he thought had the clout to get the job done: Jamal Baba Construction, owned by the Nangarhar provincial governor, Gul Agha Sherzai.
Sherzai had made one misstep. Abdul Jabar, his choice for Khogyani district chief, had alienated people with an imperious style and had used his position to dabble in business. On Oct. 9, Jabar and his security chief set off to look into reports the Taliban had torched a school near Kaga.
The tip was a setup. On the way, the men drove over a bomb detonated by remote control. Jabar, his security boss and two others died.
Meanwhile, the UNOPS team was in turmoil. Raley lost his job after brawling in a Kabul bar. Raley, now working in Iraq, says that when he left Afghanistan in late fall, security along the Tora Bora road's route had gone "to hell."
Javed Khan, 26, one of four Afghans working for UNOPS as community development officers, was key to security. Together, the men pressed their sources in the villages to identify potential threats.
"If we didn't have Javed and his guys, we'd be nowhere," says project supervisor Ben Akari, a former New Zealand army commando.
On Jan. 27, a UNOPS convoy was driving near Wazir. Javed Khan, in the lead truck, answered his cellphone. A local elder called to tell Khan a bomb had been spotted a few hundred yards ahead. Khan stopped the truck, climbed out and halted the convoy.
"He looked white as a sheet," said Akari, who was in the convoy. Police found an IED.
Three weeks later, the team had an even closer call: A Land Cruiser carrying Akari and two engineers between Wazir and Karmakhell rolled over a potentially powerful explosive built from two mortars and an anti-tank shell. It turned out to be a dud: Only one of the mortars partially detonated. Akari's truck was slightly damaged.
The string of incidents prompted Noel McCarthy, a New Zealander who was UNOPS security chief, to hire 30 Afghans at $3 a day. He sent them out on bicycles to scour the road's path for hidden explosives.
More bad news
One day in early March, the UNOPS crew found itself confined to its compound. Demonstrators planned a march in Jalalabad to protest the alleged killings of civilians a day earlier by U.S. Marines. Previous demonstrations in Jalalabad had turned violent.
By afternoon, police had quieted the demonstration, allowing Akari to drive to Karmakhell. His worry then was the drug-eradication effort underway nearby. The Afghan government, under U.S. pressure, had been destroying fields of poppy, which is used to make opium for heroin. Akari feared locals would link the road builders with the anti-poppy drive that threatened their livelihoods.
The eradication effort four days earlier had been halfhearted. Instead of plowing up fields, Afghan authorities had trimmed the poppy plants. Villagers already were replanting as Akari drove by.
Heading back to Jalalabad, he stopped in Wazir and got out to walk. Then his cellphone rang. Javed Khan was on the line: A Taliban commander, Qari Badar, had been seen in Wazir. He was looking to kidnap a Westerner to barter for the release of his brother, a prisoner of the U.S.-led coalition.
Akari knew Badar could be anywhere. Still, Akari wasn't an easy target. He had Nepalese and Afghan guards and an M-5 rifle. "I'll not go willingly," he said. He continued his stroll another 10 minutes. "We have to go home."
Rain, strikes cause delays
Today, Shane Middleton is far from the road he conceived. He works with an Irish aid group in Kenya, patching up schools, building dams and digging wells.
"You have a lot more freedom," he says. "You don't need security clearance. … You don't need an armored vehicle." Middleton says he has no regrets. He spent 16 months in a country where most expatriates last no more than 12. "It literally took a bomb from the Taliban to get me out of there."
In December, Afghan authorities arrested a local man, Lala Agha, for the bombing that killed Zargai Khan and sent Middleton fleeing. McCarthy, the UNOPS security chief, learned that Agha confessed and was paid $1,200 by the Taliban. Agha said he had not singled out the UNOPS road crew but was looking for Western targets. He'd rigged two 122mm artillery shells and detonated them with a device resembling a garage door opener.
In March, McCarthy learned Agha had been released. "We'll be watching him," McCarthy says.
On April 24, Zargai Khan's widow gave birth to a daughter.
During the spring, the road builders lost local laborers to opium traffickers paying three times the UNOPS rate of $3 a day. "All our unskilled labor just walked off the site," said Arnold Fox, an Australian who replaced Middleton.
Work was delayed in winter by heavy rains. Meanwhile, the Afghan contractors have been late paying workers, leading to strikes. The cost of the road swelled from $3 million to about $4 million — even as the project was cut to 18 miles — because UNOPS underestimated the need for culverts and causeways.
Javed Khan said he's worried the project won't meet its Nov. 1 deadline. Fox is optimistic the road to Tora Bora can be paved on time — if contractors throw enough resources at it. But the contractors are struggling. Sherzai's firm took on so many other jobs that it has to lease equipment in Jalalabad.
Ellie