Chasing the phantoms of war across Afghanistan

With machine guns rocking in their turrets, a convoy of Special Forces soldiers ploughed into this mountain town of Chaghcharan in pursuit of enemy fighters one cold winter afternoon. What they found instead was a knot of rumours and contradictions.

The local police intelligence chief, squatting on the dirt floor of his compound, told the Americans intriguing tales of armed Taliban and Al Qaida supporters massed in a nearby valley. The soldiers braced for battle.

But in a rooftop redoubt across the street, the provincial governor sat on a cushion with an automatic rifle tucked beneath his hip and assured them that all enemy forces had been driven from the area.

Later, the local militia general, presiding over this grimy provincial outpost from a hilltop fortress, offered yet another scenario: There were no enemy fighters left, but some armed men in the area sympathised with the Taliban and Al Qaida.

The 10-man "A" team from the Army's 20th Special Forces group had just stumbled upon what soldiers call "ground truth" - the complex and often confounding reality of the combat zone. Their bruising 17-day mission through the wilderness of western and central Afghanistan this month produced no hard truths, only versions.

More than a year after U.S. forces and their Afghan allies toppled the Taliban regime, Special Forces teams are chasing ghosts. The specially trained soldiers are primed for combat but frustrated by a war in which the enemy refuses to fight and victory is not clearly defined.

With the American public and U.S. policymakers fixated on Iraq, the Special Forces are locked in an unseen war here. A year ago, the teams tracked and targeted the enemy for devastating airstrikes, working closely with commanders of the Northern Alliance militia.

Today, their mission is radically different - an ungainly mixture of combat patrols, intelligence-gathering, nation-building and efforts to win hearts and minds.

Three-quarters of the Special Forces personnel in Afghanistan today are citizen-soldiers from the National Guard and Reserves. Their presence frees active-duty Special Forces to train for a possible war in Iraq. For the first time in a combat zone, Special Forces here are commanded by a National Guard officer.

The 20th Special Forces team came to Chaghcharan, the capital of remote Ghowr province, to purge the area of any lingering enemy fighters. Because no U.S. forces had been to the region, the team was ordered to report on the presence of armed militiamen, their loyalties and their weapons, and to divine the intentions of warlords and commanders who ostensibly backed the government of President Hamid Karzai.

It soon became evident that Ghowr, like virtually every other province outside Kabul, the capital, was beyond government control. It was one more example of the obstacles facing the U.S. military in its long-term strategy of training a new Afghan national army to replace warlords and militias.

Just getting to Chaghcharan from Herat, 320 miles to the west along the ancient Silk Road, was an ordeal. Vehicles got stuck in mud, slid down icy ravines and were slowed by dust storms and snowdrifts.

Attempts to sort out who supported the Taliban and who did not - and whether any Taliban or Al Qaida holdouts remained - were frustrated by wildly divergent claims and counterclaims. Particularly maddening were sessions with the police intelligence chief, a gaunt, hollow-eyed former communist named Arafi.

At their first meeting, Arafi made a show of ordering his bodyguards out of his command post, saying he had something confidential to share with the Americans. He told them that the nearby Badgah Valley held 1,000 armed Taliban supporters. The valley was "a mousetrap," he said. "They will let you in, then close off your escape and kill you all."

The soldiers retreated to their safe house to discuss the chief's claims. The prospect of actually fighting and killing the enemy seemed to energise them.

The team commander, a soft-spoken captain named Dave, announced his decision: They would drive into the heart of the valley in two days' time.

On the 10th day of the mission, the soldiers took two Humvees and a modified Chevrolet Blazer, bolstered by thick blast blankets and loaded with weapons, deep into the Badgah Valley. Dave stayed behind with four Afghan guards to protect the safe house.

At each village along the way, Shafiq, an Afghan American bank manager from Virginia, questioned peasants, who told an intriguing story: There had indeed been Taliban and Al Qaida fighters in the valley, enough to fill 40 to 50 vehicles. But they had left three months earlier for new hideaways in Helmand province to the south.

The convoy pushed on. At a village near the far end of the valley, where the intelligence chief reported that the Taliban had recently attacked and killed several people, a few men sat idly in the shuttered bazaar. Tumble-weeds blew through the dirt.

Villagers said there had been no battle and no Taliban.

"Forget it," said Ed, an Atlanta police lieutenant who serves as the team sergeant. "There's nothing here."

They drove back through the peaceful valley to Chaghcharan, where they planned to have another talk with the intelligence chief.

The Special Forces men had begun their mission 10 days earlier, pulling out of Herat in a freezing rain.

The convoy included a Toyota pickup carrying four young Afghan gunmen supplied by Ismail Khan, the warlord who rules Herat and four surrounding provinces. Supplied with American cash and weapons in the war that dislodged the Taliban, Khan and other warlords now provide the only measure of stability and security outside Kabul, often through corrupt and brutal methods.

The Special Forces team regarded Khan's men as a necessary evil. The "muj," as they called them (though these gunmen were infants during the Afghan mujahideen's war against the Soviets), were kept on a tight leash.

The team commander, Dave, 38, owns a small computer company in Atlanta. He relies heavily on the leadership of three veteran police officers from the Atlanta area: Ed, 40, a master sergeant adept at logistics and planning, and two streetwise staff sergeants, Dan, 43, and Mike, 41.

On the first night, they shot a dog. Frank, 35, the communications sergeant, was on guard duty when a huge dog, growling and snarling, bounded into the campsite.

Frank threw rocks, but the animal kept charging. Finally, Frank tagged him with a laser on his M-4 rifle, then squeezed off two rounds. The dog yelped and fled, trailing blood.

As the men were breaking camp the next morning, a woman from a nearby village approached. She said her husband had been smashed in the forehead with a rock in a dispute over wheat.

The medics, Mike and Dan K., 34, an emergency medical technician from Alabama, hiked down into the village and found a man named Baitulla, 45, with a glob of animal fat plastered on his forehead, a home remedy. They peeled off the dried fat, cleaned the wound and closed it with five stitches.

During the six days it took to drive to Chaghcharan, the team had stopped at remote mountain villages to question village headmen on military matters and ass