Time Sep

50 TIMESeptember 3–10 2018

AFGHANISTAN

Kabul

Herat

Ghazni

GHAZNI

PROVINCE

Quetta

Kandahar

Islamabad

AN OMINOUS ORANGE GLOW LIT UP THE SKY FOR
miles around. It was after midnight on Aug. 11 and
the city of Ghazni less than 100 miles from Kabul
was on ire. Approaching the outskirts of town in
a convoy of heavily armored 22-ton vehicles the
team of Green Berets from Operational Detachment
Alpha (ODA) Team 1333 took it as the irst sign that
it wasn’t going to be an easy night.
The group was one of three U.S. Army Special
Forces–led units converging on Ghazni to save it
from the Taliban which had laid siege to the city
over the previous 24 hours in a surprise attack. And
the closer the Green Berets got the worse it looked.
Approaching the city ODA 1333 had to muscle their
massive vehicles around bomb craters and aban-
doned big-rig trucks that the Islamist insurgents
had set up as roadblocks.
The dismal obstacle course wasn’t just proof that
the insurgents had the upper hand over the 1500
Afghan police and soldiers based in the city even
though those forces were lush with sophisticated
American-supplied weaponry. The team soon dis-
covered the wreckage-strewn approach to the city
had become a shooting gallery for hidden Taliban.
Rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun
ire came screaming in from a tree line to the east—
small bursts at irst then all at once. Streaks of
heavy ire glowed green in the commandos’ night-
vision goggles as two- and three-man Taliban teams
shot rockets at the Special Forces before vanishing
into nearby scrubland. The U.S. forces returned ire
with rapid bursts from the .50-caliber machine guns
perched atop the vehicles. At one point one of the
men shouted “Where the f-ck are [the airstrikes]?”
Almost on cue a lumbering AC-130 gun ship cir-
cling above began showering 105-mm cannon ire
on Taliban positions below. Apache attack helicop-
ters A-10 attack planes F-16 ighter jets and MQ-9
Reaper drones also delivered airstrikes. The road
into the city “was just a sh-t show” one U.S. soldier
tells TIME.

World

Back in Washington the war in Afghanistan often

seems like an afterthought. According to the Penta-

gon combat missions oicially ended in 2014 U.S.

forces serve only as “advisers” and peace may be at

hand. An unprecedented three-day June cease-ire

was followed by secret U.S.-Taliban talks in Qatar

in July. “We’re seeing the strategy is fundamentally

working and advancing us toward reconciliation

even though it may not be playing out the way that

we anticipated” General John Nicholson the top U.S.

commander in Afghanistan said on Aug. 22.

But in August America’s 17-year enemy in Af-

ghanistan the Taliban launched a coordinated set

of assaults around the country ahead of the Muslim

holiday of Eid al-Adha. With echoes of the Tet of-

fensive carried out by the Viet Cong during the Viet-

namese New Year in 1968 the Taliban attack targeted

vulnerable outposts peppered across seven provinces

and claimed the lives of scores of Afghan forces.

The assault on Ghazni which engulfed nearly all

of the city’s 19 districts was the most orchestrated

operation of this nationwide onslaught. And the

Taliban’s surprising efectiveness—capturing dis-

tricts nearly toppling a provincial capital and briely

cutting of the main north-south highway just 60

miles from the capital—raises troubling questions

A wall damaged

by a Taliban

mortar at a

small makeshift

outpost in

Ghazni; two

Afghan soldiers

were injured