Forward Operating Base Connelly: From his watchtower in insurgency-wracked eastern Afghanistan, US army Specialist Josh Whitten doesn’t have much to say about his Afghan colleagues. “They don’t come up here anymore, because they used to mess around with our stuff.”
Welcome to Forward Operating Base Connelly, where US troops are providing training and tactical advice to the 201st Afghan army corps as they take on the Taliban on the battlefield.
For seven months after the formal end of the NATO combat operation in Afghanistan, US forces have guided their counterparts from the sidelines with a mixture of pride, bewilderment -- and suspicion.
The latter is clearly evident in the layout of this temporary base in Nangarhar province, where a snaking barbed-wire fence separates the armies of the two nations.
For “Operation Iron Triangle” which concluded on Saturday, US forces kept very much to themselves -- with a squad of guard dogs and a 7.62 Caliber machine-gun at the entry point reinforcing a simple message to Afghan forces: do not enter.
Whitten chews his tobacco and spits. “Sometimes they shoot in the air, we don’t really know what for,” he says, in a sign of the mistrust that permeates US forces after years of “insider attacks”, including the killing of General Harold Greene by a radicalised Afghan soldier a year ago.
Twice a day, a dozen military advisers would go with heavily armed escorts to the Afghan side to provide their views on how best to “clean up” three districts near the Pakistani border.
The 2,000 Afghan soldiers, police and intelligence agents involved in Iron Triangle were tasked with cornering the Taliban in the Hisarak district, west of the base.
In eastern Afghanistan their guerilla war shows no sign of letting up, and militants are now taking refuge across the border in Pakistan, claimed General Mohammad Zaman Waziri, commander of the Afghan forces.
“The enemy comes from Pakistan,” he said, echoing the words of President Ashraf Ghani who last week accused his neighbour of sending “messages of war” to Afghanistan.
AFP
