Camp Lybert in Afghanistan.

As a member of the United States House of Representatives Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, I was invited to travel with a couple of my colleagues to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Chad. In early September I made that trip along with Representatives Stephen Lynch, a Democrat from Massachusetts and Todd Platts, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

Prior to my leaving on this trip, many people I ran into in Western New York asked why I would choose to travel to regions fraught with danger and ravaged by poverty. I explain it much the same way I explain why I chose to represent Western New York in Congress. Once elected to serve in Washington, DC, many representatives pick up their things and move to Capitol Hill. I never left Western New York. I spend some days in the Capitol region but Buffalo is my home. By interacting with the people here, experiencing their frustrations and triumphs and witnessing the community’s obstacles and progress, I can better represent the region and its people in Congress. Similarly, by taking this trip, talking to the people on the ground, witnessing firsthand the challenges in these countries, I am better able to understand the issues they face and form my own positions on international strategy.

As I tell you about my travels I will do so not exclusively through my own lens but from the perspectives of the people I met and sought out during the visit. You will read the stories of an Army general, an eight-year-old village boy and his family, the children and women in a refugee camp in Chad, a United Nations worker and a captured US reporter.

Rodney Anderson

and the new al Qaeda

After a seven-hour flight aboard a C-130 military plane from Bahrain, our delegation arrived in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad at 5:30 in the morning on the sixth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on America.

Following a quick briefing at the US Embassy and a quicker 9/11 commemoration ceremony, we moved briskly by motorcade through the neighborhoods of Islamabad to an airport, where three Black Hawk helicopters would carry us to the remote and rugged mountain region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border near Tora Bora and the dusty frontier city of Peshawar.

Peshawar is the birthplace of the new al Qaeda; this is where US forces were said to have defeated the organization in late 2001, and this is where al Qaeda has now re-organized and re-emerged, according to several recent National Intelligence Agency reports, as a stronger, younger and smarter version of the organization that attacked the US six years ago.

The newly reconstituted al Qaeda might more properly be termed al Qaedaism, inspiring and linked to cells throughout the world, controlled and directed by al Qaeda central. Osama bin Laden still leads al Qaeda central, but new leaders are emerging from the increasingly Egyptian-dominated organization, including Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, both of whom served prison terms for participating in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Al Qaeda central is based in Pakistan and their leaders move freely between there and Afghanistan. Their ability to launch operations around the world has been greatly enhanced by new technology and a sophisticated network of cells who assume responsibility for fundraising, logistics and planning.

We wore armored vests and combat helmets as protection in the event of any unexpected hostility. At 115 degrees, the summer heat in these military mountain bases is intense. Our military escort was led by US Army Brigadier General Rodney Anderson and six Army machine gunners who manned the three helicopters that carried us over the sharp, mountainous terrain to Camp Lybert, the US military base located several thousands of feet above sea level.

The American military mission in this region is to work in conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in counterinsurgency operations, to develop Afghanistan’s national security capabilities and to promote a stable Afghan state. The US and Afghanistan depend on Pakistan to help coordinate disruption of cross-border infiltration. Pakistan’s sincerity and success in this effort are highly suspect.

Anderson explained that it would take much more than military intervention to capture al Qaeda leaders and to defeat Islamic extremists. He said that during the initial bombing campaigns that targeted this region after the September 11 attacks, we alienated the civilian population here, who otherwise might have been valuable allies in rooting out al Qaeda. Anderson said that the instinct to use excessive force was a big mistake, because civilian casualties are exploited to recruit al Qaeda members from the remote mountain villages.

Anderson is an impressive figure with a booming voice who exudes leadership and confidence. He stood erect and his presence commanded immediate recognition from his troops. The son of a North Carolina brick mason, Anderson was equally impressive in his command of the facts on the ground and his optimism about the effectiveness of the new American strategy here.

“We are making progress and we will succeed, because our mission is now equal parts military and humanitarian,” he said. “We are not here solely to defeat the enemy; more importantly, we are here to defeat the enemy’s strategy.”

Emir and his doctors

When we reached Camp Lybert, our landing created a dust storm that forced the military and civilian personnel to take cover for several minutes. After meeting the military command at Lybert, General Anderson escorted me into one of the base’s medical tents, where doctors were performing surgery—not on a recently injured soldier, as I anticipated, but rather on an eight-year-old boy from a nearby village, who was born with a deformity that fused his middle and index fingers together on each hand.

The doctors, who were cutting and stitching his fully exposed hand, talked casually of the importance of the work that they were doing there. It is customary for military medical personnel to seek out villagers who are in need of medical attention. The local villagers are flown to the base, treated and returned to their villages. This practice generates good will and builds trust between the US military and the villagers.

General Anderson silently observed this exchange between the doctors and me, nodding approvingly. As we walked away, Anderson said, “You can kill all the bad guys and still not win the war unless you make life better for the people here.”

The boy’s name was Emir, and his father was an Afghan national who fought with the Taliban during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the early 1980s. In late 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with more than 100,000 troops, and their 10-year occupation of the country resulted in the killing of more than one million Afghan civilians. Five million more fled to Pakistan. The chaos and corruption of post-Soviet Afghanistan led to a bitter civil war and abetted the rise of the Taliban.

The Taliban evolved from a coalition of fighters against the Soviet occupation to an Islamic fundamentalist force that imposed a very strict interpretation of Islamic law on the Afghan people. The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996 and controlled 95 percent of the nation by 2000. Emir’s father left the Taliban during this period, in which much of the population experienced severe restrictions on their freedom and human rights abuses. Women were prohibited from working and girls were denied education. Public amputation and torture were common forms of punishment.

Camp Lybert, about five miles from the Pakistani border.

After the Soviets left in 1989, the US and its allies lost interest in Afghanistan and did little to help rebuild the war-ravaged country. This abandonment, as some Afghans refer to it, still serves to undermine trust between the American military and the Afghan people.

Anderson said that the American military is incrementally rebuilding trust through humanitarian and reconstruction projects. The Provisional Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Afghanistan is a US-led effort that provides raw materials and expertise to encourage the Afghan population to participate in the rebuilding of their country. Villagers pick up bags of cement for projects ranging from repairing mosques to rebuilding canal walls for micro-hydropower plants. US Army civil engineering personnel supervise the construction and work with villagers to plan new projects. The program started by giving villagers free bags of ready-mix concrete and has now expanded to include gabions, wire cages designed to hold rocks to form foundations for erosion-control structures.

The progress is slow but tangible in the mountain villages that we visited. The people here are disaffected and disillusioned by decades of occupation and civil war. But these projects and the direct involvement of the Afghan villagers are hopeful signs.

“We can win this war, you know,” Anderson said. “But we have to show these people we can give them a better future. That is why we need to do more of what you just saw. There are thousands of kids in these mountains like Emir and many villages to rebuild. We must get to these people before the enemy does.”

I met an Afghan civilian employee at Camp Lybert named Khaled. Khaled was a math and science teacher under Taliban rule in the capital city of Kabul. Khaled, too, turned away from the Taliban when they began to enforce their rigid ideology. Today, Khaled works as an interpreter. In addition to providing translation, he assists the Americans with his knowledge of the terrain and culture. The US military pays him and provides him resources to teach math and science to the villagers who work on the military bases.

Counterinsurgency’s primary objective is to win over the civilian population rather than to destroy the enemy. It seeks to capture the minds and imaginations, the hearts and souls of disaffected and humiliated people. It must forge a seemingly elusive hope in the context of a miserable present and past. This requires the military’s direct involvement in organizing civil society and in rebuilding nations. This cannot be accomplished with tough talk and use of military force alone.

Our final visit was to the Frontier Corps Headquarters at Bala Hisar Fort in Peshawar. The Frontier Corps provides security at more than 100 outposts along the Afghanistan and Pakistan border. We were hosted by the Inspector General of Frontier Alam Khattak and several military officers. We told Khattat of our experiences and of the progress we observed, particularly in the military’s commitment to humanitarian work in the mountain villages.

After several minutes of formal exchanges, Khattak presented each of our delegation members with an official gift, as a sign of our country’s continuing commitment to the security of the mountain region: a mounted Afghan army assault rifle.

After quiet contemplation of the ironic moment, I was convinced that this mission still had a long way to go.

The children of Camp Gaga

Children gather to be photographed at Camp Gaga, a refugee center in Chad.

Chad is in central Africa, immediately south of Libya and running along the western border of the Sudan, Africa’s largest country. There are about 200,000 refugees from Darfur displaced in 15 camps in eastern Chad.

The Gaga Refugee Center is a chaotic desert encampment of thatched huts, tents emblazoned with United Nations symbols and a mass of desperate people meandering slowly through the parched and arid landscape. Women and small children wander beyond the camp boundaries at great risk to their safety in search of branches and sticks to build new huts and use as firewood for cooking.

As our delegation arrived, Gaga initially seemed like a happy place because of the animated excitement of the children living there. Gathering quickly and curiously, groups of small children stood assembled by our idling vehicles. Their numbers swelled instantly. They saw the cameras and immediately arranged themselves in groups. They wanted to be in a picture. They’ve obviously been through this before: They insist on seeing the digital image. When they see their images on the screen, they laugh and smile and point at themselves. It’s an addiction for them; the more they see, the more they want.

The children smile and laugh easily now, carefree in the temporary comfort of this moment, but the facts on the ground tell you that they are stuck in a place with an uncertain if not ominous future. The women, meanwhile, linger as silent, shadowy, peripheral figures. Watchful of their children, they are untrusting of strangers, knowing of the unforgiving ways of this wretched and cruel place. This camp in particular, and the region in general, is a living hell, the consequence of unspeakable violence and depraved indifference. The refugees here are victims of a deliberate and systemic campaign of torture, murder and rape. This is ethnic cleansing, this is genocide; according to the United States Agency for International Development, this is the “worst and most devastating humanitarian crisis in the world today.”

Catherine Huck is director of operations for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Abeche, Chad. Huck, a native of France, has been a humanitarian aid worker for 35 years in Africa and Southeast Asia. In a calm yet serious tone, Huck told our delegation that she had never experienced so much brutality.

“Rape here is a lethal weapon of war,” she said. “Rape is committed with a sense of impunity in this conflict and victims have no recourse. Last year there were many reports of members of the Janjaweed raping darker-skinned African women, telling them they would bear light-skinned babies. This is a form of ethnic cleansing, to be sure.”

In Sudanese culture, lineage runs through the father, and the Janjaweed militias want to produce Arab babies by African women in order to displace the African population.

The Janjaweed—the name means “evil horse rider” in Arabic—are Arab supremacists, government-sponsored bandits who are sent out to terrorize the African population and drive them from their villages. They ride horse- or camelback, armed with AK-47 rifles. They are said to carry leather boxes that contain Koranic verses, intended to keep them safe on their death rides.

Huck said that last spring the organization Doctors Without Borders reported that its doctors had treated more than 500 rape victims in a six-month period—which, they believed, reflected only a fraction of the total number of victims, because many women were unable or reluctant to report the crimes and seek treatment. (In Sudan, the law requires that four male witnesses be willing to testify in order to prosecute any sexual assault. Victims bringing rape charges likely subject themselves to charges of adultery.)

Huck said that the response of the Sudanese government was to accuse Doctors Without Borders of crimes against the state, publishing false reports, spying and undermining Sudanese society.

Under international law, sexual violence as a tactic in war is considered a crime for which states can be held accountable. In December 2006, a United Nations commission of inquiry found that the atrocities in Darfur amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Tents for refugees at Camp Gaga provided by UNHCR.

The government of Sudan continues to deny these allegations and claims they are fabrications of the Western media and humanitarian aid agencies. Western journalists and aid workers are often targets of harassment and violence. Last August, while I was traveling in Sudan with another small Congressional delegation, the US Embassy informed our group of a developing situation concerning an American journalist named Paul Salopek. Salopek is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning writer with the Chicago Tribune and was on assignment for National Geographic magazine when he was apprehended and taken into custody by the Sudanese Liberation Army near the Chadian border.

Salopek was turned over to the Sudanese government and was charged with espionage, publishing false information and traveling without a visa. He was held in a 15-by-15-foot cell with several other prisoners in North Darfur. Representative Christopher Shays and I were allowed to visit Salopek. The prison was fly-infested and saturated with a grimy film that liquefied from the sweltering heat. The guards openly brandished AK-47 rifles and looked uninterested, speaking among themselves in Arabic.

Salopek was brought to the prison office, where we were waiting. Appearing frail and thin, Salopek was still lucid when talking of his experience. He expressed concern for his Chadian interpreter and driver. Salopek knew as an American he would be treated much more humanely than his Chadian colleagues. After about 45 minutes, we were able to convince the governor of North Darfur to allow Salopek to see an English-speaking lawyer.

Due to growing pressure from the international community, the charges against Salopek and his colleagues were eventually dropped. He and his Chadian colleagues were all released after 34 days in prison.

The mistreatment of Paul Salopek and other Western journalists is well documented and publicized throughout the world. This is a deliberate and calculated ploy by the Sudanese government to discourage Western journalists from traveling into the Sudan to tell the story of Darfur and the complicity of the Sudanese government in the genocide there.

A recent international intelligence assessment says there are credible reports that a group of several al Qaeda operatives in Sudan are providing training to troops under the control of the Janjaweed. Sudanese officials, who have done nothing so far to halt the Janjaweed’s slaughter in Darfur, have seized on the report, insisting the government’s hands are tied in controlling the murderous raiders because the Janjaweed is tied to al Qaeda and not the government.

Ill-planned wars, humanitarian crises and hard lessons

After six days traveling through the most primitive areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region and in eastern Chad, where Darfur refugee camps now spill over from Sudan, I was struck by the vastness of both territories, the remoteness of the terrain and the utter despair and abject poverty that clutches the exploited and exploitable populations of both regions. They are all victims of failed states, corrupt military dictators and sectarian militias that inflict on their own people death and destruction so brutal as to defy human comprehension.

The violence in these places is deliberate, raw and open, evoking fear and exacting compliance with its perpetrators’ worldview. In each of these places, and in each of these acts, Islamic extremists invoke a twisted interpretation of the Koran to justify rape, torture and murder. They kill with impunity in the name of destiny, and in the name of God. In these places the US is engaged in conflicts where the imagination is the endgame, where the battle is for the hearts and minds of the disaffected and humiliated people trapped in these fouled and confused parts of the world.

The US must learn hard lessons from our experiences in these desperate places. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the lesson is never to go to war unless you can describe and create a functioning end state, and unless you are prepared to commit the resources and time to succeed completely. This is nation-building, pure and simple, and it requires a whole lot more than talk and military force. It demands more than a political strategy; it must include a strategy that considers people—from General Anderson and his troops, to the women and children of Camp Gaga, to Emir and his family in the mountains of Afghanistan.