Oct 2002

TIME: Taunts From the Border

By MICHAEL WARE / PAKTIA

It was an impressive show of force. Under the cloak of darkness last week, Chinook and Black Hawk choppers dropped an entire battalion of 520 U.S. paratroopers into a remote valley in Afghanistan, just across the border from the rugged mountains of Pakistan, where al-Qaeda has re-established training camps. With dogs barking, cows chewing and a watchful camel resting, the heavily armed U.S. force trudged through irrigated fields and muddy Pashtun villages--cordoning off a 3.5-mile-long area and searching each of 150 residential compounds that dangle off the nosebleed hillsides by the Kakh and Khardala rivers. "We aim to get the maximum number of people on the ground at once," says Major Mike Richardson, paratroops operations officer. "It gives us shock value."

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TIME: Karzai's New Bunker

By MICHAEL WARE

On a Kabul street with no name but alive with honking yellow taxis, something curious is happening. A new construction site has sprung up just outside the grounds of the presidential palace, with a formidable wall of soil-filled shipping containers stacked two levels high. The swarms of Afghan laborers say they don't know what they're building. American engineers shoo away anyone who asks about it. But members of the palace guard, charged with protecting President Hamid Karzai, say the construction sits above an aging bunker complex and that U.S. forces from the 769th Engineer Battalion are refashioning it for the President. "We're building an underground bunker for Karzai," a member of the battalion told TIME.

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TIME: Kabul: Tense Moments on the Palace Grounds

By MICHAEL WARE

The Special Forces soldiers assigned to protect president Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan have learned to trust no one. That lesson was made abundantly clear when a gunman dressed as a soldier in the newly formed Afghan army attempted to assassinate their charge in early September. It's not hard to imagine how a recent altercation between Special Forces and Afghan government troops nearly erupted into a bloody melee inside the Presidential Palace grounds — a confrontation that says a lot about the future of the American presence in Afghanistan.

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