Christina Lamb covers for The Sunday Times (London), the US led war on terrorism in Afghanistan with additional reporting by Mohammad Shehzad. --Editor
It was seeing American soft drinks in Al-Qaeda hands that made Second Lieutenant Eric Schwartz really angry. "They were wearing our US Army uniforms, our ponchos and swigging from Snapple bottles as if to taunt us," he said, describing one of the many ambushes on his unit in the southeastern Afghan town of Shkin.
"Others had cloaks covering their bandoliers of bullets so we would think they were civilians. They were Chechens and Waziris and they fight dirty.
"You know, a lot of people outside think the war here in Afghanistan is over, but we're on the ground and I'm telling you this is where the war on terrorism really is and it's getting harder."
"Welcome to Shkin", reads the hand-painted sign where a black Chinook touched the ground last week, churning up thick clouds of dust with its whirring blades.
Another was just behind. Helicopters fly in pairs and never turn off their engines at this US base high up in the badlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan, hovering just long enough to disgorge one lot of American troops and load the next.
All the time a smaller Black Hawk patrols the sky. "Trust me, you don't want to be here," said Bruce Capehart, a combat psychiatrist among those jumping on board to leave.
"The most evil place on earth" is how Shkin is described by Colonel Rodney Davis, a spokesman for the US forces in Afghanistan. "Real Mad Max territory."
It is here, in these fortress-like mountains, that the search for Osama Bin Laden is now concentrated. In the past six weeks it has seen some of the heaviest fighting of the whole war in Afghanistan.
Perched on a desolate hill from which the Pakistan border post is visible on the facing mountain, the mud-walled base surrounded by coiled barbed wire looks exposed and primitive. Indeed, the soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division stationed here often go for days with no water.
But there is nothing unsophisticated about the control room where officers pore over maps marked "classified", monitor radio frequencies used by Al-Qaeda operatives, study satellite images and download intelligence gleaned from prisoners and cross-checked at the Harmony database at Bagram, the centre of American operations in Afghanistan.
Sipping black coffee from a paper cup at his desk, the commander, with small lines of tiredness etched around his eyes, has little doubt about what he and his men are up against. There is no talk here of that other war in Iraq.
"This is the real front line in the war against terror," said Colonel Michael Howard, a surprisingly soft-spoken, thoughtful man, who commands the 1,050 troops at all four American bases in the border area of southeastern Afghanistan.
US intelligence has focused the hunt for the world's most wanted terrorist on a 40-square-mile stretch just across the Pakistan border in south Waziristan, and it would seem to be the perfect hiding place. The local Pashtun people say that, when Allah created the earth, he had a pile of rocks left from which he created Afghanistan. There can be few places as hostile as the tribal lands that straddle the border.
In the summer there is no shade from the harsh 120F sun, while in the winter the sub-zero winds seem to pierce the bones. Gritty dust coats everything, getting into the mouth, hair, ears and eyes, and under the fingernails. All the soldiers seem to have grey complexions and at night the tents echo with hacking coughs.
Flying to Shkin, the Chinook hugs the scree-covered hillsides as one mountain range after another rises jaggedly from the ground like scales on a dinosaur's back. We fly so close that we can make out the bright colours of nomads' dresses below. From the open sides where the gunners sit, it feels as if we can touch the rocks.
The pilot explains that he is making it harder for anyone to shoot his "bird" down, but even so the helicopter is fired upon as it tries to land at Urgun, the last base before Shkin.
Driving is not an option. The single-track road between the mountains is far too exposed to ambushes from gunmen on the hilltops, a lesson the British Army learnt when retreating from Afghanistan in 1842, when almost all of its 16,000 troops were slaughtered. Just one doctor was left alive so that he could tell the tale.
"Why would anyone fight over this place?" asked Sergeant Don Kenitzer. "Nothing grows here but terrorists and rocks."
An artillery man, just as his father was in the Korean war, Kenitzer's heavy-rimmed thick lens glasses give him more than a passing resemblance to Austin Powers, and after nine years in the army this is the first time he has been in combat.
"At least it's the first time I've had people shooting at me," he said, recounting how last week he had to dive to the ground between tents as 107mm rockets pounded the base at Urgun. "In two months here, we've had 17 rocket attacks. Thank God they're not accurate."
It is not just the harsh terrain that renders dirt-poor Waziristan an ideal hideout. The main industries are smuggling and banditry, and the area is inhabited by some of the fiercest tribesmen on earth, the Waziris and the Mahsuds. They carry guns as casually as westerners carry mobile phones, and live by an extreme honour code of an eye for an eye.
Part of this code requires them to protect with their lives those who come looking for sanctuary. In the village of Angor Adda, which US intelligence regards as Al-Qaeda's capital, eight men were recently found dead with their ears cut off and dollars stuffed in their pockets, an apparent warning of what happens to informers.
When this area was part of the British Empire in India, colonial officers gave up on attempts to control the tribes. In 1893, when the Durand Line was established dividing +tribes between Afghanistan and British India, Waziristan became an autonomous territory. When Pakistan was created in 1947, these so-called Tribal Areas were left semi-autonomous and the historic right to cross freely over the Durand Line was retained.
All of which goes to make this a haven for Al-Qaeda fighters and extremely irritating for the American soldiers, who cannot cross the border into a country that is supposed to be one of their main allies in the war on terror.
"They come in, shoot at us, then jump back across an imaginary line that we mustn't cross," grumbled one sergeant.
"The fighting is on their terms," admits Howard. "We have to wait for them to come to us. Then, when we attack back, they run across the border and come back to fight another day. It's very frustrating."
The fighting of the past six weeks around Shkin was so much more sophisticated than anything the Americans had encountered before that US intelligence was convinced a high-level Al-Qaeda official must be organising it -perhaps Bin Laden's Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was regularly seen in Urgun before the US bombing of Afghanistan started two years ago.
The attacks began with an ambush of American troops on August 27. "It was the day after my birthday," said Specialist Beau Hawkins, a wise-cracking 25-year-old, who was driving the second of two vehicles targeted. "Our strategy was that we'd often go into combat areas in two trucks as bait to try to lure the enemy, but that time we were in what was supposed to be a nice area. As we were coming over the hill, our first truck started receiving fire. Then, before we could react, they were firing on us, too, using AK-47s with armour-piercing rounds.
"We kept trying to push through, but the enemy knows our battle drill and it was non-stop bullets. We were on a narrow road in a valley near the Pakistan border, so we couldn't turn round. In the end we got into a position where we could see the enemy. We were going to call in artillery, but then the enemy pushed out four or five women in front.
"We didn't know if they were fighters dressed as women or what, but they know we cannot call in artillery if there are civilians present. So we called in the Quick Reaction Force, who came in vehicles, but they got hit really badly, so we had to get back into the firefight to pull them out.
"The enemy were firing RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) on us and we were trapped, so in the end we called in air support. RAF Harriers flew in and dropped a 1,000lb bomb on them and that was that."
Hawkins was lucky. Four days later his two best friends, Specialist Adam Thomas and Private First Class Chad Fuller, both snipers, were ambushed in the same area, now known as Ambush Alley, and killed.
"After that some of our guys went to try to find the guys who had done it, and a guy walked out from behind the tree and they shot at him," Hawkins said. "But before they could get him, he had unpinned a handgrenade and blown himself up. There were body parts flying everywhere."
The man was identified as a Chechen and a video camera was found where he had been hiding. On it was footage of fighters praying in mosques before launching an ambush; attacks on the American troops; and alarmingly close-up shots of the US base at Shkin.
Many of the fighters on the film were Chechens; some were Arabs and others Waziris.
"Chechens are the hard guys," said Hawkins. "And they pick up their bodies like us. I heard they believe that if they don't bury their men before dark they go to hell. So we try to blow up their bodies so they can't bury them."
For the next five weeks the attacks on the Americans were relentless. Rockets on the base often seemed to come when the troops were eating "chow", a time they christened Rocket Hour. They were more accurate than before, even hitting the control room.
"Before I came here I'd never been shot at," said Hawkins, who looks fresh out of school but has a five-year-old daughter at home in Washington state. "Now I've been in 25 ambushes."
Two weeks ago he was transferred to the relative safety of Urgun, about 15 miles from Shkin, where between patrols last week he wrote endless letters to outdoor equipment companies, asking them to sponsor his unit and send them telescopes.
"When I wrote to one before, they just sent me a catalogue!" he complained.
His latest wheeze was to write to Hugh Hefner asking for a night at the Playboy mansion for his unit when they get out of Afghanistan. "I want to get sent to Iraq next," he said.
As a father, did he not fear for his life? "Of course you're scared," he admitted.
"But after the rounds have gone off just over your head a couple of times you get beyond fear. You've got to get your men back alive.
"Besides, this guy Osama Bin Laden is waging a holy war against America and it's my job to put an end to it so my daughter can grow up safely."
Apart from mortars and RPGs, the Al-Qaeda fighters at Shkin have used remote-controlled landmines, Russian machineguns and silent Chinese combustion rockets.
"It was the first time we'd seen anything of that complexity," said Captain Tom McCarron, acting executive officer. "Someone had to be in charge down there to synchronise it."
The Americans retaliated with Apache helicopters, A10 Warthog "tankbusters" and artillery, but the enemy had simply gone back over the border.
"We get to fight when they want to fight," complained Schwartz. "We can't go over into Pakistan so we just roll around doing these patrols until they pop up and attack us. All we can do is try and lure them deeper in the country to give us more chance of getting them."
But the Al-Qaeda fighters had adopted other tactics such as wearing US army uniforms and carrying their soft drinks, apparently pilfered from the base. "One American soldier was killed because he walked up to a bunch of guys in combat uniform thinking they were ours. He yelled when he saw what they were and killed two. Then they killed him."
The Americans responded by suspending all the local workers from Urgun and Shkin, with the loss of about 200 jobs.
The fighters kept coming back, their groups growing from three or four at a time to as many as 60. On September 29, McCarron received a report of increased signal activity, which is usually the sign of an impending rocket attack, so he called in an Apache. "Two minutes after I issued the order, our first unit started taking mortar rounds."
Not for the first time, some of the firing was emanating not only from the Pakistan side of the border but appeared to be coming from Waziri Scouts, the Pakistani border guards.
Under pressure from its officers on the ground, Washington, which has long been worried about destabilising Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, lost patience.
The Sunday Times has learnt that photographic evidence was presented to Islamabad showing the movement of terrorists across the border after they had attacked American troops, in plain view of border guards. A series of safe houses over the border was also identified.
"There is a haven in Pakistan," said Howard. "I truly believe that at a national level Pakistan's senior officers are wholeheartedly against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. But when you get down to the soldiers on the border there is a pretty high degree of acquiescence."
In official statements the Americans have stopped distinguishing between Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the fighters of the Afghan fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Instead, they refer to them all as "anti-coalition militants". How did they know the men attacking them at Shkin were Al-Qaeda?
"Taliban quit," Howard replied. "Al-Qaeda never quit."
An ultimatum was issued to Islamabad that, if Pakistan did not crack down on Al-Qaeda, the US would have to send its own troops over the border.
"There was tremendous pressure on us," admitted Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, Pakistan's information minister. On October 2, just before Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, arrived in Islamabad, the Pakistan military began its biggest crackdown in the tribal areas, sending 300 troops supported by helicopter gunships and killing eight "wanted men" in Angor Adda and Wana.
Five forts identified as hideouts were surrounded and more than 60 tribesmen arrested on suspicion of harbouring terrorists. Hundreds more for whom arrest warrants had been issued had gone underground.
The operation has provoked outrage in Pakistan. "Musharraf should tell the nation why he has dragged the Pakistan army into a fight that is not ours but purely of the US," said Chaudhry Nisar Ali, a leader of the Muslim League.
The effect has been immediate, however: it has been quiet in Shkin and Urgun. Yet nobody sleeps easily in their army cots. This remains a land where it is impossible to know who is friend and who is foe.
Last week I joined a US night patrol through the mountains of the border area.
There was bravado as we clambered into three Humvees and an armoured vehicle, but once outside the base the joking stopped. As we drove through villages and then along a river bed with our lights off, the walls of tribal forts loomed on either side.
"How do we know if they harbour bad guys or not?" I whispered.
"Trial and error," replied Captain John P Opladen, the 27-year-old in command of the operation. "If they shoot at us, we know they're enemies."
Opladen and his men may be part of the world's most formidable fighting machine, but in a narrow valley they are an easy target. Earlier he had told me that he was an only child and I thought of his mother back home in Philadelphia who, he said, had bought three television sets and was constantly watching for news from Shkin.
There remains one other pressing issue. More than two years after President George W Bush said he wanted Bin Laden "dead or alive", no firm clue has emerged as to his whereabouts. Although intelligence has zeroed in on the Angor Adda area of south Waziristan, the last confirmed sighting was in Jalalabad in November 2001.
His voice was heard on a radio during fighting at Tora Bora in December 2001, although that might have been a decoy, and there have been unconfirmed reports of his presence at a wedding in Khost last spring and a recent rallying of his troops near Jalalabad.
In the past two months a Taliban resurgence in the southwest has seen attacks on aid workers increase to one every two days. It has caused the United Nations to declare a third of the country a no go area.
US military officials insist this does not mean their mission in Afghanistan has failed. "It would be a huge psychological uplift to capture Bin Laden or Mullah Omar (the Taliban leader) but the war on terrorism isn't focused on them," said Davis. "They're leaders and they can't function without followers. so we kill the followers. We've killed more than 200 in the past six weeks."
Afghanistan has become the forgotten war. In a speech to the 3rd Infantry last month, Bush declared Iraq "the central front in the war on terror", much to the annoyance of the brave boys at Shkin.
However, Bin Laden refuses to go away, as his apparent threats of new suicide attacks on US targets made clear yesterday. How can a man of 6ft 7in with such distinctive features just vanish, I ask those charged with finding him -the US special forces zooming around on their quad bikes, instantly identifiable by their civilian clothes, beards and sunburnt faces.
"There are lots of wanted guys still running around the US who we can't find," said one. "If you don't want to be found it's very difficult. Besides, money talks."
Notices stuck up on buildings in local villages offer a $ 1,000 bounty for the head of an Afghan working with the Americans and $ 5,000 for each American soldier.
On a day patrol with troops we were constantly stopped by village children who have learnt the word "candy". The boys have old men's faces and are encrusted with dirt; their clothes are ragged and none of them goes to school.
"None of them has shoes," said Opladen, shaking his head. "I was in Korea before I came to Afghanistan but this is much worse."
The feeling that life has not improved in these areas since the fall of the Taliban may prove a key factor to who wins the war on terror.
"What we do here trying to find the top leaders is futile if we don't do anything at the grassroots for civilians," said one member of the special forces. "Nobody is really going to collaborate with us because at the end of the day they don't believe we will stick around, while the bad guys will.
"I even had a 10-year-old boy, who I'd given something to and promised to be back, say to me, 'No you won't; you Americans never come back'. Can you imagine that? A 10-year-old. If you ask me, we're achieving nothing."
