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2005-09-28 Afghanistan/South Asia

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Posted by Steve White 2005-09-28 00:00|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Photos of the COIN troops involved in the gunfight today.
They look mean

Photo1
Photo2
Photo3

Posted by john 2005-09-28 15:50|| 2005-09-28 15:50|| Front Page Top

#2 Photos of the COIN troops involved in the gunfight today [Shopian]

Arjuna, incarnate.

John thanks for the pics, always look for your expertise and comments. elsewhere, I found this 10 page article on Siachen Glacier 2003..author illustrates the awsomeness of the place quite well...thoughts?

..WE WERE MARCHING up a strip of shattered rock laid out between two streams of the purest white, frozen highways extending in great ripples toward the head of the Siachen Glacierâthe largest alpine glacier on earth, nearly two trillion cubic feet of ice. The air was frigid and the light crackled with the crystalline clarity found only above 16,000 feet. The sky was an unusually deep blueâa blue that bordered on violet, a violet that shaded into black, a black that warned of cold that could snap bones and stop the dance of molecules dead in its tracks.

Up ahead rose a snowy 18,950-foot saddle that marked the end of the Indian subcontinent and the beginning of Central Asia. From its crest you could gaze into India, Pakistan, China, and Tibet. Surrounding us on all sides was an unbroken wall of pinnaclesâhuge cetacean humps barnacled with impossibly large cornices, seracs, and needlelike spires. "I am so happy to be in these mountains!" cried Mohmad Yaseen Khan, a 47-year-old Kashmiri Muslim who was serving as our Online Extra
Read more about the environmental devastation on the Siachen here
guide and cook. "The number of peaks I want to climb here is... is... well, I will have to make a special trip back just to count them. See how each one shines in a different way? See how their shapes are different? This is a place where a mountaineer would want to be buried."

Within a 25-mile radius of where we stood, 48 peaks rose above 19,000 feet; only 16 of these have names, and only six have been climbed. Above them towered 27 giants with altitudes exceeding 23,000 feet. Thirteen of these have never been scaled, and they include some of the greatest remaining prizes in Himalayan mountaineering: Saltoro Kangri II, four peaks in the Apsarasas group, and another three in the Teram Kangri group.

But there's a reason these mountains remain untouched: They sit in the middle of a 250-square-mile war zone where India and Pakistan have been fighting for the past 19 years as part of their intractable dispute over the state of Kashmir. What might be a climber's paradise is instead the site of a harrowing and improbable siege, the highest and coldest combat theater in the history of the world.

....In settings like this, suffering is often transformed into legend. The Pakistanis tell of a post beyond Sia La, at nearly 22,000 feet, that is said to have three separate cracks in the ice known as Three-Man Crevasse, Five-Man Crevasse, and Eight-Man Crevasseâeach named for the number of men who died falling in. Soldiers talk of men losing their minds and leaping from the posts to their deaths. Some say their tormented cries can be heard in the wind over the peaks. And then there's the story about the platoon killed in an early battle at Bilafond La, whose bodies froze into such grotesque positions that their corpses had to be hacked into pieces before they could be placed in helicopter panniers and brought down for return to their families.

Whether such tales are true is less important than what they symbolize about the futility of Siachen duty. "From what I've read, no one has ever been stupid enough to fight at this level before," an officer at Ghyari remarked one afternoon when none of his colleagues were within earshot. "I hope it won't be repeated again, because it's a waste. A big, bloody waste."
The Coldest War

Posted by Red Dog 2005-09-28 19:30|| 2005-09-28 19:30|| Front Page Top

#3 Siachen is of great strategic importance.

Musharraf has not gotten over the failure of his SSG unit to prevent Indian dominance of the high ground.

Deaths due to altitude have come down sharply as the Indian army learns more about high altitude warfare.
It now has an entire mountain warfare division acclimitized to high altitude on standby deployment.

Posted by john 2005-09-28 21:19|| 2005-09-28 21:19|| Front Page Top

#4 ...BEFORE LEAVING PAKISTAN, I heard quite a few remarks about Narinder "Bull" Kumar, a legendary Indian military man and mountaineer, and none of them were complimentary. "Colonel Kumar is the man who started all this," Major Tahir had fumed. "I have no wish to meet himâthat bastard."

The insults did little to prepare me for the bald, friendly man who was brimming with good humor and charm when we met at the New Delhi airport. Kumar, now 69, is short and powerful, still packed with thick muscle from his days as a climber. He has a thin white mustache, an endearing propensity for laughing at his own jokes, and an enormous fondness for beer. Kumar's family originally came from Rawalpindi and moved, just before Partition, to what is now the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. After graduating from the Indian Military Academy in 1954, he joined the army and was earmarked for the cavalry. But in 1958 he got the chance to attend the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, run at the time by Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who summited Everest with Hillary. Inspired, Kumar flung himself into high-altitude mountaineering and began racking up notable achievements.

Posted by Snoluns Hupatch6252 2005-09-28 22:08|| 2005-09-28 22:08|| Front Page Top

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