February 16, 2006
Tough G.I.'s Go to War Armed With Afghan ABC's
By JOHN KIFNER

FORT DRUM, N.Y. — As the 10th Mountain Division prepared to go to Afghanistan this month, its Third Brigade ordered boxes of the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's seminal book "Taliban" to be issued to officers along with body armor, high-tech seven-layer cold weather uniforms and ballistic-grade Oakley Blade wraparound sunglasses.

When the 10th Mountain went to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, their task was purely military: to hunt down Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. That mission remains, but now the goal is as much a political one: to bolster the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai.

The 10th Mountain, one of the Army's best units, is developing a military ethos that goes beyond the tactics of past conventional warfare to a new age of ideological war.

In a series of interviews as the soldiers — about half of them combat veterans — prepared for their deployment this month, the division's commander, Maj. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, and other officers spoke of the heightened language and cultural training they had instituted to meet the new challenges in a conflict against militant Islam that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently referred to as "the long war."

The officers were relentlessly upbeat; war is not a profession for doubters. But at the same time, they were keenly aware they faced, as General Freakley put it, "a very savvy, capable adversary" in what another officer called "a very ambiguous battle-space."

Officers in many Marine and Army units have instituted study programs in basic Islam and local mores for the duty of nation-building. But division commanders like General Freakley have wide latitude, and the program here is particularly sweeping.

Lt. Col. David W. Morrison, the division intelligence officer, for example, has detailed 10 soldiers to an intensive course in Pashto, the major language in Afghanistan, as their sole duty for 47 weeks.

Counterinsurgency warfare, the 10th Mountain soldiers now believe, is as much a political problem as a military one; as much knowing how to win over the population as shooting bad guys.

"This is a very complex environment," said Col. John W. Nicholson, the lean commander of the Third Brigade, the main fighting force being deployed, whose office in the Pentagon was incinerated on 9/11. "It necessitates a very holistic approach."

"Part 2 is governance," Colonel Nicholson said, "extending the reach of the government. We could be fighting al Qaeda one day and meeting with a local mayor the next."

Capt. Rocky Haley, the officer in charge of much of the Third Brigade's program, said he had been deployed twice to Kosovo and once to Bosnia without any cultural awareness training.

"It's only in the last three to five years the Army is really realizing the importance of cultural awareness," he said. "The Army is getting better. They realize it's a key piece — you have to understand the culture."

The Third Brigade is headed for the most volatile part of Afghanistan, the eastern sector stretching 600 miles along the Durand Line drawn by the British in 1893 that forms the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is mountainous territory, with much of its infrastructure destroyed over decades of fighting, and it is rife with smuggling and banditry.

The Pashtun tribesmen who straddle the porous border are legendary fighters. In the tribal regions on the Pakistani side, where Islamabad's government holds little sway, Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, including possibly Osama bin Laden himself, have found refuge.

Insurgent attacks are on the uptick. Last year 99 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, roughly double the rate of any previous year.

General Freakley and his headquarters are being sent to Bagram Air Base to take command of NATO forces there. Helicopters and additional troops are also being deployed, for a total of 7,100 troops. They are expected to be fully deployed in March.

The plan, once they get there, entails building up the Afghan national police and army to provide basic security and a sense of national identity. Provincial reconstruction teams are to rebuild — or in some cases just build — roads, bridges, schools and clinics.

"Civil Affairs plays such a large part in this," said Maj. Stewart Moon, the brigade Civil Affairs officer. "We have to build their infrastructure to their ability, to get them a foothold on this big mountain."

The centerpiece of the Army's strategy is the cultural awareness program, which includes lectures by outside experts, language lessons and recommended readings. In Iraq, many officers now believe, insensitivity to local customs in house searches, for example, created resentment that helped foster the insurgency.

In December, soldiers filled an auditorium here for a mandatory course on Afghan culture where they learned, among other things, that the all-American thumbs-up sign of approval is the equivalent there of a raised middle finger.

"Don't do it," said the instructor, Scott Moyer. "Don't do it. Period."

Up on the movie screen, an old Afghan man was saying: "In this place no one obeys the law."

"There is no law," he went on. "The gun is law. We are the product of 23 years of war. Children born of war know only war."

There was not much in the way of horseplay or wisecracking as the auditorium full of soldiers solemnly watched a rambling documentary of two young filmmakers' trip through Afghanistan.

The soldiers and officers were also taught the basic facts and history of Afghanistan. Among things they learned: Slightly smaller in area than Texas, Afghanistan has 28 million people, 44 per cent of them Pashtuns, a fierce people who are themselves often divided and whose first loyalty is to family and tribe. There are also Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara (a group of Shiite Muslims widely believed to be descendants of Genghis Khan's hordes) and Nuristanis, recent converts to Islam formerly known as Kaffirs, or unbelievers.

The climate is arid to semi-arid steppe with the mountains of the Hindu Kush rising to 16,000 feet. Pashto and Dari, which are related to Farsi, the Persian spoken in Iran, are the principal languages.

The Pashtuns live by a code of honor called Pashtunwali.

"They need to be hospitable," Mr. Moyer explained. "They have the right to revenge. That's the big one," and then he added in colorful language that soldiers should avoid angering them.

A soldier in the back chimed in, recommending "The Kite Runner," the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini about the Taliban in Kabul. Then some veterans of Afghan tours spoke up, with one challenging the axiom that it is the village or tribal elder who is the key power broker.

"That's a mistake we made a lot of times," he said. "They'd trot out this old guy and he's just an idiot. The real leader is the young guy with the slicked-back hair."

A major problem, another added, was "the difference in the way they perceive time. Everything takes so much longer than you expect it. You just have to deal with it."

On the sprawling base, where the wind off Lake Ontario brings blinding snow this time of year on the base just north of Watertown, 95 miles north of Syracuse, there is a Cultural Awareness Learning Center, a prefabricated building behind division headquarters with classrooms, a lending library of books on Afghanistan and language laboratories.

At a minimum, all the soldiers will carry a card with phonetic approximations in Pashto and Dari of such useful phrases as "drop your weapons," "lie on stomach" and "calm down."

"These are lessons learned," said Chief Warrant Officer Jeff Malmgren, an intelligence expert. "The hard way, unfortunately."

At the same time, the 10th Division has not neglected its training for warfare. Writing more than 30 years ago, Louis Dupree, a leading scholar of Afghanistan, noted that an early name for the area, particularly the tribal regions spanning the Durand Line, could be translated as "Land of the Unruly," "Land of Rebels," or "Land of Insolence."

Not much has changed.

Now it is a land weary after more than two decades of war, and there are some signs of compromise and rebuilding, particularly in the cities. It is still uncertain, though, how far the authority of President Karzai's American-backed government extends beyond his palace walls.

Complicating matters is the growing problem of illegal narcotics. Post-Taliban Afghanistan exports 87 percent of the world's opium, the base ingredient for heroin, some 4,200 metric tons, according to the United Nations. Officers here estimate that 60 percent of the population is dependent on the opium trade.

There is concern that tactics used by insurgents in Iraq may be migrating to Afghanistan. There have been at least 25 suicide bombings, previously unknown, since September.

"The doggone best place for that migration to take place is on the Web," said Colonel Morrison, the intelligence officer, glaring suspiciously at his computer screen. "I can get on the Web and in two minutes learn how to build a bomb."

Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taliban leader, issued a statement last month calling America the "biggest enemy of Islam" and linking rebellion in Afghanistan with the Iraqi insurgency.

"In Afghanistan they will face the same fate very soon. With the beginning of the new year, Afghan mujahedeen will intensify their attacks. Their techniques will improve," he said, presumably from somewhere in the Pashtun tribal areas.

For Col. Michael Coss, the division's operation officer, it is that border region, where a recent rocket strike on the Pakistani side may have killed some ranking al Qaeda operatives along with a number of civilians, that is crucial to Afghanistan's future.

"They've got to get control of the border," Colonel Coss said. "No doubt that is a challenge we are oriented on. Traditionally it was a tribal region. Control was not well exercised out there."

"That's just history," he said. "I'm not saying anything new."

Ellie