The Taliban Return to Jalalabad

Phase 3 of the Tanker Wars

This was the opening of my May 29, 2010, post on Free Range International, when I was living at the Taj Guesthouse in Jalalabad.

“Security incident rates across Afghanistan are skyrocketing, and this year it appears that Jalalabad will, for the first time, receive its fair share of attention. This unfortunate reality is forcing outside-the-wire implementers to spend an inordinate amount of time drinking tea and chatting with various local officials and ISAF personnel to calibrate the threat level in Jalalabad. We’re in for a bad summer.”

During the 2010 Fighting Season, the Taliban unleashed a wave of fuel tanker attacks, bombing of kiosks and small businesses. Stores selling movie DVDs, cell phones, and photography equipment were heavily targeted, but so many of them are still operating that those targeted could have been in a business dispute. If the Taliban were trying to intimidate businesses that were “haram” under their rule, it wasn’t working.

What was working was the Taliban’s newest fuel tanker tactic: Limpet mines. They are now making small, powerful mines with military-grade plastic explosives they salvaged from Russian PTM mines or Chinese type 66 hand grenades. They then use electric or non-electric blasting caps, a time fuse, and powerful magnets to build the mine. The magnets they get from the American military, which auctions hundreds of used desktop computers a month at both Bagram and Kandahar Air Fields.

Limpet mines that the Skipper rendered safe. He’s the one who figured out the villains were getting magnets from hard drive brackets of junked desktops.

I remember the Afghan complaining bitterly that the desktop computers sold to them at military auctions outside Bagram Air Base were useless. Looks like they found some value in them after all.

In early May, the Taliban burned five tankers full of fuel at the customs lots east of town

One limpet mine destroyed five tankers

Then the Taliban started attacking fuel tankers driving on the Jalalabad City bypass road with two-man motorcycle teams attaching limpet mines to the rear of the tankers. Note the brand-new fire truck, which extinguished the fire so quickly that the tractor was able to detach from the tanker.

Your tax dollars at work, building firefighting capacity for Afghan municipalities

Sometimes the Taliban mines function as soon as they make contact with their target, resulting in dead attackers.

The truck drivers respond to the new tactic by placing guards on the rear of their trailers

The Pakistani drivers could arm their guards with pikes, lances, or even stout pieces of wood to keep motorcycle teams at bay, but they don’t. They have no sense of a close-combat style.

By July of 2010, the Taliban started going after American Army MRAPs with Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIED)

Back in 2010, these were my observations concerning the sudden appearance of the Taliban inside of Jalalabad:

Despite all the talk of ‘focusing on the population” and “population-centric warfare,” ISAF is doing nothing of the sort. The Americans have a unit on the border crossing at Torkham, but those guys just sit on the road all day doing nothing, and they go back to the FOB every evening. They inspect nothing, they mentor nobody, they serve little purpose outside of providing an armed American presence at that crossing. The Americans have “rule of law specialists” who are fobbits – they drive to the Nangarhar Afghan National Police HQ about two to three times a month when they can get enough MRAPs and security to leave the wire. They drink tea and chin wag with their ANP counterparts, but what is the point? What the hell can you accomplish in a three-hour visit?

Until our actions on the ground include teaming up with the ANP, embedding into their units, and patrolling with them, we will continue to see tons of explosives rolling into the country via the Torkham border daily. We’ve known since Vietnam that answering tactical problems with technology is a waste of time, money, and lives.

It is easier to lose more troops trying to protect them with a passive operational posture and “advanced” technology than using aggressive tactics to solve tactical dilemmas.

If we’re here to fight, let’s fight – if not, let’s go home – it’s that simple.

That assessment certainly stood up to the test of time. And my forecast about the Summer of 2010 proved prescient; the Taliban attacked and killed several of my International NGO friends and kidnapped another, who, unfortunately, was mistaken for a combatant by the SEALs sent to rescue her. It was a long, hot, and discouraging summer.