BARGHANTU, Afghanistan -- The tunnel entrance was no more than 18 inches high. Matt, a U.S. Special Forces soldier, stripped off his body armor, dropped his rifle and wriggled through the gap, pistol and flashlight leading the way. Some 150 feet in, his beam caught a shape: a bearded man hiding behind a pile of rocks.
Cornered, the man stood and greeted Matt with a smile, as if their underground rendezvous were a scheduled appointment between friends. Instead, he was frisked, handcuffed, bundled into a helicopter and taken away for questioning.
The U.S. military is deploying tens of thousands of fresh troops in a much-publicized strategy to woo the Afghan people through good government, economic growth and security. Yet behind the battle lines, the U.S. is quietly escalating a more forcible campaign.
In recent months, small teams of Army commandos, Navy Seals and Central Intelligence Agency operatives have intensified the pace of what the military often calls "kill-capture missions"-- hunting down just one or two insurgents at a time who are deemed too recalcitrant to be won over by any goodwill campaign.
| What do they do with the captured ones, now that Guantanamo Bay is no longer accepting captives? Otherwise it sounds like a brilliant idea. Happy hunting, guys! |
| And not just Gitmo - Baghram too. |
| Don't forget Ice Station Zebra ... |
The Pentagon's fiscal 2011 budget, released Monday, called for increasing the number of elite Special Operations troops, buying larger numbers of aerial drones and expanding the amount of military and financial assistance to Yemen, the home base of the Al Qaeda offshoot that claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day bombing of a crowded U.S. airliner. Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to determine whether a U.S. drone strike in mid-January killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, though that group said Monday he is still alive.
"You've got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable," Gen. David Petraeus, chief of U.S. forces in the region, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December. He said coalition commanders plan to escalate counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan even more in the coming months. The CIA plans to increase its presence by 25%, though it won't provide exact numbers.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied commander in Kabul, made his name commanding similar special-operations forces in Iraq and sending them after hundreds of key insurgent and Al Qaeda figures. His success was considered crucial to salvaging the Iraq war.
He recently told his staff in Kabul, "It's not the number of people you kill--it's the number of people you convince." But the stick remains as integral to his strategy as the carrot.
| Like a magician: the Army and Marine units keep the attention focussed on their movements, while the Special Forces act unnoticed... except for those bad guys suddenly missing or dead. |
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