As I walked along the two-foot wide trail on a 75-foot-high cliff I had one question for US Army Captain Aaron Tapalman.  "Exactly how is it that the embedded reporter wound up walking point?"

Operation Nike, an air assault mission to the mountains of Sabari District in northern Khowst province, Afghanistan kicked off 2 A.M. when the soldiers of Bravo Company, a.k.a. Team Viper, loaded up on dual rotar CH-47 helicopters for a twenty minute flight to where no US Soldiers had ever gone before.

Nike, a battalion level operation of the 1-26 Infantry Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team/1ID--The Big Red One--was designed "to cause disruption [of] the insurgent support zone" in the western part of the Battalion's area.  The driver of the operation was one month old video from a drone that appeared to show a group of six men suspected of being insurgents from Pakistan driving up a nearly dry mountain river bed to a village that has no name and unloaded what could have been two machine guns before dispersing into the rocky, tree covered mountains.

Team Viper's mission was to work with their Afghan Army partner platoon to clear the village, search for any illegal weapons and engage the village elders to gather information and intelligence.  On the mission Vipers 2nd Platoon would be the main effort, moving through the villages with their ANA counterparts and other attached teams of soldiers like Explosive Ordinance Disposal, military intelligence and Psychological Operations.  First Platoon would provide over-watch security from the ridge lines.  Further down the river canyon, a platoon from Hannibal Company was positioned in armored MATV vehichles controlling access to the road.  At the peak of the mountain was the battalion TAC--a small tactical operations center set up in the field.

Area of Operation Nike and Maday Ghar mountain.  Yellow dot is LZ where Team Viper landed at night.  Red dot is Koshal Kalay, aka the village with no name.  Blue dot is Mundikehla.  Pink dot is the final LZ where we flew out of.

In keeping with military procedure, the villages to be cleared were termed objectives and given code names, in this case Beetle, Bear, Badger, Bison and Bobcat in addition to their local name.  Objective Beetle, the first objective and also the place where the men with machine guns were spotted by the drone, only had a code name because no US or coalition forces had ever been there to ask anyone what the small cluster of houses clinging to the side of the mountain was called.  

To get to Beetle, the Soldiers of Team Viper had to descend 2,000 feet of treacherous terrain ranging from loose shale that collapsed under foot causing rock and soldiers to careen down the side of the mountain to climbing down the boulders of mountain water falls.  By the time they reached Objective Beetle, Operation Nike had 5 soldiers in need of Medical Evacuation.

The descent from the 8,000 foot peak of Maday Ghar began at twilight.  1st and 2nd Platoons took the crevice of a dry stream bed.  Viper HQ and the attached teams followed the ANA.  Normally when trekking down a mountain you eventually cross a goat trail but all we saw were the occasional piles of goat droppings.  The mountain is so isolated and the villages so small, even after centuries there hasn't been enough traffic to develop the slightest of paths so the HQ element and ANA blazed their own trail and got to the first staging area almost one hour ahead of the platoons.  "Lesson learned, let the ANA pick the route through the mountains," said CPT Tapalman.

1st and 2nd platoon's route down had them climbing down boulders and what would have been water falls for four hours.  The Soldiers later dubbed it Satan's Ass Crack.

The mountains of north west Khowst province are covered with dense stands of Holly Oak trees whose sharp pointed leaves pierce right through thick cotton cargo pants, walnut trees, sage and scrub brush.  In the villages there will be plum and mulberry trees.

Early June is wheat harvest season in Khowst province and the terraced fields along the river gleam gold with fresh cut wheat stalks in the sun.

The fields and trees are the source of a major dispute in Sabari and part of an even larger dispute that has roiled in Khowst for more than 200 years.

In his 1815 ethnography of Afghanistan, the British Diplomat Mountstuart Elphinstone wrote that Khowst is "a small country, peopled...by many small clans of various descent."  Within Khowst province there are at least 11 sub-tribes split between the two super-tribes of the Karlanri and the Ghilzai.

There is another division of the tribes not listed in most modern literature but is noted by Elphinstone, "The whole of the valley is divided into two factions, calld the Tor Goondee, and Speen Goondee (i.e. the black and white leagues), which are perpetually at war."

The Goondee is an often overlooked part of the Pashtunwali, the tribal code of the Pashtun people who live in eastern Afghanistan.

"Individuals enter into engagements to support each other, either in specific enterprises, or in all cases that may arise.  These alliances are the Goondees, and they may include any number of persons," Elphinstone wrote nearly two centuries ago.  "The connection between two persons in the same Goondee, is reckoned stronger than that of blood.  They are bound to give up all they have and even their lives for each other.  A Goondee between two chiefs is not dissolved even by a war between their tribes."

CPT Tapalman had never heard of the Goondees of Khowst until I brought them up while we were walking through a village and I asked his interpreter, Sonny, if I was pronouncing the word correctly.  I was and the elders of villages confirmed that the white and black Goondees still exist.  The Speen (white) Goondee being the Sabari, Zardran, Tani and Khost city tribes and the Tor (black) Goondee having the Jani Khel, Musa Khel, Mangal and Zazi tribes.  The old books about Afghanistan like Elphinstone's "An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul" are still the best books and the modern maps are mostly arbitrary lines that mean nothing to the villagers.

"Musa Khel?" CPT Tapalman asked in surprise.  The men in the village's guest room confirmed, yes, they were Musa Khel tribe members even if all the maps said we were in Sabari territory.

Second platoon had made its way to Khoshal Kalay, the previously unnamed villaged where the suspected insurgents off-loaded weapons then dispersed and disappeared into the mountains.

On the map Khoshal Kalay is in the Sabari district and should be Sabari tribe members but the residents of the 15 family village of were oblivious to the assigned cartography.

"No Taliban, no Taliban," was the constant refrain from a couple of the young men as we entered the village.

"That's funny, we haven't even asked them any questions and they are denying supporting the Taliban," said 1st Lieutenant Michael McKemey, leader of 2nd Platoon.  It was just like a scene from a police movie where the suspect says he didn't kill anyone before the detective even starts asking questions.

The US and Afghan Soldiers fanned out to gently search the village.  The Afghans and interpreters would knock on the door to a house, tell the oldest male there told to put the women in one room and then once the women were gathered and cloistered, the Afghans would search, moving objects, looking in under and around with US Soldiers following closely searching mostly with their eyes through the two and three story houses then moving through stables, orchards and the terrace fields.

While the soldiers slowly searched, Tapalman and McKemey talked with the middle aged men of the village which were probably much closer to the actual authority of the village than the half senile old men a lot of villages claim are the elders/maliks/khans.

The late Louis Dupree, who even after passing is still the foremost expert on Afghanistan because his knowledge is locked in and not subject to curent events, wrote of how Afghanistan and especially small villages are fundamentally inward looking societies in which "a man is born into a set of answers" his fate and future are mostly determined at birth.  Inward looking societies are similar throughout tribal cultures.  A man will usually have the same occupation as his father, his social status is determined all but exclusivly by the status of his family and his wife will likely be a close cousin.

The villagers erect both physical and socio-psychological mud walls to keep to keep the outside world away.  One of the techniques is to keep outsiders, like US Army officers, away from the real authority.  "An outsider seldom meets the true power elite of a village unless he remains for an extended period," Dupree wrote in his 1973 book "Afghanistan" the quintessential almanac of everything Afghan.  "When outsiders approach the village leaders disappear behind mud walls, and the first line of defense, the second line of power come forward to greet the strangers with formalized hospitality, which surprisingly enough also serves as a defensive technique."

If the the US Army officers can figure out who has the Zoor--the power--in a village it becomes easier to influence the village, to possibly change things and upset the set of answers everyone has already accepted.  The fundamental purpose of the socio-psychological mud wall is to maintain the status quo because villagers, like most humans, resist change because change represents a potential loss.  To a westerner the people of Khoshal Kalay have nothing, but the people of Khoshal know nothing else and see their village, their house, their little terrace fields and way of life as everything they own.  Anything that changes that is a loss and, under some interpretations of the Pashtunwali code of Ghayrat, the things you own must be protected and defended to the death.

In the west behavioural economists have found that people will work harder to avoid a loss than make a gain and the less you have, the harder you try to keep it.  Those three cups of tea are about getting you to go along, get along and leave thinking they actually like you and hoping you never come back.

Tapalman and McKemey drank one cup of tea each and played along as the men said five different ways that Taliban, Haqqani Network or other foreign fighters never pass through Khoshal. 

The leader of the middle aged residents of Khoshal said he and other relatives owned a shop in Khowst city and one man had a few gold fillings, dental work is a sign of prosperity in the high mountains of Afghanistan.  There were no cars or pick up trucks in the village, but the the dry river bed had well worn double tracks of regular vehicle traffic.  A few solar panels were bolted to roofs and there were electric lights but no TV or satellite dish.  The did listen to the radio, which for the last 40-50 years has been the primary source of information for rural Afghans.

With the search complete, CPT Tapalman thanked the men for their gracious hospitality and give them a little gift, "This is a picture of your village taken from a helicopter.  It is a beautiful village and I thought you would like a picture of it."  

The leader of the villagers was slow to take the picture from the smiling CPT Tapalman.  It was a moment of truth that passed between the two of them.  Tapalman didn't fall for the usual mud-wall routine, and the village leader knew it.  The message of the glossy color photo was clear:  We are watching you.

Down the crackling golden stubble of the freshly harvested wheat terraces the soldiers fanned out in a wedge formation looking for a patch of dirt or stack of rocks that didn't fit.  Every house, shack and all the surrounding groves had been searched for a weapons cache, the wheat fields were all that remained.  But no weapons were found--not even an old AK-47 or shotgun.  

"No weapons?  Clear out here?" Tapalman said more of statement of disbelief than a question.  He just shook his head.

In the mountains of Khowst province there is a culture clash as a rural, peasant almost fuedal society comes in contact with the post-modern information age.  Villages like Khoshal have a few solar panels which power an electric light or three, a radio and charge up a cell phone.  The wheat is cut with sickles and scythes, but up to 40% of the young men of the village are sent to the city to work, some even to Dubai.  There is only enough land in the village for only the oldest son to continue farming and support a family.  The goal of most of the young men who leave the village is not to make a new life in Kabul or Karachi, but to make enough money in to pay the bride-price to marry a cousin and return to the area as a shopkeeper, merchant or worker.  Most continue to work away from the village their whole life.

One Afghan folktale collected by Louis Dupree tells the story of three cousins--two boys and one girl.  One of the boys has rich father, the other a poor father.  The girl and the poor boy fall in love, but the girl had already been promised to the rich boy.  "Khadi [the poor cousin] announced his decision to leave and seek his fortune...'I shall return wealthy and we shall be married.'"

Over the years Khadi became wealthy as a caravan merchant and returnd to the village asking about girl, Marghalai, "She is well and happy, the wife of Aslam [the rich cousin]"

Khadi loaded up his caravan and "slowly made its way to Hindustan with its riches, and with Khadi and his borken heart."

More than 100,000 men from Khowst province may be working abroad and sending up to $6 million dollars a month back to their families.  The big concern for Team Viper and the Afghan National Security Forces is the group of young men who stay behind as they are the recruits for the Taliban and Haqqani network.  A few days after operation Nike a twenty-year-old local Afghan blew himself up near the Kholbesat Bazaar, just one kilometer from Viper's small combat outpost.

The first question westerners often ask is what motivates a young Afghan man to strap on 20 pounds of explosives and blow himself up.  But that is a mostly irrelevant question.  The bomber my be a religious zealot, it may have been a way to nullify a debt, uphold his duty to avenge a wrong under the Pashtoonwali or his one chance to be famous and make mark.  None of those things matter.  The real question is who gains by that young man blowing himself up?  He is not a solo agent.  Someone else builds the bomb and teaches him how to use it.  Some one recruits him and encourages him.  Someone straps it on him and sends him out the mission.  A suicide bomber is a high-cost weapons system.  In this instance it was employed on the day the Bazaar was reopening.after being closed because a few Afghan Soldiers were attacked by a bomb and some children were injured in the blast.  The young Afghan suicider's motive does not matter, he was merely a tool of others and understanding what they wanted to accomplish is what counts.

The goal of the insurgents may be what it seems, to inflict damage on the security serivces and show the public that the Haqqani network, the Taliban, are in charge and there will only be security when the Americans and government are gone.

It could be more complicated though.  If the Kholbesat Bazaar is shut down, other bazaars will profit.

The mostly inward looking society distorts the perception of the bomber.  The locals blame the outsiders, the Americans and the ANSF because if the Americans were gone the suicide bombers would stop.

The inward looking society blames the outsider.  The inward looking Afghan though he lives in Dubai, looks back to the village.  In the distant mountains some people never look beyond the village or valley with legends of hazards just across the ridge line still being told.

As we moved from one valley to another CPT Tapalman told me how another Army unit high up in the mountains met with villagers who told them how dragons lived in the next valley over.  Or at least that is how the translation came through.  Elphinstone in 1815 described how "The Afghans believe each of the numerous solitudes in the mountains...to be inhabited by a lonely demon, whom they call Ghoollee Beeabaun.  They represent him as a gigantic and frightful spectre who devours any passenger whom chance may bring within his haunts."  Ghoolee Beeabaun sounds close enough to a dragon.

The only thing that was attacking TM Viper as they moved down the valley was the heat and the terrain.  As the squads move forward, the injured soldiers slolwly crept along the rocky goat trails to get to a slight widening of the dry river bed which would be used as the landing zone for the medevac and a water resupply.

A water resupply on a long-range multi-day mission consists of a blackhawk helicopter hovering over a drop zone and shoving two body bags filled with water bottles out the side door.  For the medevac the helicopter would have to fly in, rotate, tilt and somehow squeeze the rotar blades between the banks of the river bed--and do it at night.

There was at one point some question about whether the medevac would actually happen.  None of the soldiers had dangerous injuries--a badly twisted ankle, a twisted knee, stomach virus and a mild dehydration--they were all listed as 'priority' medevacs which evidently means 'when we can get around to it.'  The fifth though, a soldier who fell hard when a terrace wall he was standing on collapsed was switched to urgent after he could no longer walk under his own power.

After the evacuation the soldiers moved under cover of darkness to higher ground and set in for the night.  I put out my poncho, flattened down a bed of wheat straw, wrapped up in my poncho liner and fell into a deep sleep.  Like most of the soldiers I had been awake for 20 hours.  Unlike them I didn't have two pull two hours of security.  I am always amazed at the physical and mental stamina of the Soldiers.  The hike that day wiped me out, but I carry 20 to 40 pounds less than them because I don't have to ruck ammunition.  I get to sleep all the way through the night because my camera wouldn't be of much use on perimeter security and I tend to blow off the 'stand too' when everyone is awake and on security before dawn's twilight.  Thus I was wide-awake and fresh early in the morning when the platoon finally made it to a village with a name--Mundikhela and immediately grasped how screwed up the tribal cartographers were.

"They are Jani Khel," the interpreter said.

We were sitting on the ground drinking goat milk chai and eating some of the worst naan (the Afghan flat bread) I had ever eaten, when after a long and winding discussion CPT Tapalman finally got the name of their tribe--Jani Khel.

"The tribal fued is starting to make more sense," Tapalman said.

For centuries there has been ongoing fueds over trees, terrace fields and water for irrigation between the Sabari and Jani Khel tribes.  The government supposedly drew district and provincial lines with an eye toward tribal boundaries, but these Jani Khels were deep, deep in Sabari territory.  At least according to the government cartographers.

"They redrew the lines," one village elder said, "giving the Sabaris claim to our fields and trees."

The intensity of wars over trees, especially Holly Oak which is more of an overgrown shrub with a trunk than a real tree is perplexing until you realize that for most of Afghanistan there are two sources of heat during the bitter Afghan winters;  bottled propane and wood.  The firewood industry the big money maker for a few tribes like the Jani Khel.

In 1959 the Zadran and Mangal tribes got into war over what Louis Dupree termed "a few stands of Asian confiers."  The goondee system fired and up and soon nearly every tribe around Khowst was in the fray.  An adventurous Afghan Army Officer thought he would be play the role of peacemaking mediator and went into the middle of the disputed forest only to be shot in the head.  The rest of the army quickly stood up and moved toward Khowst causing at least 3,000 Mangal tribesmen to flee into Pakistan.

By Afghan tradition there are three things worth fighting over; Zar, Zan & Zamn, Money, Women & Land.  Land with trees and terrace fields has been worth fighting over for centuries and even if it is really not, the fueding seems to be part of the culture.  It is what these tribes do.  The United Nations mission in Afghanistan tried its hand at negotiating a final settlement but failed.  It failed because of the long held attitude one old Malik related to the British Diplomat Elphinstone 200 years ago.

"We are content with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood, but we will never be content with a master."

The attitude still prevails today, some of the first words out of the mouths of Mundikhela men were, "we are self governing."

For most of the day as the soldiers gently searched the villages of Mundikehla, CPT Tapalman querried about the fued.  "I've been hearing the Sabari side for months, it is interesting to hear the Jani Khel side."

He would also inquire about the weapons cache of mortars, grenades and machine gund found in Mundikhela two years ago.  The villager elders owned up to it saying, "they were to be used against the Sabaris, not Americans."

The gentle searches turned up nothing of note, the conversations bore no new information, the platoon, hot, thristy and empty handed after two days deep in the hills walked back to the hasty patrol base where they guzzled down bottles of canal water that had been treated with chlorine tabs.  The soldiers kept their empty water bottles and left them at the PB for the Senior medic and the EOD attachements to fill with water and treat.  It tasted like funky swimming pool water but kept all them going for another two hours as they walked to the LZ for the helicopter flight back to Combat Outpost Sabari, but finding the route to the LZ would cause few moments of confusion because even though we could see the LZ across the river, there were 200 foot cliffs on each side of the river bed.

"Terrace fields, that means irrigation," I said outloud to no one in particular.  "There is an aqueduct upstream that leads to here, which means there will probably be an aqueduct leading to the other side we can walk on."

A local man confirmed my idea and I took off up-stream looking for where the river met the aqueduct along the way passing up a few soldiers.  When I found the aqueduct I started walking along the well worn foot-wide path that gently moved downhill.  The river bed made a more rapid descent and soon I was on a 75-foot-high cliff and the point man for second platoon as it made its way to the LZ.

"Exactly how is it that the embedded reporter wound up walking point?" I asked CPT Tapalman, who was a few meters behind me.

"You volunteered to."

"No, no.  I mean, why am I even in a position to be on point?"  

"Because you have more Afghan experience than a lot of the soldiers and know to go looking for an aqueduct," the Captain said.

Mostly it was because I was hot, tired, thirsty and just wanted to get to the LZ so the mission would finally be over.
 

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Coda:  The total take of Operation Nike, by the standard count, was zero, but that does not make the operation a total waste of time.  CPT Tapalman got a better read on the tribal boundary dispute which the insurgents leverage to their advantage.  Often these missions are about getting insurgent facilitators to pop their heads up and get talking.  Tapalman calls it "kicking over rocks."  Sometimes you kick over a bunch of rocks and find nothing, others you kick over a few rocks and get the whole snake pit swirling making it easier for Special Forces teams to come in and conduct precision raids.  A subsequent multi-day mission kicking over rocks resulted in 300 SF operators descending on Zambar and hitting seven objectives and hauling some ranking bad guys.

"Everyone wants to do intelligence driven misisons," says Lt. Colonel Jesse Pearson, the commander of the 1-26 Inf. "but someone has to do the missions that generate intelligence."

It is very easy to see after the fact that just about anything else would have been a better use of time and assets than Nike.  There are two ways to judge the quality of a decision, the outcome and the process used to make the decision.  Outcome can be determined by luck, so process is the only valid judgement.  War is about decision making under conditions of uncertainty, a grand, high stakes example of cumulative prospect theory in action.  Nike and missions like it cannot be judged on results, but on the reasoning behind them.

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Khoshal Kalay as viewed from a long ways up.

 
Soldiers making their way down dry water way filled with boulders and water falls that the soldiers later dubbed "The Devil's Ass Crack."

 
Khoshal Kalaly.  Note the elevation changes in the houses and terrace fields.


More of Khoshal's wheat terrace fields.


In the village guest room of Khoshal.  Many villages have a room like this to entertain guests for them to stay the night.


Decorations in the guest room.  They are all clocks, none are set to the correct time or even the same time.  Many Afghan men wear watches but they are often set to some random time.


Leaving Khosal


JD Johannes on a terrace outside Khoshal Kalay, Afghanistan.


Wheat to be harvested.


Stacks of cut wheat.


CPT Tapalman having goat milk chai with the men of Mundikhela.


JD Johannes enjoying his breakfast of choice when on a big mission.


The LZ side of Mundikhela.


The LZ is on the bottom terrace field.


Perspective on distance and depth of the river gorge.


Terrace farms of Mundikhela.

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