Free Operation Dark Heart by Anthony Shaffer

Interesting. They made the sacrifice of an armed, able-bodied guerrilla just to play combat cameraman. If they could free up someone for that job, it meant they were thinking about information operations and how to use that against their adversary—us. That indicated a robust level of thinking and a complex concept of operations. One thing I’d learned about terrorists was that they are very adaptive. They aren’t part of a large bureaucracy with a lot of rules and regulations. They don’t have any oversight—or moral compass, for that matter.
    These guys are changing and adapting, I thought, learning to use propaganda and videos to find fresh recruits and raise money for their weapons and training bases.
    I grabbed a thick translation transcript.
    Dave said the videotape had started in Pakistan in the training camps. A team of a dozen guys seemed to be in on this operation. We watched them take target practice with their AK-47s in a camp that appeared to hold maybe forty or fifty men. Smiling, they’d shoot off their Kalashnikovs into the air to celebrate. They talked to some elders—older men in black turbans—who were wishing them well. There were shots of them praying, probably to show off their Islamic devotion to their funders. As each Talib spoke into the camera, I skimmed the transcript. They were making some kind of religious statements or oaths: They were doing this for Allah. Should they die, they would go to heaven. This was to bring praise upon their family. The blood of the infidel will flow.
    These guys were hams—but they were hams with guns.
    In the bleak mountainous landscape—dusty, rocky, and brown, dotted with scrubby pine and some sorry-looking juniper—we watched as they moved across the mountains, over smugglers’ trails into Afghanistan. They made camp, cooking food along the way. As they went, the narrator explained their mission: how important the war was, and how they planned to return Afghanistan to the Taliban, expel the infidels from the country, and give it to Allah. Conquering Kandahar was the first step in retaking Afghanistan. The fighters talked a lot of Mullah Omar. They wanted to take back the land for their brother Mullah Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban who had led them to dominance over the warring tribes in Afghanistan in 1995 and had eluded capture since then, so that he could walk freely and give them the benefit of his wisdom. They thanked Allah for their weapons and the good weather.
    After twenty minutes of tape showing what appeared to be several days, they reached their quarry in the late afternoon: a small cement police station in a tiny village. An Afghan flag was fluttering above it. A dozen or so mud huts blended almost seamlessly into the surrounding landscape, with a thin, rocky road running through the settlement. From the looks of the terrain, they were near Khowst, a province on the border of Pakistan about 100 miles southeast of Kabul.
    Outside the police station, in the sunshine of the waning day, two policemen in khaki uniforms and boxy caps were hanging around smoking, their AK-47s up against the building, under a worn poster of Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud—the “Lion of Panjshir”—was the leader of the Northern Alliance and fought the Soviets and then the Taliban, until the Taliban or al Qaeda finally succeeded in assassinating him on September 9, 2001. His poster was all over downtown Kabul, too, and at every AMF-controlled checkpoint I’d seen since I’d been in country. His leadership was greatly missed by Afghans, and frankly the more I learned about him, the more I recognized how much we’d screwed up by not supporting him during the dark post-Soviet-occupation days.
    The filming was at a distance from the police station in the village, so the picture was shaky, but I could imagine that the policemen were talking about the day, going home to the wife—or wives—and kids, and so on. These police outposts were the closest thing to