WASHINGTON – The stories don’t make the front pages of U.S. newspapers:
- Unidentified attackers fire a rocket toward a U.S. base in central Afghanistan. No casualties or damage are reported. U.S. Special Forces are deployed, but don’t find attackers in the Deh Rawood district in Uruzgan province.
- A soldier is wounded in a rocket attack on a U.S. base in Asadabad, in the eastern province of Kunar.
- A military helicopter crashes in the Afghan capital, killing all seven German peacekeepers aboard. It’s unclear what brought it down.
- In eastern Afghanistan, attackers kill a U.S. soldier in a gunfight in the town of Shkhin. The first U.S. combat death in Afghanistan since August, it brings to 16 the number of Americans killed in hostile situations since the war on terror began.
- In southern Kandahar, a remote-control bomb explodes, killing one Afghan soldier and wounding three others. The bomb goes off as a contingent of Afghan soldiers is marching toward a training ground on the eastern edge of the city. No one takes responsibility for the bombing.
Crude rockets, often connected to timers, are fired at U.S. forces almost daily in Afghanistan, but the attacks rarely cause casualties.
Nevertheless, the relentless hit-and-run attacks take their toll. At Bagram, a bleak air base 30 miles north of Kabul and home to about 8,000 coalition forces, U.S. troops are starting to feel a sense of psychological fatigue, if not battle weariness.
These are the front lines in the battle to hunt down al-Qaida terrorists and Taliban militiamen who have thus far eluded capture or death.
Some U.S. military sources fear the campaign in Afghanistan could bog down further – just as the U.S. is about to launch a war in Iraq. There are indications resistance could become more intense in the days to come.
One intelligence report indicates Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyr, who has urged a jihad against U.S. troops, commands as many as 50,000 militiamen. U.S. forces have been looking for Hekmatyr for some time, but he is often on the move. Hekmatyr’s goals are clear – overthrowing President Hamid Karzai and chasing U.S. forces out of the country.
Even in relatively pacified areas of the country such as the Khost province, attacks occur every few days.
The attacks usually come from the direction of Pakistan, where remnants of al-Qaida and the Taliban movement have found refuge in the lawless tribal areas that hug the border.
Despite sweeps by U.S. combat troops through the frontier region, the number of rocket attacks on U.S. bases and outposts in Khost and the neighboring border provinces has remained consistently high – about 50 per month since the summer. Guerrillas inside Pakistan are beginning to sneak into Afghanistan for brief hits, according to U.S. military sources.
Both U.S. troops and Afghan government forces say they would like to chase the attackers into Pakistan and destroy their bases. But the U.S. alliance with Pakistan prohibits such cross-border raids. Thus, the torment continues.
“This reminds me of some of the problems we saw in Vietnam,” said one U.S. officer.
