Lone Survivor_ The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 ( PDFDrive )

with the Taliban army. The United States had been busy trying to clear all of
them the hell out of Afghanistan for four years but with only limited success.
The jihadists seem to have some kind of hammerlock on tribal loyalties,
using a whole spectrum of Mafia-style tactics, sometimes with gifts, sometimes
with money, sometimes promising protection, sometimes with outright threats.
The truth is, however, neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban could function without
the cooperation of the Pashtun villages.
And often, deep within the communities, there are old family ties and young
men who sympathize with the warlike mentality of the Taliban and al Qaeda
chiefs. Kids barely out of grade school — joke, they don’t have grade schools up
here — are drawn toward the romantic cutthroats who have declared they’ll fight
the American army until there is no one left.
I guess there’s something very alluring about that to some kids. You can see
these potential Taliban recruits in any of the villages. I’ve seen dozens of them,
too young to have that much hate and murder in their eyes and hearts. Christ,
one of the little bastards had sat on my bed urging eight armed men to torture
me. Nice. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen.
But there is another side to this. Sabray was obviously governed wisely by
Gulab’s father. And there was a sense of law and order and discipline in an
essentially lawless land. Al Qaeda effectively owns great swaths of land in
Kunar Province, which had now been my home for the better part of three
months. And this is mostly because of the terrain.
I mean, how the hell do you impose national government on a place like
this? With no roads, no electricity, no mail, little communication, where the
principal industry is goats’ milk and opium, the main water company is a
mountain stream, and all freight is moved by mule cart, including the opium.
You’re whistling Dixie. It’s never going to happen.
Al Qaeda are running around in broad daylight, mostly doing what the heck
they want, until we show up and chase the little pricks back over the border to
Pakistan. Where they stay. For about ten minutes, before launching their next
foray into these tribal mountains, which their ancestors have ruled for centuries.
These days there are less gifts and a lot more fear. The Taliban is a ruthless
outfit, with instincts about killing their enemies which have barely changed in
two thousand years. They should somehow by now have frightened the bejesus
out of my buddy Gulab and his father, but they had not succeeded, so far as I
could see. There’s just something unbreakable about them all, a grim
determination to follow the ancient laws of the Pashtuns — laws which may yet