British forces that deployed Wednesday near the Afghan-Pakistani border in the latest operation aimed at Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants face a complex challenge: Not only do they have to find the enemy fighters, they have to know them when they see them.
Determining who is–and who is not–the enemy is a tricky matter for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. Since being routed from Kabul and other strongholds last year, Al Qaeda and the Taliban have revamped their structures, breaking large forces into tiny guerrilla cells that are much harder to detect, U.S. military officials said Wednesday.
“We’re going against a very adaptive enemy,” U.S. Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill said at Bagram air base, days before he is scheduled to take charge of American forces in Afghanistan. “We’re not likely to see this enemy en masse again.”
Dubbed Operation Buzzard, the British deployment is part of a larger effort to thwart Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as they seek to regroup, particularly in the mountains outside the eastern city of Khost, an area where enemy fighters are believed to be hiding.
The Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants have mostly turned off their radios, once a rich source of intelligence for coalition forces able to intercept enemy conversations. Most foreign fighters from Arab countries or Central Asia, who were easily identifiable, have been captured or have left the country, analysts say. And the remaining Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda members are hard to distinguish from other Afghans, who dress, talk and, much of the time, behave the same.
Afghan tribal factions, meanwhile, continue to blast at each other over land conflicts and disputes that pit warlords against administrators of Afghanistan’s new interim government. The fighting is particularly fierce in eastern Afghanistan.
Earlier this month, Australian commandos got caught up in what tribal leaders insist was a local dispute.
As the soldiers patrolled in the high mountains north of Khost, an unseen enemy opened fire with heavy machine guns. The Australians called in a U.S. air strike, and about 10 men died in the counterattack. Local authorities now say the dead were Afghan tribesmen involved in an armed dispute with another tribe.
“It’s real hard to tell who’s who,” said Col. Wayland Parker, the liaison between the U.S. military and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
“The good news is we’re driving them to the point where they can only work in groups of two or three,” he said. “The new problem is that they could be anywhere.”
One key difficulty in the latest phase of the conflict in Afghanistan is that high-tech surveillance and communications equipment–the supposed ace in the hole of the modern military in a new age of warfare–is turning out to be of lesser value in low-tech Afghanistan.
“All the technical stuff we use at this point isn’t very effective,” Parker said. As a result, he said, the counterterrorism effort in Afghanistan “is very manpower intensive,” a departure from military trends of the 1990s.
Gathering accurate local intelligence is not easy in Afghanistan. Amid rapidly shifting political alliances, a reliable local informant can disappear or become unreliable overnight, particularly when there’s money involved, analysts say.
Because warring Afghan factions are eager to turn the U.S. military might against their own enemies, tip-offs about who might be the enemy have to be verified by several independent sources, Parker said.
Importance of information
To further complicate matters, reliable informants are easiest to find in areas already clear of the Taliban and Al Qaeda–and hardest to find where they are needed most.
“The main reason the Americans haven’t succeeded [in clearing out remaining Taliban fighters faster] is that they don’t have political information,” said Mir Jan, a spokesman for the foreign relations department of Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry.
“Local people know that this person used to be Taliban, that that person was cheated by Al Qaeda. Without local information, the Americans have a lot of problems.”
Western officials in Kabul say they now divide the enemy into three groups: Al Qaeda and Taliban followers who are actively fighting coalition forces, those who are still believers but “may have shortened their beards and put their turbans in the closet” and those who have made a clean break and are now considered former members of the Taliban.
In the field, determining who is the enemy is simpler.
“People that fire at you are enemies,” said Maj. Bryan Hilferty, a U.S. military spokesman at Bagram air base. He admitted that not all of those shooting are part of the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
“It’s no secret we haven’t been attacked in a long time” by the Taliban or Al Qaeda, Hilferty said.
Turning to profiling
With few exchanges of gunfire since the last major U.S. military push at Shah-e Kot in March, soldiers are relying instead on enemy profiling in areas believed to be Al Qaeda or Taliban centers or transit points, like the region east of Khost. Keeping an eye on movements in the area, they believe, helps them identify some targets. Profiling criteria are kept as secret as possible.
“If we tell you everybody using a three-humped camel belongs to the Taliban, tomorrow the Taliban won’t be using three-humped camels,” Hilferty joked.
With Taliban and Al Qaeda forces now arrayed in small guerrilla units in an effort to avoid attention, coalition forces have had to respond in kind, using small foot patrols in remote areas where the enemy is believed to operate.
The new phase of warfare tends to favor enemy fighters, who know the rugged territory and its myriad hiding places.
“We have taken away some of their capabilities, but now we can’t find them,” Parker admitted. While the small enemy groups are less effective, “they’re still out there, and we need to keep forces around because they can collect very quickly.
“They are learning just like we learn,” he said. “We adapt, they adapt.”
