The Taliban take Dih Bala
The Tanker Wars Part One
I posted this on September 12, 2008, on the Free Range International blog, and honestly don’t remember that the Taliban had taken a district center so close to me this early in the conflict. I look back on these old posts with sadness tempered by a little pride that I operated outside the wire for so long while providing honest, boots-on-the-ground reporting for a worldwide audience of tens of thousands. Back in 2008, I would never have guessed our Afghan adventure would end in abject defeat and the biggest clusterfuck of a noncombatant evacuation in the history of the Marine Corps. In 2008, I saw light at the end of the tunnel. Thank God I got out of the way before it hit me.
Fridays are always laid-back, as it’s the one day off we get each week. We had our usual complement of French and German aid workers visit for drinks and a dip in the pool.
If you can’t tell, my French friend Pierre is in flagrant violation of the ’no Speedo’ rule at the Taj. Every time we try to explain the rule to him, he pretends not to understand English. However, he and his crew are great folks who pay their bar tab in Euros, which makes them especially popular with me, so we let him slide on the speedo issue.
The interesting news of the day comes from the lady on the right. She is German and works for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). She requested our assessment of last night’s attack on the Dih Bala district center, which is 300 meters from one of her offices. Like many international NGO workers, she has a high tolerance for risk. She has been here a long time, knows Dih Bala and the surrounding area well, and is completely freaked out because there have been no problems with the Taliban before.
Dih Bala is about 10 miles to the east of us and is home to many large clans of land pirates. They never molest NGOs, as reconstruction makes it easier for them to smuggle goods across the frontier, which is how they have earned their living for the past 2 to 3 thousand years. The Governor of Nangarhar Province has successfully eliminated the cultivation of opium poppy in the area. However, there is still a lot of opium there because of the smuggling expertise of people in the Dih Bala district. If the Taliban are attacking the district center, it means something.
It could be the elders’ posturing with weapons to get the governor’s attention. The governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, is from Khandahar Province, and the local tribal chiefs have a tenuous working relationship with him. One way to get the big man’s attention and a little love is to have your district center attacked, then say you drove the bad guys out when the Afghan Army arrives to investigate. Or it could be that the Taliban has moved into the district, which is always bad news for the elders.
The Taliban typically dismantles the local power structure to establish dominance in a district. The elders can pledge allegiance to the Taliban or be targeted for assassination. If the Taliban are not strong enough or miscalculate when dealing with certain elders, the villagers will grab their rifles and fight. Intimidation of an armed population is a dangerous game - the Taliban sometimes screw it up.
Our assessment of Dih Bala district is that the Taliban are back and strong enough to challenge the provincial government for control of the district center. Our German friend agreed, which was a bitter admission for her to make, with the Taliban back, her work here is at an end.
As the security situation continues to deteriorate, we have been making a point to look at every tanker and police check post attacked by the Taliban.
The tanker pictured above was attacked from across the river, and the cab was peppered by 60 to 70 machinegun rounds and an RPG. The RPG shot was either beginner’s luck or we have one hell of a pro RPG gunner working the area. The machine gun team was also disturbingly proficient. The closest probable ambush site is 300 meters away and 200 meters above the truck.
The tanker pictured above had 10 bullets and one RPG hit; all the rounds came in from the left rear from close range. There are ANP checkposts 500 meters behind us and 500 meters ahead - an ambushing party can’t cross the river or set up on the side of the road without being detected. All the Taliban attacks come from across the river and include enough firepower to fix the checkposts while they go after fuel tankers. That didn’t happen this time, and there is also little fuel left in the tanker. We guess that it was emptied in Laghman Province and then shot up in the same spot as the previous two Taliban attacks. The criminals were probably mounted in local vehicles, and they and the driver escaped after paying off the cops. This is our Occam’s razor assessment, and we could be wrong because, at the end of the day, this is Afghanistan, where it is difficult for Westerners to read the tea leaves.
Really powerful reflections here. The tactical analysis of those tanker ambushes is chillng tbh the precision from 300m with RPGs suggests a much more capable force than people realized in 2008. I was reading military assessments from that era recently and everyone underestimated how quickly things could pivot from routine to total collapse. Wild how hindsight works.
Great write up. When originally written, I had just returned from my first Afghanistan deployment with 1/6. It was quite the change up from the previous OIF deployments. I remember being optimistic at the time of an eventual ISAF “victory.”