American Muslims in the War on Terror
latimes.com
THE UNTOLD WAR
U.S. Heroes Whose Skills Spoke
Volumes
By RONE TEMPEST, TIMES STAFF WRITER
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The first time he saw
the Khyber Pass leading into Afghanistan, he was a
frightened 11-year-old refugee from Pakistan.
The next time he saw those sheer rock walls--31
years later--he was a seasoned U.S. Marine Corps
officer engaged in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Of all the untold tales of the U.S. war against
terrorism, one of the most remarkable is about a
ramrod-straight Marine lieutenant colonel named
Asad Khan. Born in Pakistan and raised in the
United States, a Muslim married to an Episcopalian
from Connecticut, Khan was assigned to classified
duties with the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad from
early October until March. Fluent in Urdu, Pashto and Arabic, Khan quickly
became one of the most important figures in the anti-terrorism campaign,
alternating between delicate diplomatic duty here in the Pakistani capital and
dangerous Special Forces field missions in Afghanistan.
"His work was absolutely pivotal," U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin said
in a recent interview.
In the frantic days following Sept. 11, Khan was one of a handful of Afghan
and Pakistani Americans who helped plug a huge hole in U.S. intelligence
operations, working the front lines as interpreters, interrogators and liaison
officers. They allowed the U.S. to overcome a major disadvantage by calling
on its richly diverse citizenry.
Khan worked with the Pakistani military to set up U.S. bases, interviewed
Afghan informants about Al Qaeda operations, coordinated the rescue of
American aid workers, led a State Department diplomatic team into Kabul to
secure the embassy, and participated in several missions with Special Forces
outside Kandahar.
When a key U.S. Embassy intelligence official died of a heart attack, Khan,
who has the highest possible security clearances, took over his job.
And when an Al Qaeda suspect captured in the hunt for Osama bin Laden
broke out of his plastic handcuffs and attempted to escape, Khan tackled and
restrained him until he could be subdued by military police.
The overall number of Afghan and Pakistani Americans involved in the war
effort has not been released, although their recruitment by CIA and Defense
Department agencies has been very public. They range from the very
high-profile Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Rand Corp. analyst who serves as
President Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan, to Wahid Shah, a Southern
California real estate broker who worked as a Dari-language translator for the
U.S. military at Bagram air base north of Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Because most of their work was secret, few of the men have received any
public recognition.
Khan, now at Camp Lejeune, N.C., preparing for a battalion command, was
recently permitted by military and State Department authorities to talk about
some of his activities, but many others remain classified.
Another Marine, a mess hall clerk from Salt Lake City, also has emerged as a
hero.
Cpl. Ajmal Achekzai was chosen in November to raise the American flag over
the coalition base near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. But until his
recent return to his post at Camp Pendleton, the four months that he spent on
the front lines interviewing prisoners and acting as a guide on forward
reconnaissance missions were kept under wraps.
"Achekzai was the go-to guy," said Marine Maj. Tom Impellitteri, who took
the young clerk with him on the mission to capture Kandahar airport in
November. "Every time we went into a new village he was the first to dismount
and engage the locals."
"They told me I was going to be in Afghanistan for three to five days; I ended
up staying four months," said Achekzai, who before Sept. 11 had been
resigned to a career making sure fighting Marines had enough water and food
packets.
Achekzai was a noncombatant specialist; they are referred to derisively in the
Corps as POGs, or "People Other Than Grunts." But in his first week in
Afghanistan he was involved in a firefight with a convoy of fleeing Taliban.
The contributions of others, however, remain hidden.
Contacted at his suburban San Diego home, real estate broker Shah would not
discuss details of his translation work at Bagram, where he lived in the
intelligence compound known as "Motel 6."
Shah, who grew up in Kabul, said he hopes to go back to Afghanistan for
another tour of duty.
Chamberlin said she still works closely at the embassy with another Pakistani
American whose name is kept secret because of the sensitive nature of his
work. Like Khan, the young man, described by Chamberlin as being in his late
20s, is fluent in Pashto, the language spoken by nearly 40% of the Afghan
population, including most of the Taliban. Only 6 years old when his family
emigrated from Pakistan to the United States, he also speaks idiomatic
American English and is comfortable with U.S. culture.
"Bottom line," Chamberlin said, "is that these may be hyphenated Americans,
but they are 100% American."
Several weeks after Sept. 11, U.S. diplomats in Islamabad began hinting that
they had some special assets with linguistic skills embedded in the embassy's
intelligence cell, including a field-grade military officer. It is becoming clear that
the most important among them was Khan, who arrived here Oct. 8.
His contribution to the U.S. mission is evident in a five-page letter from
embassy officials recommending that the 42-year-old Khan be awarded the
Bronze Star for valor, one of the country's highest combat awards.
According to the document, a redacted copy of which was obtained by The
Times, Afghans regularly came to the U.S. Embassy compound here offering
"vital information on the location of terrorist elements and operational planning
against Americans in Pakistan."
"Not only was Lt. Col. Khan the only American who could communicate with
them," the document states, "he was the only American who had the ability to
act on the information. For example, Lt. Col. Khan was involved in an
interrogation concerning locations of possible Al Qaeda safehouses on the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border."
The shortage of Pashto-speaking American intelligence agents was nothing
new.
Former CIA official Frank Anderson said that even during the 1979-89 Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan, when billions of dollars were poured into the
anti-Soviet moujahedeen movement, the intelligence agency had only one
Pashto speaker, a retired Army officer who learned the language on a military
exchange assignment.
"The truth is that we never trained Pashto speakers," recalled Anderson, who
directed the CIA's Afghan task force from the agency's Langley, Va.,
headquarters from 1987 to 1989. Instead, Anderson said during an interview in
his Washington, D.C., consulting office, the intelligence agency relied almost
exclusively on Pashto-speaking Pakistani military officers.
But after Sept. 11, this was not a comfortable arrangement for U.S. officials.
Pakistan had been the fundamentalist Taliban regime's biggest supporter. Its
most vociferous support often came from the many ethnic Pushtuns serving in
the Pakistani army. This made Americans such as Khan critical to the
anti-terrorism campaign.
When not working in the embassy intelligence cell, Khan was often out in the
field on special assignments, sometimes working with Special Forces units.
During the December to January hunt for Bin Laden in the mountainous Tora
Bora region of eastern Afghanistan, Khan was assigned to take custody of 238
Al Qaeda fighters who had been captured trying to flee to Pakistan. It was then
that he tackled the escapee.
The Bronze Star recommendation also cites Khan's participation in operations
that remain classified. Two photographs obtained by The Times show Khan in
the field, but the faces of his partners are obscured for security reasons.
"The whole experience was like living out a Tom Clancy novel," said Khan,
reflecting on his 31-year journey from Pakistani schoolboy to American war
hero.
Khan's family hails from a place not far from Pakistan's border with
Afghanistan, near Tora Bora in the White Mountains south of Jalalabad. He
belongs to the Afridi clan, a powerful Pushtun family known for its fighting
skills.
His great-grandfather, grandfather and father were all military men who served
in Kashmir during the British colonial era. A colorfully written recent book,
"History of the Northern Areas of Pakistan" by Ahmad Hasan Dani, describes
one of Khan's more famous uncles as a "stoutly built, short figure of indomitable
courage and strength [that he] inherited from his ancestral Afridi stock of Tirah
in Northwest Frontier Province but in whose veins also ran the blood of the
land--mountain daring and wild hunting."
After siding with the successful 1947 Pakistani independence movement, the
Khan family settled in the town of Abbottabad, where it founded the country's
first commercial poultry farm and lived comfortably, allying politically with a
succession of military rulers.
But when Gen. Yahya Khan was forced to step down in 1971, the family lost
its political connections. Their home in Abbottabad was attacked by armed
supporters of Pakistan's new civilian ruler, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Khan, then 11, remembers being awakened by his pistol-packing father and
told that they were leaving for Afghanistan. Using a forged passport, his father
was able to sneak the family, including all six children, through the Khyber Pass
to Kabul.
"I remember being afraid, but I also remember at the time thinking we were
embarking on a great adventure," Khan recalled. "To reassure us, my mother
kept telling us we were on our way to see Disneyland. But I didn't even know
what Disneyland was."
A year of travel as political refugees took the family from Afghanistan to Spain,
Britain and finally the United States. They settled in West Hartford, Conn., near
the poultry company that had helped the family establish its farm in Pakistan.
Khan, a schoolboy athlete in football and lacrosse, attended Avon Old Farms
preparatory school in Avon, Conn., and later Babson College outside Boston,
where he met his wife, Cheryl. After graduating with a business degree, Khan
volunteered for military service.
"Now here comes the corny part," Khan said in a recent interview. "America is
my country of choice. I wanted to give something back for the privilege of
being an American. No other country in the world would let an immigrant like
me become an officer in its military and command its offspring."
Khan has done well, rising to lieutenant colonel at a young age for the
notoriously slow-to-promote Marines. He has won appointment to several of
the prestigious command colleges, including the Naval War College, where he
earned a master's degree. He also contributes regularly to military publications,
including an upcoming article on the anti-terrorism campaign in the Marine
Corps Gazette.
Khan qualified for a program maintained by the armed services to identify
soldiers with useful language and cultural skills. Between 1992 and 1993, he
spent a year with the Royal Saudi Marines in Saudi Arabia, where he learned
Arabic. In 1999 and 2000, he made two trips to Pakistan to help combat
international drug trafficking.
The Sept. 11 attacks struck at the core of Khan's moderate Islamic beliefs and
the American system that had welcomed him.
"I just find it an abomination that these people had hijacked our religion and
exploited illiterate and desperate people in that part of the world," Khan said.
It was also personal. "My wife is Episcopalian. We have to honor each other,
to follow the principle the United States abides by." The couple has three
children.
So it was with an evangelical zeal that Khan went to Pakistan. Chamberlin
credits Khan with breaking down the mistrust between the Pakistani and
American militaries following the imposition of sanctions against Pakistan for
developing nuclear weapons. The ambassador and the Marine fasted together
during the holy month of Ramadan and often broke fast together in the
evenings.
Chamberlin turned to Khan to direct the rescue of eight Christian aid workers,
including Americans Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer, who had been kept
prisoner for months by the Taliban regime in Kabul. Working from the embassy
in Islamabad, Khan organized their helicopter rescue, then took the pictures
when the two young women were reunited with their parents.
"This came at a time we were all looking for something good to happen--and it
did," Khan recalled.
In January, while on assignment supervising security along the Pakistani-Afghan
border, Khan found himself poised at the mouth of the legendary Khyber Pass,
where he had stood on the first leg of his family flight to America.
"In 1971 we were fleeing, not knowing where we were going or when we
would return," he said. "I never imagined that it would take 30 years to come
back to the same spot."
Khan said he was struck by the sight of refugees massed at the border, just as
he and his family had been three decades before.
"In a way, nothing had changed," he said. "I could have very easily been any
one of them. By the grace of God, and good fortune, I am an American."
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