Welcome to the death zone
The U.S. can't win a ground war in Afghanistan, says a British special forces officer who helped train the mujahedin.
By Tom Carew
Sept. 19, 2001 | We were in Afghanistan to assess the fighting capability of the mujahedin, and to retrieve Soviet equipment. It was 1979 and the Afghans were fighting a superpower with tactics they had used against the British before the first world war.
Watching them fight was like watching an old western: The cowboys would come into a valley and down would come the Indians. My task was to teach them modern guerrilla tactics. Without them, they would be exterminated. I tried to go without preconceptions, but it was hard. Before leaving Britain, everyone said be careful, they are barbaric, they'll chop you up. My boss gave me a Flashman novel about Muslim brutality -- his idea of a joke. After a few months adjusting, however, I found the Afghans to be very pleasant. We got along. I respected their bravery; they respected the way I instructed them.
I had more difficulty coping with the physical terrain. When I arrived in Peshawar, an Afghan military leader warned me, "I hope you are fit, my men march very quickly." No problem, I thought. I was used to marching. But my God; up, up, up we went. We entered the Hindu Kush mountains and started climbing. Above 3,000 meters, the oxygen started to thin and my concentration to lapse. The Afghans were used to it, but anyone else feels really lightheaded.
As fighting terrain, it is an absolute nightmare. It's a natural fortress. You can't get very far with vehicles; you get bogged down and the passes are too steep. The Russians had a bloody awful time. They really got stuck. It's one thing to put in your infantry, but you've got to keep them within range of your artillery and your mortars. With bad mountain passes, this is almost impossible.
None of this matters to the Afghans: They have it all organized, moving from one village to the next, where they have bases stocked with food. This is how they have fought and won wars for the past 200 years, with little bases all over the place and holes in the ground where everything is buried. This allows them to carry as little as possible and to cover ground much faster than a Western force could. We didn't use tents. We lived in caves or slept rough. There were guys in the army just carrying a weapon, three magazines and some naan bread, wrapped in a shawl on their back. There is no way a Western soldier could carry heavy equipment and keep up with them.
For a foreign army, establishing a supply route would be very difficult. To try to carry food and water up those mountains, some of which are 4,000 meters high, would be madness. Because of bacteria, you have to carry bottled water and each gallon weighs 4.5 kilograms. On some days, we were going through 11 to 15 litres. A soldier marching in those hills is going to burn between 4,000 and 5,000 calories a day. You need high-calorie, Arctic rations. Meat doesn't last more than a couple of days, so must be killed fresh. I contracted hepatitis from bad food.
And, of course, there is the weather. Toward the end of this month, the winter will start setting in. It begins with rain; then it freezes, then it snows. By the middle of October the snow will be very deep, up to neck height. A journey that takes three days to walk in summer will take more than 10 days in winter. The freezing conditions rule out helicopter support. The mist in the valleys invites crashes.
The Afghan fighters know the mountains as well as a farmer from Wales knows his hills. They are like mountain goats. I heard someone on the radio say, "Yeah, we can put in a load of four-man teams." Well, that's ridiculous. The Hindu Kush is a vast expanse of land. What can a four-man team do that you can't do with a satellite? Never mind a needle in a haystack; it's like a needle in the middle of Wembley stadium.
Besides, a Western task force will stick out like a sore thumb in the Hindu Kush. Most of the Afghan fighters wear sandals with old car tire treads on the bottom. So a Western boot print is instantly trackable. Once identified, the soldiers are sitting targets. We trained the Afghans in the art of "shoot and scoot"; they would lay a little ambush, let rip and disappear. They picked it up very quickly. Before long, they had learned to let the Russian convoys get halfway up a pass and then blow a hole through their middle. The lucky ones died instantly. The unlucky were chopped to pieces in the aftermath. In the Hindu Kush, don't expect to appeal to the Geneva convention.
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