iggled through the gap, pistol and flashlight leading the way. Some 150 feet in, his beam caught a shape: a bearded man hiding behind a pile of rocks.
Cornered, the man stood and greeted Matt with a smile, as if their underground rendezvous were a scheduled appointment between friends. Instead, he was frisked, handcuffed, bundled into a helicopter and taken away for questioning.
The U.S. military is deploying tens of thousands of fresh troops in a much-publicized strategy to woo the Afghan people through good government, economic growth and security. Yet behind the battle lines, the U.S. is quietly escalating a more forcible campaign.
In recent months, small teams of Army commandos, Navy Seals and Central Intelligence Agency operatives have intensified the pace of what the military often calls "kill-capture missions"—hunting down just one or two insurgents at a time who are deemed too recalcitrant to be won over by any goodwill campaign.
The Pentagon's fiscal 2011 budget, released Monday, called for increasing the number of elite Special Operations troops, buying larger numbers of aerial drones and expanding the amount of military and financial assistance to Yemen, the home base of the al Qaeda offshoot that claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day bombing of a crowded U.S. airliner. Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to determine whether a U.S. drone strike in mid-January killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, though that group said Monday he is still alive.
"You've got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable," Gen. David Petraeus, chief of U.S. forces in the region, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December. He said coalition commanders plan to escalate counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan even more in the coming months. The CIA plans to increase its presence by 25%, though it won't provide exact numbers.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied commander in Kabul, made his name commanding similar special-operations forces in Iraq and sending them after hundreds of key insurgent and al Qaeda figures. His success was considered crucial to salvaging the Iraq war.
He recently told his staff in Kabul, "It's not the number of people you kill—it's the number of people you convince." But the stick remains as integral to his strategy as the carrot.
Typical of this approach is the December Special Forces raid on Barghantu in Zabul Province, a popular transit route for insurgents. During a six-month combat tour, which just ended, the soldiers stationed there conducted more than 100 operations to target Taliban commanders and facilitators, seize their weapons, disrupt their bases and destroy their sense of security.
Barghantu is a village of perhaps 300 people living in a few dozen mud-walled compounds spread out along 1,000 yards of orchards and dry river bed. Intelligence reports suggest the village serves as a bedroom community for passing insurgents.
The raid has two targets: "Objective Albany," a compound thought to be used to manufacture roadside bombs; and "Objective Syracuse," a man thought to be the local coordinator for bomb makers.
Two Blackhawk helicopters insert teams in and around the village. The first teams hit the eastern and western sections of the village at about 8 a.m., beginning the search for fighters and weapons. Another team is dropped off along the parched riverbed, or wadi, to block anyone trying to escape in that direction, while another team, headed by company commander Maj. Mike, sets up a command post on a rocky spur a few hundred yards above the village. The ridge is so narrow that the pilots have to balance the helicopter on its front wheels while the soldiers leap out. The Special Forces allowed a reporter to go along on the operation on condition that the soldiers' last names not be published and that certain tactical details be omitted.
The command team sets up machine-gun positions at opposite ends of the spur. They spot two boys on the barren mountainside collecting dry plants for kitchen fires. The soldiers escort the boys down to the command post so they won't tip off the Taliban. Soon, two more boys join them, huddling in thin shawls against the morning cold. The major gives them a Snickers bar and some trail mix. One boy accepts with a smile; another does so sullenly.
A half-hour into the operation, the soldiers scouring the village have already rounded up nine fighting-age males for questioning in the village's eastern section. But villagers tell them the bomb facilitator they're seeking left two days earlier.
The troops, with help from Afghan army soldiers, search a small compound at the base of the spur. They lead two men in turbans out of the house, bind their hands with plastic cuffs and walk them away through the bare orchards. A woman in blue and green robes stands outside the door, a baby in her arms, and wails in a voice that pierces the valley.
Soldiers in the western part of the village meet a man who offers to identify the local Taliban fighters. They show him photos of the men they've rounded up and he points to two of them; the names match those on a list of suspects the soldiers brought with them. Before loading the suspects onto a helicopter, the soldiers give them a final pat-down and discover a hand-grenade fuse on one. It's a small explosive, not the whole grenade. But it has enough force to blow off fingers, and could create chaos inside the Blackhawk.
Elsewhere, soldiers are still looking for the bomb facilitator, in hopes that he hasn't actually left town. The man found hiding in the tunnel turns out to be his father. He says he hid because he's scared of helicopters, but the soldiers find a mortar round hidden inside a wall in his compound. The explosive material has been removed, and the soldiers suspect it has been used for a roadside booby trap. "That guy is coming with us," says the company sergeant major.
At 11 a.m., soldiers are still searching for the bomb-making compound. A villager tells them it's the one kitty-corner from a small mud mosque. Sgt. First Class Clayton, a 26-year-old Texan, takes four Afghan soldiers to have a look.
They don't find any bomb-making materials, but they do discover something else, hidden under a pile of hay: a pair of U.S. Army fatigue pants. It's an alarming find—there have been intelligence reports that foreign insurgents plan to dress in American uniforms during attacks on coalition troops.
Meantime, two armed men are spotted running on a ridge a couple of thousand feet above the village. The deep tattoo of cannon fire echoes through the hills as two Apache attack helicopters strafe the men, apparently killing them, then return to the base to refuel. After they're gone, an unmanned surveillance plane sees a dozen more men emerge from the rocks and make their escape.
Just after noon the Blackhawks begin returning in waves, collecting the troops and the suspects they're taking for further questioning. When his Blackhawk sets down, Capt. Josh, an assault-team leader, climbs in and connects to the helicopter's intercom. The pilots tell him that on the way in they saw two more armed men trying to hide in the hills.
"Can y'all put me down on that target?" asks Josh, a 36-year-old from Mississippi.
The helicopter circles the trackless hills and flies over a herd of grazing sheep. In a sloping valley below, the pilots point out an oblong ring of crumbling rock wall, perhaps 30-feet across at its widest.
A red motorcycle leans against the enclosure wall. Nearby, a man holds his hands up in surrender. While one Blackhawk circles above, Josh's helicopter touches down. Afghan and American soldiers pour out and shout at the man to stop.
Moments later, a second man appears about 100 yards uphill. He wears a light gray turban and a threadbare pinstriped vest over a mustard-colored tunic.
The Afghan soldiers yell at him to halt. Instead, he bolts up the gradual incline, the barrel of an AK-47 poking out of his loose-fitting clothes. From his pocket emerges the antenna of a two-way radio commonly used by insurgents. Josh tells Lance, a 32-year-old, red-bearded fellow Mississippian, to fire a warning shot. Lance fires two.
In the helicopter above, Marc, a 32-year-old Coloradan, sees small fountains of earth erupt as the warning shots hit dirt. He leans and fires four more shots into the ground behind the man.
Instead of stopping, however, the man runs faster, dropping his rifle and radio in the rocky crevasses. He's 200 or 300 yards away when Josh gives the order: "Burn him down."
Josh, Lance and an Afghan soldier with a sniper rifle open fire. One shot hits the man in the right shoulder, but he keeps running. A second slams through the bone in his upper right arm. His arm flinches, and he spins around before regaining his balance and taking off again. "I can't believe that son of a bitch ain't going down," Lance tells Josh. Josh's next shot hits the man's thigh, knocking him to the ground.
When Josh reaches him, the man is lying on his side. "Come here," Josh yells in Pashtu, the local language. Josh knows the man can't stand, but doesn't know how to say, "Hands up."
The team medic quickly bandages the man's arm and leg to stanch the bleeding. Four soldiers use the man's blanket as a makeshift stretcher to carry him to the landing zone.
An hour after he was shot, the suspected insurgent is in the trauma ward of the 758th Forward Surgical Team at a coalition base in Qalat, capital of Zabul Province and about 25 miles from Barghantu.
Maj. Lisa Coviello, a general surgeon in a black "Operation Enduring Freedom 2009-10" T-shirt, cuts away his clothes, searching for additional injuries.
The 40-year-old Chicagoan is on call 24 hours a day. She says most nights she gets into bed around 2 a.m. and lies awake until dawn, her mind zigzagging with thoughts of broken bodies. "Please, God, let me sleep," she says to herself.
Dr. Coviello discovers a bullet hole on the right side of the man's abdomen. As she works on him, the man lifts his head and looks down his bloody torso to see a bulbous pink section of his own small intestine, about the size of a tennis ball, protruding from the wound. He moans and drops his head back to the stretcher.
His blood pressure falls dangerously low and his eyes assume a glaze of indifference. He's circling the drain, thinks Dr. Coviello. The trauma team struggles to locate a vein plump enough for an IV. Nurses and medics hold him down while the doctor inserts one into the femoral vein near his groin. They pump in six units of blood, from a supply collected beforehand from U.S. troops. His blood pressure recovers.
In the operating room, Dr. Coviello opens his abdomen and discovers that the bullet has torn 15 holes in his intestinal tract. She removes a damaged section of bowel, reconnects the ends and stitches up the remaining holes.
The man regains consciousness in the recovery room. Soldiers scan his irises and take finger prints. They ask him questions. He is, he says, a Taliban fighter.
—Siobhan Gorman, Peter Spiegel and Yochi J. Dreazen contributed to this article.
Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com
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