Unit's Comic Misadventures Still Lead to Successful Mission

MIANASHIN, Afghanistan, Oct. 21, 2005 – The airdrop of supplies in the morning had fallen far from the mark, leaving water bottles and boxes of food strewn for hundreds of yards across the mountain. The paratroopers had spent the afternoon carrying box after box down from the ridgeline, but several large loads still needed to be transported. With daylight rapidly disappearing, the company seemed to have run out of options.

Army Spc. Daniel Boyle spotted the old man leading a team of donkeys up a hill in the distance. With a flash of inspiration, Boyle realized the donkeys might be the solution to the unit's transportation problem, on this mission earlier in October.

He beckoned the man over and began to negotiate. They quickly reached an agreement, and before long, each donkey was loaded up with an enormous bundle of supplies and ready to move out.

Army Staff Sgt. Matthew Sheppard mounted the lead donkey. He slung his weapon on his back and gave a gentle jab with his heels to spur the animal forward. As the donkey started trotting off, a sudden thought occurred to Sheppard. "Hey, how do I make it stop?" he hollered. But by that time the unlikely convoy was already on the move.

As the incident with the donkeys shows, "adapt and overcome" was the strategy on display when paratroopers from Company A, 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, and counterparts from the Afghan National Army conducted a five-day operation in Afghanistan's Mianashin region, north of Kandahar, in early October. The operation resulted in the detention of three Taliban leaders and the destruction of two enemy safe houses.

"On a mission like that, you never know what situation you're going to find yourself in. That's why we just try to stay flexible and make the most out of whatever breaks we get," said Capt. Michael Shaw, Company A commander.

The operation began with a pre-dawn air assault into the town of Lwar Kowndalan Oct. 1. Two Chinook helicopters, with an Apache gunship for support, delivered the paratroopers in a clearing just outside the village. The paratroopers flung themselves out of the Chinooks into a wall of dirt and dust kicked up by the propeller blades. The helicopters took off seconds later. As the dust settled, the paratroopers could see they had landed in a graveyard.

They moved out quickly and encircled the town by squads. Their objective was to capture several high-ranking Taliban operatives known to live in the village. With the Afghan soldiers leading the way, the troops searched several houses and in no time had taken three enemy fighters captive.

The soldiers were also on the lookout for a safe house used by Taliban forces in the area. After several hours, Shaw decided to set up a patrol base from which to continue the search. He chose a high-walled, fortress-like compound surrounded by orchards. Ironically, soon after occupying the building, the paratroopers realized it was actually the safe house they were looking for.

The next day, after loading the three detained enemy fighters onto a Chinook for transport to a secure location, the company moved out on a punishing hike through the mountains to the town of Gardeneh. The sun beat down mercilessly as they trudged along, sliding on the shale-covered hillsides and getting snagged in tangled thorn thickets. It was only a two-mile hike, but with the heat and the altitude, it felt more like 20.

The village lay on top of a hill and at the foot of a cluster of immense boulders. A search of the homes failed to turn up any evidence of Taliban presence, but one old man informed the paratroopers that approximately 50 Taliban fighters had recently moved through the area. Shaw had his men set up an observation point at the old man's house in hopes that the enemy might pass by again that night.

While they waited for night to fall, another problem presented itself: The paratroopers were almost entirely out of food and water. They would have to live off the land. They paid the old man to butcher one of his goats and drank water from his well after purifying it with iodine tablets.

Late that night they sat around the fire eating broiled goat meat with their hands and drinking sweet Chai tea. "What part is this?" asked one paratrooper warily as he fished a hunk of goat meat out of the pot. "Don't ask. Just eat," someone answered.

Later, when most of his men were in their sleeping bags or on guard, Shaw went to sit by the old man's side to thank him for the hospitality. Knowing the Taliban would harm the old man if they knew he had helped U.S. forces, Shaw asked the man for a strange favor. "I want you to lie to them. Don't tell them you helped us," he said.

In the morning the company hiked several miles farther out to search another compound, then circled back and made the journey all the way back to their base in Lwar Kowndalan to await resupply.

From the roof of their compound, the paratroopers saw the C-130 fly over, and crates of food and water attached to green parachutes came tumbling out of the plane's hold. Sheppard's squad was dispatched to retrieve the supplies. Hours later, he rode back into the compound on the back of a donkey, leading the rest of his improvised convoy behind him. "Cool! War donkeys!" exclaimed Pvt. Adam Richter.

The re-supply had also included humanitarian aid supplies for the local people. All afternoon and into the evening the villagers filed into the compound one by one to receive rice, beans, sugar, tools, radios, and other supplies. The paratroopers did their best to distribute the material according to need, but everyone seemed to be equally needy.

"Ask him how many people are in his family," 1st Lt. Sean McDonough, the company's executive officer, told his interpreter as one boy approached to receive his portion of the supplies. "He says he has five brothers and five sisters," the interpreter said. "Oh brother," sighed McDonough.

Operations continued the next day as the platoon discovered another abandoned safe house and several caves that had been used as shelters or staging points for ambushes. Using mortar fire, M-136 anti-tank missiles, and hand grenades, the paratroopers destroyed them all.

Company A was due to be "exfiltrated" by Chinook helicopters just after sunrise Oct. 5. But before they could leave, there was one last piece of unfinished business -- the compound they had been living in. Rather than leave it intact for the Taliban to use, Shaw gave the order to destroy the building and the remaining supplies in it with claymore mines.

Staff Sgt. Richard Eldridge emplaced the mines, setting one inside a room in which someone had scrawled some fitting graffiti: "Up Yours Taliban," it read.

When everything was set, Eldridge crouched down just outside the gates of the compound and detonated the mines. There was a tremendous blast and then a cloud of smoke, and dust came drifting out of the gates. Poking his head inside, Eldridge saw that the explosion had split the main building straight down the middle. The compound's days as a safe haven for Taliban fighters were over.

The paratroopers moved out to the pickup zone. Soon they heard the "WHUPWHUPWHUP" of the incoming Chinook helicopters, and less than 45 minutes later they were back at Kandahar Airfield, looking forward to a well-earned day of hot chow, hot showers, and sleep on comfortable mattresses. And no more donkeys.

The Atlantic Monthly | October 2005

Imperial Grunts

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200510/kaplan-us-special-forces

With the Army Special Forces in the Philippines and Afghanistan—laboratories of counterinsurgency
by Robert D. Kaplan

(snip)

AFGHANISTAN

By the time I left the Philippines, the postwar consolidations of Iraq and Afghanistan were in jeopardy. Both the Pentagon and the American public had thought in terms of a decisive victory. Yet the fact that more U.S. soldiers had been killed by shadowy Iraqi gunmen after the dismantling of Saddam Hussein's regime than during the war itself indicated that the real war over Iraq's future was being fought now, and Operation Iraqi Freedom of 2003 had merely shaped the battle space for it.

In Afghanistan, too, a rapid and seemingly decisive military victory had been followed by a dirty and bloody peace. Small-scale eruptions of combat, with few enemy troops visible, were now a permanent feature of the landscape. They were something the United States would have to get used to, whichever party occupied the White House.

Warlordism, always strong in Afghanistan, had been bolstered in recent decades by the diffuse nature of the mujahideen rebellion against the Soviets, the destruction wrought by fighting among the mujahideen following the Soviet departure, and the bureaucratic incompetence of the Taliban itself, which was more an ideological movement than a governing apparatus. An Afghan state barely existed even before the U.S. invasion of October 2001. Thus, barring some catastrophe such as the fall of a major town to a reconstituted Taliban, or the assassination of President Hamid Karzai, discerning success or failure would be a subtler enterprise in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The continued turmoil in the greater Middle East, and my desire to observe Army Special Forces in a more varied role than what I saw in the Philippines, led me on a two-month journey to Afghanistan in the fall of 2003.

The American invasion of Afghanistan a month after 9/11 was greeted with a chorus of dire, historically based predictions from the media and academia. American soldiers, it was said, would fail to defeat the rugged, unruly Afghans, just as the Soviets and the nineteenth-century British had. The Afghans had never been defeated by outsiders; nor would they ever be. After only a few weeks of American bombing, however, the Taliban fled the Afghan capital of Kabul in disarray. To say that the Americans succeeded because of their incomparable technology would be a narrow version of the truth. America's initial success rested on deftly combining high technology with low-tech field tactics. It took fewer than 200 men on the ground from the Army's 5th Special Forces Group, in addition to CIA troops and Air Force Special Ops embeds, helped by the Afghan Northern Alliance and friendly Pashtoons, to topple the Taliban regime.

If history could have stopped at that point, it would be an American success story. But history does not stop. By the fall of 2003 the Taliban had regrouped to fight a guerrilla struggle against the U.S.-led international coalition—similar to the struggle that the mujahideen had waged against the Soviets. With hit-and-run attacks across a dispersed and mountainous battlefield, and a new national army that needed to be trained and equipped, Afghanistan constituted a challenge better suited to Special Operations forces than to the conventional military.

With troops jammed elbow-to-elbow along the sides, divided by a high wall of Tuff bins, mailbags, and rucksacks, the C-47 Chinook, followed by its Apache escort, lifted off the pierced steel planking that the Soviets had left behind at Bagram Air Force Base. The rear hatch was left open where an M-60 7.62mm mounted gun was manned by a soldier strapped to the edge. Beyond the gun the landscape of Afghanistan fell away before me: mud-walled castles and green terraced fields of rice, alfalfa, and cannabis on an otherwise gnarled and naked sandpaper vastness, marked by steep canyons and volcanic slag heaps. The rusty, dried-blood hue of some of the hills indicated iron-ore deposits, the drab greens copper. Because of the noise of the engine, everyone wore earplugs. Nobody talked. Soon, like everyone else, I fell asleep.

An hour later the Chinook descended steeply amid twisted, cindery peaks. Hitting the ground, those of us who were headed for the firebase grabbed our rucksacks and ran off through the wind and dust generated by the rotors. At the same time, another group of soldiers, waiting on the ground, ran inside. The crew threw off the mailbags and Tuff bins. Then two soldiers on the ground led a hooded figure, his hands tied in flex cuffs and a number scrawled on his back, to the helicopter. In less than five minutes the Chinook roared back up into the sky.

The handcuffed man was a puc: "person under control"—what the U.S. military calls its temporary detainees in the war on terrorism. It has become a verb; to take someone into custody is to "puc him." The men who had put the puc in the Chinook—en route to Bagram, where he would be interrogated—were members of an Army Special Forces A team based at an Afghan firebase in Gardez. But they didn't look like any of the Green Berets I had so far encountered in my travels. These Green Berets had thick beards and wore traditional Afghan kerchiefs, called deshmals, around their necks and over their mouths, Lone Ranger—style, as protection against the dust. On their heads were either flat woolen Afghan pakols or ball caps. Except for their camouflage pants, M-4s, and Berettas, there was nothing to identify them with the U.S. military. They brought to mind the 2001 photos of Special Forces troops on horseback in Afghanistan that had mesmerized the American public and horrified the old guard at the Pentagon. All were covered with dust, like sugar-coated cookies.

I threw my rucksack in the back of one of their Toyota pickups and we drove to the firebase, a few minutes away. There was a science-fiction quality to the landscape, which seemed devoid of all life forms. Near the fort were two distinctive hills that the driver referred to as "the two tits."

Firebase Gardez is a traditional yellow, mud-walled fort; the flags of the United States, the State of Texas, and the Florida Gators football team were flying from its ramparts. Surrounded by barren hills on a tableland 7,600 feet above sea level, the fort looks like a cross between the Alamo and a French Foreign Legion outpost.

An armed Afghan militiaman opened the creaky gate. Inside, caked and matted with "moondust," as everyone called it, stood double rows of armored Humvees, armed GMVs (ground mobility vehicles), and Toyota Land Cruisers—the essential elements of a new kind of convoy warfare, in which Special Ops was adapting tactics more from the Mad Max style of the Eritrean and Chadian guerrillas of recent decades than from the lumbering tank armies of the passing Industrial Age.

Hidden behind the vehicles and veils of swirling dust were canvas tents, a latrine, a crude shower facility, and the perennial Special Forces standby—a weight room. Almost everyone here was either a muscular Latino or a white guy dressed like an Afghan-cum-convict-cum-soldier. Half of them smoked. They put Tabasco sauce on everything. Back at home most owned firearms. They bore an uncanny resemblance to the freelance journalists who had covered the mujahideen war against the Soviets two decades earlier.

"Welcome to the Hotel Gardez," said a smiling and bearded major, Kevin Holiday, of Tampa, Florida. Major Holiday was the commander of this firebase and of another in Zurmat, two hours south by dirt road. "Within these walls we have ODB-2070 and two A teams, 2091 and 2093," he told me in rapid-fire fashion. "Next door, living with an ANA [Afghan National Army] unit, is 2076. Down at Zurmat is 2074. Most of us are 20th Group guardsmen from Florida and Texas, here for nine months, except for a tent full of active-duty 7th Group guys on a ninety-day deployment"—the Latinos. "We're the damn Spartans." Holiday smiled again. "Physical warriors with college degrees."

From Firebase Gardez, Major Holiday's "Spartans" launched sweeps across Paktia Province, trying to snatch radical infiltrators from Pakistan. "All the bad guys are coming from Waziristan," Holiday said, referring to a Pakistani tribal agency. "Because of the threat from Pakistan, there is not much civil-affairs stuff going on here." Officially, the Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf was an ally of the United States. But like his predecessors, and like the British before them, Musharraf had insufficient control over the unruly tribal areas. "Pakistan is the real enemy" was something I quickly got used to hearing.

"Who was the puc put on the Chinook when I arrived?" I asked Holiday.

"We hit a compound. It had zero-time grenades, seven RPGs, Saudi passports, and books on jihad. The Puc lived there. We've got more people to round up from that hit."

"Everything we do," he went on, repeating a phrase I had heard often already, "is 'by,' 'through,' 'with' the indigs. The ANA comes along on our hits. Though the AMF [the tribally based Afghan Militia Forces] are the real standup guys. They see themselves as our personal security element. Yeah, every time we go out on a mission, we try to pick up hitchhikers—any Afghan who wants to be associated with what we do. Give the ANA and AMF the credit, put them forward in the eyes of the locals. We have to build up the ANA—it's the only way a real Afghan state will come about. But it's naive to think you can simply disband the militias."

The mud-walled fort was, in Major Holiday's words, a "battle lab" for Special Forces. One of the goals was to implement the El Salvador model: build up a national army while at the same time employing more-lethal paramilitaries, and then make the latter gradually and quietly disappear into the former. The process would take years—a prospect Holiday relished. I was reminded of what another Special Forces officer, Lieutenant Colonel David Maxwell, had told me: counterinsurgency always requires the three Ps—"presence, patience, and persistence."

Holiday, who had just turned forty, seemed the most clean-cut of the fort's inhabitants. A civil engineer with a master's degree from the University of South Florida, and the father of three small children, he was chatty, well-spoken, and intense. "God has put me here," he told me matter-of-factly. "I'm a Christian"—he meant an evangelical. "The best kind of moral leader is one who is invisible. I believe character is more important than education. I have noticed that people who are highly educated and sophisticated do not like to take risks. But God can help someone who is highly educated to take big risks."

Holiday had served in the 82nd Airborne before returning to civilian life and then joining Special Forces as a Florida National Guardsman. His long months of Guard duty did not please his private employer, so he left his job and went to work as a civil engineer for the state. "You see all this around you?" he asked, eyeing the dust, engine grease, and mud-brick walls. "Well, it's the high point of my military life and of everyone else here."

"What about the beards?" I asked.

Holiday smiled, deliberately rubbing his chin. "The other day I had a meeting at the provincial governor's office. All these notables came in and rubbed their beards against mine, a sign of endearment and respect. I simply could not get my message across in these meetings unless I made some accommodations with the local culture and values. Afghanistan is not like other countries. It's a throwback. You've got to compromise and go native a little."

"Another thing," he went on. "Ever since 5th Group was here, in '01, Afghans have learned not to tangle with the bearded Americans. Afghanistan needs more SF, less conventional troops, but it's not that easy, because SF is already overstretched in its deployments."

Holiday disappeared into the Operations Center, or ops cen, where I was not permitted because I lacked the security clearance. He had a tough, lonely job, I learned, being the middleman between the firebase and the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force—cjsotf. The higher-ups wanted no beards, no alcohol, no porn, no pets, and very safe, well-thought-out missions. The guys here wanted to go a bit wild and crazy, breaking rules as 5th Group had done in the early days of the war on terrorism, before "Big Army" entered the picture, with its love of regulations and hatred of dynamic risk. A monastic existence of sorts had evolved here, with its own code of conduct.

Holiday had to sell the missions and plead understanding for the beards and ball caps with the cjsotf, which, in turn, was under pressure from the Combined Joint Task Force-180 at Bagram. On one occasion, when the guys were watching a particularly raunchy Italian porn movie during chow, Holiday came in and turned it off, saying, "That's enough of that; keep that stuff hidden, please." An angry silence ensued, but the major got his way. Holiday, though an evangelical Christian, is no prude. He was only being sensible. If we are going to flout the rules, he seemed to be saying, we have to at least be low-key about it.

''The area where I'm from we call the Redneck Riviera," Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Custer, of Mobile, Alabama, told me as we returned to Gardez one evening. "Now, I know what you're thinking." He laughed. "Yeah, I've got relatives who live in trailers, who've never been thirty miles from their home. I eat grits." In fact Custer is an ethnic Cuban who had been separated from his family because of Fidel Castro, and was adopted by southerners. "So I'm not really related to the General Custer."

After he had arrived on a short visit, Custer and I moved into my tent, where we had many late-night conversations. He was a 19th Group National Guardsman, and a Customs officer in civilian life. Like the other Guardsmen, he had a lack of ambition that made him doubly honest. One night, while cleaning an old Lee Enfield rifle on a Bukharan carpet, Custer gave me his theory on the problem with the war on terrorism as it was being waged in Afghanistan. I later checked his theory with numerous other sources on the front lines, and it panned out perfectly: This wasn't his theory so much as everyone's, when people were being honest with one another. Sadly, it was a typical American scenario. I will put into my own words what he and many others explained to me.

The essence of military "transformation"—the Washington buzzword of recent years—is not new tactics or even weapons systems but bureaucratic reorganization. In fact, such reorganization was achieved in the weeks following 9/11 by the 5th Special Forces Group, based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, whose handful of A teams (with help from the CIA, Air Force Special Ops embeds, and others) conquered Afghanistan.

The relationship between 5th Group and the highest levels of Pentagon officialdom had, in those precious, historic weeks of the fall of 2001, evinced the organizational structure that distinguished al-Qaeda and also the most innovative global corporations. It was an arrangement with which the finest business schools and management consultants would have been impressed. The captains and team sergeants of the various 5th Group A teams did not communicate with the top brass through an extended, vertical chain of command. They weren't even given specific instructions. They were just told to link up with the indigs—the Northern Alliance and also friendly Pashtoons—and help them defeat the Taliban. And to figure out the details as they went along.

The result was the empowerment of master sergeants to call in B-52 strikes. Fifth Group was no longer a small part of an enormous defense bureaucracy. It became a veritable corporate spinoff, commissioned to do a specific job its very own way, in the manner of a top consultant. But as time went on, that operating procedure came to an end. Now what had previously been approved orally within minutes took three days of paperwork, with bureaucratic layers of lieutenant colonels and senior officers delaying operations and diluting them of risk. When hits finally took place, they more than likely turned up dry holes. One of the basic laws of counterinsurgency warfare, established in the Marines' Small Wars Manual (1940) and the British Colonel C. E. Callwell's Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1896), was being ignored: Get out of the compound and out among the local people, preferably in small numbers. Yet the CJTF-180 in Bagram, by demanding forms and orders for almost every excursion outside the firebase, acted as a restraint on its Special Forces troops, whose whole purpose was to fight unconventionally in "small wars" style.

There was no scandal here, no one specifically to blame. It was just the way Big Army—that is, big government, that is, Washington—always did things. It was standard Washington "pile on." Every part of the military wanted a piece of Afghanistan, and that led to bureaucratic overkill.

"Big Army just doesn't get it," Custer said, like a persevering parent dealing with the antics of a child. "It doesn't get the beards, the ball caps, the windows rolled down so that we can shake hands with the hajis and hand out PowerBars to the kids. Big Army has regulations against all of that. Big Army doesn't understand that before you can subvert a people you've got to love them, and love their culture." (In fact, one reason that some high-ranking officers in the regular Army hated the beards was that they brought back bad memories of the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era Army.)

"Army people are systems people," he went on. "They think the system is going to protect them. Green Berets don't trust the system. We know the Kevlar helmets may not stop a 7.62mm round. So we wear ball caps—they're more comfortable. When you see a gunner atop an up-armor, bouncing up and down in the dust, breaking his vertebrae almost, let him wear a ball cap and he's happy. His morale is high because simply by wearing that ball cap he's convinced himself that he's fucking the system.

"Maybe in the future we'll be incorporated into a new and reformed CIA, rather than into Big Army. Any bureaucracy that is interested in results more than in regulations will be an improvement. You see, I can say these things—I'm a Guardsman."

During my time at Firebase Gardez, I went out regularly on "presence patrols" throughout the countryside. On one occasion the convoy descended from the mountains through cannabis fields and newly tilled poppy plantations. A massive mud-walled fort with Turkic-style towers loomed in the distance, marijuana leaves drying on its ramparts. I thought of the poppy fields on the way to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

We halted in the middle of the road at the sight of what looked like a landmine. It wasn't. But by a turn of events the halt led to a local Afghan intelligence officer's inviting a counterintelligence guy, two other Green Berets, and me into his house for tea, while the rest of the convoy stood guard outside. He served the tea in a carpeted room heated by a dung-fired stove, with aspen beams overhead. I stared at the dust drifting into the tea.

Our host eventually discussed a certain Maulvi Jalani, who had entered into an informal alliance with Jalalludin Haqqani, the former mujahideen leader in Paktia and Khost, and a man associated with Saudi Wahhabi extremists like Osama bin Laden. He explained how opium profits were funding the Islamic opposition to Karzai. He believed that the Taliban would not return to power. More likely was the coalescing of an Iranian-brokered coalition of anti-American and anti-Karzai forces, to include Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and other of the more radical ex-mujahideen leaders, along with disaffected elements of the Northern Alliance, some remnants of the Taliban, and al-Qaeda.

The intelligence officer wanted us to stay for a meal, but we politely declined, since we had hours of traveling ahead. As usual, the map was useless. The dendritic pattern of dirt roads dissolved into incomprehensibility. The idea that a command post far away at Bagram could determine, as it had tried to, what roads we turned down, in a land where roads were virtually nonexistent, suddenly struck me as ludicrous. Twenty-first-century communications technology worked toward the centralization of command, and thus toward micro-management. But the war on terrorism would be won only by adapting the garrison tactics of the nineteenth century, in which lower-level officers in the field forged policy as they saw fit.

A few days later approval came for a hit near Gardez. Rather than wait, an eleven-vehicle convoy was imme- diately stood up, and around 9:00 p.m. we were off. By now I had been on enough compound hits to know the drill, so after we arrived I drifted away in the dark from my assigned vehicle and, after a while, proceeded inside the compound by myself, to see how the search was progressing.

Green Berets were probing with flashlights for two unexploded grenades that one of the occupants had just thrown at them. "Watch where you walk," I was warned. Along the courtyard were darkened rooms, illuminated by blue chemlights that the Green Berets had left behind to indicate that the rooms had already been cleared. Inside the house I peeked into a room where two Green Berets were kneeling on a carpet. They were using a flashlight to go over a pile of documents they had found, being careful not to wake two children who, miraculously, were sleeping through this mayhem.

As I left the compound, I noticed a counterintelligence officer interrogating one of the male inhabitants. They were both squatting against a section of mud wall, illuminated by flashlights attached to the M-4s held by other Green Berets, who had formed a semi-circle. The Afghan had a long white beard and a brown hood over his pakol. He looked stoic, unafraid. The counterintelligence officer was asking him simple stock questions in English: Had he seen anything suspicious? Who were his friends?

Each question elicited a long conversation between the man and the interpreter. It was clear that the counterintelligence guy was missing a lot. He didn't speak Pashto beyond a few phrases. Here was where the American Empire, such as it existed, was weakest.

Finally, all the counterintelligence officer could say to the man was "If you ever have a problem, come and see me at the firebase." Yes, this is what the man would surely do: forsake his kinsmen, and trust this most recent band of invaders passing through his land, invaders who could not even speak his tongue.

It wasn't the counterintelligence officer's fault that he hadn't been given the proper language training. Several years into the war on terrorism, one would think that Pashto would be commonly spoken, at least on a basic level, by American troops in these borderlands. It isn't. Nor are Farsi and Urdu—the languages of Iran and the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where U.S. Special Operations forces are likely to be active, in one way or another, over the coming decade. Like Big Army's aversion to beards, the lack of linguistic preparedness demonstrates that the Pentagon bureaucracy pays too little attention to the most basic tool of counterinsurgency: adaptation to the cultural terrain. It is such adaptation—more than new weapons systems or an ideological commitment to Western democracy—that will deliver us from quagmires.

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