Afghan Spotters Vital To Pinpointing Enemy Civilians Led Planes to Targets By Karl Vick Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page A01

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Mohammed chose a muddy red taxi at the border, trying to look inconspicuous for the drive back to Kandahar. He set the satellite telephone on the back seat, under a pile of clothes and a box of cookies.

It was early October, as the United States was on the threshold of a massive bombing campaign against the Taliban militia that ruled Afghanistan. The Taliban -- glowering men in black turbans -- controlled the border crossing, the checkpoints and the jails -- which a spy would count himself fortunate to reach if captured.

On the radio, Taliban leader Mohammad Omar warned Afghans not to pass information to the Americans that could help steer bombs toward the hide-outs of the radical Islamic militia. If caught, Omar vowed, the spies' houses would be burned to the ground.

"This," said Mohammed, looking back on his harrowing weeks as a spotter for U.S. airstrikes, "was dangerous work."

The Afghan war was fought on many fronts. But few efforts were more clandestine and risky than that undertaken by a handful of Afghan civilian spotters, armed only with forbidden telephones and the nerve to shadow the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. They pinpointed the location of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, a key element in the U.S. bombing campaign. They were hunters, and the hunted.

"Do you know what will happen to your family if you're caught?" said Ahmed Wali Karzai, who each night helped field the Afghan spotters' calls to the Pakistan home of his brother, Hamid Karzai, now the interim leader of Afghanistan. "These guys were 100 percent risking their lives."

Much has been made of the vital role U.S. Special Forces played as forward observers in the war. Small bands of American commandos traveling with anti-Taliban militias relayed target coordinates on the battlefield to pilots circling overhead. The satellite-guided bombs that followed cleared the way for the Afghan forces to advance, gobbling up the country in two months.

But U.S. bombs also fell hundreds of miles from the nearest American commando, not only in the precise place but at the right moment: the goal was obliterating al Qaeda and Taliban forces when they had come together, in locations they thought would be safe.

These strikes were called in by an underground Afghan network that even now remains obscure, testimony to the discipline of an effort that depended on secrecy and discretion. Indeed, spotters seldom knew the identity of compatriots taking the same risks. The others were, perhaps, following the same cars loaded with Arabs, phoning in the same address where they went indoors, and listening for the explosion two hours later.

"This is the law of intelligence work," said Abdul Ali, another Kandahar spotter. "One spy should not know another spy. I don't know anybody else."

A vivid if incomplete picture of the effort emerged in interviews with two spotters and one of the men who took their reports on the satellite phones he had taught them how to use. They told of close calls, a campaign based on trust and dependent on craftiness that at least once turned the Taliban's medieval strictures against itself: One of the satellite phones used to summon U.S. airstrikes was smuggled into the country under a burqa, the head-to-toe veil the Taliban required women to wear in public.

For Mohammed, the mission began with a summons to the Pakistani city of Quetta. A mutual friend passed the word that Karzai wanted to see him.

Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun tribal leader and longtime Taliban opponent, had known Mohammed for years. They shared a trust formed in part by mutual hatred for the brutal regime that had assassinated Karzai's father two years earlier. For days they talked about the looming war and how inevitably the fighting would come to Kandahar, where the Taliban had first risen.

On the fourth night, Mohammed was alone in a room with Hamid Karzai and his brother, Ahmed. One of them produced what looked like to Mohammed a laptop computer with a handset attached. But the lid was an antenna, and the handset could dial anywhere in the world.

"This is the satellite phone," Hamid Karzai said. "Let me show you how to use it." The brothers showed the young man how to pivot the dish toward the Indian Ocean satellite, how to read for signal strength and battery life. Then they gave him the numbers for the phones they would keep.

"If you have any fear, you can choose not do it," Mohammed recalled being told. "But if you do it, you need to tell us where the Taliban and al Qaeda go."

Mohammed never saw an American at the Karzais' house, but he understood implicitly that the phone had come from the United States. He also knew his friends would pass on his information to the U.S. military for targeting. When Mohammed arrived back in Kandahar and unwrapped the gadget, his family immediately grasped its significance as well.

"My family said, 'Please, for God's sake, get out of the house. Stay somewhere else. The Taliban will come here and burn this house.' "

The first U.S. bombs fell five days later, Oct.7, piercing the the roof of Omar's sprawling palace (which he had covered with tires) and Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds around Kandahar's airport. The targets were long-expected to be hit, as was the military camp and ammunition dump called Kishlayjadid that exploded in a huge fireball three nights later, just outside the city.

Mohammed had called about the ammo depot, telling Hamid Karzai that the Taliban had not abandoned it after the first airstrikes. As the sound of exploding ammunition rolled across the night, he felt a rising panic.

"I felt like a thief in my own city," he said. "I was very confused."

A few days later, he recalled, Hamid Karzai arrived in Kandahar, cruising into the seat of Taliban power on a red Honda 125 motorcycle. Five identical Hondas carried confederates. After a night or two, Karzai took three bikes north, rumbling toward a rendezvous with U.S. commandos in Uruzgan province. On the phone he carried, Karzai a few weeks later would negotiate the surrender of Tarin Kot, the provincial capital.

Back in Kandahar, Mohammed continued hunting targets, astride one of the red motorbikes Karzai left behind. On the streets of Kandahar, he dodged donkey carts and gaudily painted motor rickshaws, peering through a veil of dust for his quarry.

Sometimes it was easy. The Taliban troops, whose military specialty was mobile warfare, were known for cruising Kandahar in double-cab Toyota pickup trucks. Even easier to spot were the foreigners who made up bin Laden's al Qaeda. Any non-Afghan stands out in Kandahar, and the Arabs, as al Qaeda operatives were generically known, were a privileged class.

"Inside the city, I followed them wherever they moved," Mohammed said, using the traffic for cover. If their cars headed out of town, where traffic grew thinner, Mohammed had to peel off and let U.S. jets hunt for targets. But around town, "if they stopped, that's what I reported."

The results are the ruins in and around Kandahar. On one street American bombs crushed a row of houses used by Arabs. On the road leading toward western Afghanistan, a palatial two-story home exploded into rubble hours after al Qaeda members gathered there to escape bombing near the airport. Spotter Ali said 27 al Qaeda members died inside, including an assistant to bin Laden.

"When he died, the assistant, all of the Arabs were crying for him," he said. "It seemed he was a big person."

The accuracy of the bombs was impressive, said Ahmed Karzai. "The Americans could decide whether to hit the front of the car or the back of the car," he said. "It was amazing."

But the Taliban soon caught on to the spotters. Mohammed said the Taliban began hunting the hunters seven days into the bombing. On Oct. 26, they came for Ali.

Mohammed and Ali say they were unknown to one another. Mohammed insisted that for 25 days, he was the only spotter in Kandahar. But Ali was an old friend of Hamid Karzai, and about the time Mohammed traveled to Quetta, a messenger carried a satellite telephone to Ali in Kandhar. In the following weeks, he too made regular, secret calls to Hamid Karzai or his brother. He too noted that Taliban leaders began parking their cars in the crowded bazaar during the day and sleeping in different places each night.

When the Taliban gathered in a guesthouse near the Governor's House downtown, it was noted. Ali remembers hearing the explosion that followed his call, but so, he added, did other spotters. "We were busy," he said, with a lopsided smile.

Ali, who now runs Kandahar's official radio and television station, said that because the Karzais -- and by extension the Americans -- used multiple sources to confirm slippery targets, "we don't know whose information they are acting on."

When the Taliban enforcers caught up with Ali, he recalled being told, "You are the one who divides the dollars among the spotters." Ali was in jail for four days, and beaten only "a bit," he said, but the worst was not knowing whether he would emerge alive. The same day he was arrested, the Taliban captured and killed Abdul Haq, another anti-Taliban leader, who was also traveling with a satellite phone.

Ali's own phone was hidden. It had been in the house of a friend when the Taliban showed up, and while he was in jail, friends nervously passed it from house to house, the one bit of evidence that could lead to his death.

Ali was released, but he was warned not to leave Kandahar. He decided to disobey the order. He immediately headed north to join Hamid Karzai in Uruzgan.

"I was not alone," he said. "Many others were there spotting."

By early November, more phones had reached Mohammed through the courier system Ahmed Karzai anchored from Quetta. Ahmed Karzai remembers sending "10 or 12" phones out, as well as walkie-talkies and Pakistani rupees went north "as necessary," he said. He took calls every night at 9, he said, from locations in Kandahar, Helmand, Nimruz and Herat provinces.

The phone in Nesh, on the border between Kandahar and Uruzgan provinces, got there under a burqa. But not every spotter was so secretive. "One guy drove to Kandahar, put the phone on the back seat of his car, and drove back to Uruzgan," said Ahmed Karzai. "He was completely crazy."

In Kandahar, Mohammed was taking no chances. The phones that reached him were passed on to people who "were all friends before," he said. "I trusted them all."

He impressed on each one additional duty that Karzai had added: damage assessment. In the first days of the air campaign, reports of civilian casualties were undermining support for the U.S.-led military campaign. The Pentagon needed to know which reports to challenge, and which to concede could need investigation.

The spotters said there were mistakes. In the town of Daman, northeast of Kandahar on the road toward Kabul, a U.S. airstrike killed26 civilians. The spotter was one Mohammed had trained, but it was unclear what went wrong. In Kandahar, when Taliban gathered one afternoon in the headquarters of the office of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, an American fighter-bomber swooped down. Its bomb, however, landed on a civilian house across the street. "There were 14 people killed," Ali said.

That night the bombers returned, this time hitting the religious police headquarters squarely. But only a Taliban watchman was inside, and so were several children, Ali said.

At the same time, many bombs found their targets. One U.S. bomb found Arabs some 15 miles southwest of Kandahar, in a residential compound near a mountain where Kandaharis said they had moved to escape the bombing campaign. On the road beside it lies twisted wreckage of what the residents say were two station wagons that had left the compound with the Arabs' families inside.

Before long, the Taliban and al Qaeda were taking over homes in a desperate search for safety from the bombs. In Kandahar's residential Second District, 15 religious police and Arabs moved into Sarda Mohammed's home. They stayed a month and a half, setting up a gunsmith shop in the cellar and stacking rocket launchers and assault rifles like cordwood.

"Our neighbors became our enemies," Sarda Mohammed said. "They said, 'You brought these people to us. If the bomb blast hits us, we will kill you.' "

The whole city was nervous. On the radio at night, Omar's nasal voice grew angrier, his tone more defensive. "Those of you who are following America, take a lesson from me," he said. "It will be to your disadvantage."

One night, as Mohammed was dialing his satellite phone, his younger brother ran in to tell him a Taliban enforcer had circled the block, parked and was walking toward their house. Mohammed grabbed the phone and ran. The motorcycle would have been faster but more perilous: The Taliban had heard that Karzai's people used red Honda 125s.

Only after he reached the cover of a forest did the spy realize he had left behind the notebook containing the phone numbers of his contacts in Pakistan. All beginning with the code for the Indian Ocean uplink, 00-873, the numbers were as incriminating as the phone itself. When his brother agreed to go back for it, he returned instead with good news: The enforcer had gone into a neighbor's house; it was just a social call.

As Karzai and the Americans pressed south from Uruzgan, commandos called in the air strikes that cleared the way for the anti-Taliban militias, most decisively on the road outside the provincial capital of Tarin Kot, where 30 Taliban trucks went up in flames in a single morning.

Meanwhile, from the south, the militia commanded by Gul Agha Shirzai was approaching Kandahar from the Pakistani border, also supported by two trucks of U.S. Special Forces carrying radios and satellite Global Positioning Systemlocators.

In the city, caught between the advancing armies, perhaps the last official act of Taliban authorities was the arrest of a handsome young man known only as Abdullah. He was beaten to death by his torturers, and his corpse hanged on the fence in the center of Kandahar's main traffic circle, called Martyrs' Square, for all to see.

His crime: expressing anti-Taliban views, and owning a satellite telephone.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

-- Anonymous, January 13, 2002