Intel Wars by Matthew M. Aid Read Free Book Online Page B

Brigade involved in the evacuation of the army’s main firebase in the valley, known as the Korengal Outpost, recalled that as his Black Hawk helicopter took off from the base, the troops onboard his chopper took up the iconic 1965 rock anthem made famous by the English band the Animals, singing at the top of their voices, “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.”
    Within hours of the U.S. Army pulling out of the Korengal, the Taliban emerged from the shadows. In an act designed to embarrass the U.S. military, the Taliban smuggled in an Al Jazeera film crew from Pakistan to document their victory. U.S. commanders in Kabul were crestfallen when the Al Jazeera videotape was posted a few days later on YouTube for all to see. It was a suitably bitter end to the U.S. Army’s experience in the Korengal.
    For the past decade, Helmand Province has been a cancer that the U.S. and NATO forces have never been able to cure. Located in southwestern Afghanistan, Helmand is the largest of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces, roughly equal in size to Ireland, with a population estimated at 1.4 million people. Lawless and unruly even in the best of times, Helmand has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most dangerous places in all of Afghanistan. Even Afghan government officials in Kabul dread going there, with one senior official indelicately referring to the Helmandis as “brigands and outcasts” during a 2009 interview.
    Today, more than twenty-five thousand U.S., British, and Afghan troops hold the area around provincial capital Lashkar Gah, all of the major towns, and a few large firebases scattered around the province. The Taliban control virtually everything else. The Taliban remain so omnipresent in the province’s rural areas away from the populated areas that soldiers have taken to calling the hostile and desolate countryside outside the gates of their firebases “Talibanland” or “Hajiville”—“Haji” being one of the many derogatory terms that U.S. soldiers use to refer to the Taliban.
    A common theme heard from American and British soldiers who have served tours of duty there is that Helmand was far rougher than anything they had previously experienced in Iraq. The statistics back them up. Since 2006, more Taliban attacks have occurred in Helmand than in all other Afghan provinces combined. More American and British soldiers have died or been wounded in Helmand Province since 2001 than in any other province in Afghanistan.
    A morbid sense of humor has cropped up among soldiers who have served there. One sharp-witted Marine Corps infantryman who pulled a tour of duty in Helmand in 2008 had a T-shirt made up when he got back to the United States that read “I visited Helmand Province, and all I brought back was a case of PTSD,” a reference to post-traumatic stress disorder.
    Just as in the Korengal Valley, the hostility to the presence of American and British troops in Helmand is palpable. Part of the reason for the hostility is that, like in the Korengal Valley, virtually every family in the province is connected in one way, shape, or form with the Taliban. When U.S. Marine Corps combat units first arrived in the Garmsir District in the southern part of the province in the spring of 2008, they discovered that all fifty Pashtun tribes in the district were connected to the Taliban to varying degrees, with a declassified Marine Corps report admitting that “everyone is somewhat associated [with the Taliban] if they live here.”
    But perhaps more than anything else, what allowed the Taliban to thrive in Helmand was that corruption was more pervasive there than in Kabul, and opium poppy cultivation, heroin trafficking, smuggling, and organized crime dominated the province’s political and economic landscape. The bazaars and teahouses of Lashkar Gah were filled with Taliban operatives, drug lords, crime bosses,