This story should have run in The Washington Times. I wouldn’t know. As you read this, I am on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic.

The Dutch commander of a combined Dutch and Australian force in the southern province of Uruzgan on Wednesday defended the conduct of his troops amid hand-wringing from the Dutch Ministry of Defense in The Hague.

Beginning Friday the approximately 2,000 soldiers of 42 Battlegroup and Afghan police fought a pitched battle against hundreds of Taliban fighters in Chura, around 10 miles from the main Dutch base near the provincial capital of Tarin Kowt. By Wednesday the major fighting had ended. (more…)

At Kamp Holland near Tarin Kowt, the Dutch are mourning the loss of a second soldier: 44-year-old Sergeant Major Jos Leunissen, who died in a mortar accident during combat with Taliban forces around the town of Chura on Monday. I’m not attending the memorial service; I attended last week’s service for Private 1st Class Timo Smeehuyzen in addition to many other services in my three years as a war correspondent — and I’ve seen too many grown men cry. Besides, I’ve got work to do, work I think is important, work I hope contributes in some small way to victory — whatever that means — in our wars against terrorists.

The Dutch Ministry of Defense has been fairly rattled by the two deaths. And judging by all the frantic emails I’m getting from Dutch newspapers and radio programs, the public is pretty shaken, too. I would never question the courage and resolve of the Dutch soldiers fighting this battle; but the folks back home in The Netherlands seem ready to call it quits and withdraw inside their own borders. As if that were really possible in this globalized world. (more…)

On June 15 in the tiny town of Tarin Kowt in Afghanistan’s southern Uruzgan province, a car laden with explosives raced down a narrow alley towards a Dutch M-113 armored personnel carrier trundling down a perpendicular street. Taking advantage of their healthy relationship with the town, a Dutch army civil affairs team, accompanied by a Dutch reporter, had been visiting with the town’s women in a girls’ school in celebration of International Women’s Day. The M-113 was part of the team’s escort.

The car exploded, killing the driver, blowing to pieces around 10 Afghans – including five children and two women – and injuring three Dutch soldiers in the personnel carrier. Within seconds of the blast, the other vehicles in the Dutch patrol pulled back to a safe distance, their gunners scanning for follow-on attacks, while medics raced to treat the wounded soldiers. One of the injured – 20-year-old Private 1st Class Timo Smeehuyzen – hovered near death. (more…)

On the way to my hooch, I passed one of my Aussie buddies. He was covered in grime, breathing hard and bent under his armor and gear. After nearly a week, their mission to protect the engineers working on the Tarin Kowt boys’ school had wrapped. But with all the fighting in Chura, there wasn’t any transport to spare to bring them home to Kamp Holland. So they had marched, for miles, under a blazing sun. How miserable is that particular experience? Just ask Pasha, a Soviet soldier in Kandahar in 1982:

Noon – the hottest part of the day. The heat hangs oppressively over the desert. The sky is crystal clear all the way down to the horizon. A weak southerly wind stirred up the sand, but brought with it no respite from the heat. … Time stands still, turning a day into eternity. Breathing is difficult, and the body quickly loses its moisture. Sweat dries on the skin before you can even feel it, leaving behind only a delicate layer of salt on your skin. Our cammies become wooden, and are ready to break from sweat. The skin around the eyes, nostrils, and lips, is covered in small cracks, splits and scratches. More than anywhere else, the dust settles inside of these little wounds. This uneven covering of dust gives the face the ominous look of a clay mask.

Despite being totally exhausted, he was hungry for news. So was I. I wanted to know how the school project had turned out (just fine, he said) and he wanted to know what the Hell was going on in Chura. Despite witnessing the car bombing that opened the battle, the Aussie and his platoon mates knew next to nothing about the ongoing fighting just a few miles away. In similar fashion, I’d spent the day surfing the internet for word on civilian casualties in Chura, since I can’t get out there myself. Not only are there no forces available to escort me, the Dutch don’t like the idea of putting reporters in harm’s way. I say put that waiver in front of me (pictured) and I’ll gladly sign. I’m 29 going on 75 with deep deep regrets and students loans big enough to finance a yacht. What have I got to live for? (Well, her and this.)

Regardless, there’s no time. I’m supposed to start heading home tomorrow. I’ve got three or four delicate connections and only four days to make them, so it’s a hold-your-breath and cross-your-fingers sort of proposition. Afghanistan is like Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

In related news, the U.S. Army is threatening to withdraw 20 helicopters from Afghanistan, a move that will only exacerbate an already desperate shortage of transportation. NATO has protested.

My advice to NATO’s European members? Make better military investments. And with the savings, but a lot more helicopters.

I’m on Dutch radio. It’s mostly gibberish to me.

In the bloody aftermath of the June 15 suicide attack on their patrol in the filthy little town of Tarin Kowt, the young soldiers of the Dutch army’s 42 Limburgse Jagers struggled to keep Timo Smeehuyzen from slipping away. Medics gave chest compressions to the severely injured 20-year-old from Amsterdam while an ambulance from Kamp Holland raced to the scene. But it arrived too late, and Timo died sprawled in the back of a charred armored personnel carrier thousands of miles from home.

Two days later, while many of Kamp Holland’s soldiers were still out in Chura fighting back a Taliban assault, those who could assembled to say goodbye to their comrade. After a brief sermon, hundreds of Dutch and Australian soldiers filed silently out of the hangar. But a few lingered, and gathered around two bandaged and dazed young men in wheelchairs — Timo’s teammates, injured in the blast — to touch their shoulders and their hands, to say a few words. At the hangar door, several men huddled together and wept. (more…)

Today The Washington Times ran the story I filed from the Battle for Tarin Kowt:

A car packed with explosives exploded beside a Dutch armored personnel carrier outside a girl’s school in this shambling town of 100,000 on Friday afternoon, killing the driver, one Dutch soldier and around ten Afghans, including several children. The attack was the opening salvo in a major Taliban counter-attack against Dutch, Australian and Afghan forces that have been steadily extending their territory in rugged Uruzgan province north of Kandahar.

In the hours after the bombing, Australian forces patrolled Tarin Kowt under the watchful eye of an aerial drone. But the next wave hit the nearby village of Chura, a few miles to the north, when hundreds of Taliban fighters descended from the mountains to fire rockets, mortars and small arms at checkpoints manned by Dutch and Afghan forces.

Afghan forces held the line as the Dutch moved forward, calling in 155-millimeter artillery fire and Apache attack helicopters firing rockets and cannons. Dutch F-16 fighter jets based at Kandahar swooped in to drop bombs. The fighting continued into the morning, with no additional coalition casualties reported. Dutch army spokesman Major Erik Jonkers said that at least 30 Taliban had been killed.

Fighting flared up again late on Saturday. Apache crews raced to their choppers while Dutch army Sergeant First Class Richard and his crew – who like many coalition troops asked to be identified by only their first names for security reasons – waited for radio calls from artillery spotters in Chura. They slammed three-foot-tall shells into the breech of their German-made gun and fired. The red arcs of rocket-assisted shells were visible against the starry night.

Uruzgan province sits astride a major smuggling route connecting Pakistan to Helmand province’s expansive poppy fields, which produce a majority of the world’s opium and finance Taliban operations. Since August the Dutch and Australians have carefully pushed into the valley, taking one town at a time and shoring up their defenses with increasing numbers of Afghan police that they train themselves at Camp Holland.

The Dutch soldier killed on Friday represented only the second combat fatality for that nation’s approximately 2,000-strong contingent in Afghanistan. Prior to Friday, the Dutch had taken a much-criticized “softer” approach to warfare than their allies, focusing on reconstruction, training and humanitarian operations as a means of winning over Afghanistan’s xenophobic rural tribes as they expanded their sphere of influence. A joint Dutch and Australian “Provincial Reconstruction Team” represents the major military formation in Uruzgan.

“We’re not hunting the Taliban,” Jonkers said on Thursday. “We’re here to make them not important any more. But it’s not about cowardice. When we fight, we fight.”

Reconstruction in Tarin Kowt – including an Australian project to rebuild a soccer field at a boys’ school – continued despite the Taliban attacks. On Friday, engineers spread tons of fresh dirt for the field while the wreckage of the suicide bomber’s car continued to burn two blocks away.

Chris Vallance over at BBC Radio’s Pods and Blogs put together this piece on the fighting in Tarin Kowt, combining some audio I recorded with a brief interview. (My segment seems to be around 10 minutes in.) I don’t have the throughput to make the link work here in Afghanistan, but maybe you folks back home will have better luck. Cheers.

I had just finished interviewing an Australian engineer about a reconstruction project at a boys’ school in Tarin Kowt when there was a thunderclap. Debris hurtled into the air in a column of smoke a couple blocks away. And I thought, “Suicide bomber.”

Just a few minutes earlier, I’d been out on the street outside the school with some Australian soldiers. Glancing left I’d glimpsed a Dutch patrol idling in armored personnel carriers and trucks outside a girls’ school. It was International Women’s Day, so the Dutch had hauled some of their national media to a ceremony with local ladies.

Back at the boys’ school, my heart sank when I connected the dots: The Taliban had blown up Women’s Day. At a school. For girls. (more…)

At first glance I figured the Dutch Army Pzh-2000 howitzer was painted tan. Then I poked a finger an eighth of an inch through the “paint” that was actually fine dust that had adhered to the steel hull after being ground up and tossed into the air by the vehicle’s treads.

It’s a thankless job, being an artilleryman in a dirty, boring little war where artillery is only rarely needed. Every morning at Kamp Holland near Tarin Kowt, the Dutch gun crew vacuums the dust off their 60-ton machine then sit around and wait. If a patrol gets into trouble, and if the troops can positively identify the bad guys, they might call for a round or two of High Explosive. If they’re less certain, maybe they’ll ask for a smoke or illumination round just to show the potential bad guys that the gun is trained on them. It’s a rare day when the gunners fire anything at all, and even rarer when they shoot HE. And on the day I paid a visit, the vehicle commander Sergeant Daniel and his guys were deeply invested in a game of Risk. (more…)

The Dutch mission in Uruzgan province is focused on reconstruction, but building stuff in such a dangerous environment requires lots of security. Hence the heavy weapons at Kamp Holland near Tarin Kowt. When the camel dung hits the fan, the Quick Reaction Force races out in their armored personnel carriers while Apaches buzz overhead.

These are the D-model Apaches, but without the heavy Longbow radar, which was designed to spot large formations of enemy tanks and makes the choppers sluggish in hot and high environments. The Apaches’ main weapon in Afghanistan is the 30-millimeter cannon; sometimes at Kamp Holland you can hear the cannons’ low chatter as they hit targets on the nearby weapons range. (more…)

An hour-long gut-churning flight in a West Virginia Air Guard C-130 was all it took to teleport me from the shambling, somewhat goofy, Third-World Disneyland that is U.N.-occupied Kabul to Tarin Kowt, a tiny dusty hamlet wedged between steep mountain ranges and sitting astride the Taliban’s main supply route from Pakistan. Here, a couple thousand Dutch and Aussies are pursuing separate but complementary strategies to enlist Uruzgan province’s 340,000 people in the fight against (mostly) Pakistani extremists. The Dutch work to build “capacity” for economic growth — training carpenters, electricians, policemen and bureaucrats — while the Aussies roll in with cranes and bulldozers to rebuild ruined roads, bridges and buildings: all in an effort to improve Afghans’ lives and draw them into a democratic, relatively progressive national society where extremists have no toehold.

(more…)