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General Dostum from National Geographic News

General Abdul Rashid Dostum, 47, returned from exile on April 22, 2001 with 30 men. In October, 12 Green Berets, two Air Force Forward Air Controllers, and three CIA agents landed in Afghanistan to help him in his fight against the Taliban. (Note that says GREEN BERETS, not active military SF Operators on the US gov payroll) They were the first to liberate a major Afghan city when they entered Mazar-e Sharif in triumph on November 10, 2001.

Green Berets can survive and fight indefinitely, once dropped behind enemy lines. They’re parachute qualified, and experts in water operations, desert warfare, mountain warfare, espionage, clandestine operations, Morse code, hand-to-hand combat, and a myriad of other skills. They can ride horses, repair vehicles, pick locks, set up drop zones and landing zones, interrogate prisoners, and change their identities. They can “lock out” of nuclear submarines while submerged and infiltrate beaches with underwater operations gear, skydrive into a foreign country from forty thousand feet, and infiltrate enemy terroritory by plane, helicopter, boat, or foot. Some of them can even drive Soviet tanks, fly airplanes, and repair computers. Everyone on a twelve-man A-team is fluent in the tongues spoken in their area of operations. Some of them speak more than two languages.

To win the opening phase of the war of liberation against the Taliban their unconventional warfare skills were the key to success. They had a unique advantage of 21st century smart weapons, which were greatly improved since they were first used on a large scale during the Gulf War. The information age brought with it unprecedented visibility of the battlefield and unique precision weaponry. SF, with their chameonlike ability to be everywhere and nowhere simultaneousely, could now be the nation’s best “deep targeteers”. Their specialty would be finding and flushing out targets that would find it more necessary than ever to hide from the US’ big eyes in the sky.

The “Wild West” references refer to several things that have nothing whatsoever to do with lawlessness, which is what the journalists are doing when they use the term.

The Afghans were riding on horseback to face the enemy and when the Green Berets went in, they joined the forces of the Northern Alliance who appeared to be a rag tag group of men with mismatched clothing and a piece of uniform visible here and there. The description practically out of a Star Wars film–is the combination of old fashioned horsemanship -Dostum’s love of the cavalry charge–which was married to the high tech laser -bomb technique. This was referred by Dostum as the ‘death ray’. So what would happen was–the Green Berets would narrow in on a Taliban target, they would mark it with the laser, and an aircraft would lay into it from above and blow it to smithereens.

Pretty cool, huh? What I found was even more amusing was the fact that there was a Captain flying a fighter jet who was a girl, who would speak to the Taliban and tell them this was payback for the way they treated women.

Dostum’s cavalry liked to charge at a full gallop while they fired their rifles on horseback. They could close in on the enemy so fast that the enemy couldn’t even react, and the horsemen would mow them down with their AK-47’s.

100,000 of Massoud’s mujahadeen took up arms and joined in this fight. They developed a very effective method of warfare with Dostum’s love of the cavalry charge…one part of the team would stay on the ridges, lazing targets and sending in the bombs, and as soon as they detonated, the rest of the team would charge with Dostum, their guns ablaze. The Taliban and AQ would still have their heads down when Dostum and the boys overran the enemy positions, jumping over bodies and galloping through the bomb debris. At night, the horses would drop from exhaustion and sleep on the ground. Some of them weren’t broken in for the noise levels, and the team would frequently find themselves being thrown off their charges onto the ground.

Jack at Dostum’s Qali-Jangi fortress during the 2001 war

Jack leading a patrol of Afghan MOD and Ministry of Interior Troops during the 2002 War

The SuperPatriots and Jack images on this site are used by Cao’s Blog with written copyright permission and any use by any third party is subject to legal action by SuperPatriots.US

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