I stumbled on a link to Paul Refsdal's footage on The Daily Dish, where Sullivan links to a Dateline segment. Per the host, "Most American troops spend their tours in Afghanistan with only the vaguest idea of who they’re fighting. In June, a Special Forces A-Team in the south reportedly couldn’t find the Taliban. It wasn’t so hard for [Paul] Refsdal. This self-described “tall white man” managed to effectively infiltrate the insurgency in one of its bastions."
Footage of the Taliban in Kuman Province
He didn't "infiltrate" them--he was invited to joiin and film them, after spending a week in Kabul, getting word known of his wish.
This inside look at a group of Taliban is eerie in its everyday quality. Every day, they take up their perch in the mountains, in groups of ten, and urging each other on through walkie talkies, use machine guns or grenade launchers to shoot at convoys on the road snaking through the valley below. The convoys look like sitting ducks. Some days they hit them, disabling vehicles, killing and wounding US soldiers. Other days they come up empty.
Refsdal shoots footage of the commander, Dawran, playing with his children, strategizing with his troops. Dawran is a man who left multiple properties to live in a house of mud in the hills with his wife and three children. "Why are the Americans here?" he asks. "Are they oppressed? Are they living under a dictator?" Allah's name is frequently invoked, for support, and in thanks when a convoy is hit.
At the end of the footage, the group has been targeted by a gunship. They scatter into the hills. When they return, they learn the house of the second-in-command was found, and the man killed along with relatives and other soldiers.
At the end of the film we learn Commander Dawran's house has been targeted. He survived, but two of his children died.
At the end of the film, one of the soldiers, a man named Omar, tells the cameraman he will show him his area too. Refsdal was kidnapped and held for ransom for 6 days by this subgroup, then released after no ransom was paid.
The main takeaway is the Afghanis see no justification for the US forces. The things that bother us, the shots of women in burkhas, are off their radar screens. It's a land grab, pure and simple, and they seem themselves as defending their land. There are shots of a boy of twelve or 14 carrying a semiautomatic rifle, whether to use himself or just to help an adult, is not made clear.
But these are no gung ho fanatics. The film makes the attacks on the convoys look like a day at the office. There is a high five when a convoy gets hit, but the excitement level seems muted, as if this is something they've been doing for years.
Whenever a camara takes you inside the lives of a group of people, with their families, you start to identify with them. Of course, we never see Dawran's wife, just his little son and daughter. Our war against these hardy soldiers seems outsized.
But there is also a sense of painful vulnerability when you see the convoys crawling along the road in the valley. You think of the US soldiers sent out day after day along an open road, almost as targets to help the higher-ups find the positions of the guerillas by deducing their locations from where the shooting is coming from. It is a sickening feeling to see a truck in the valley come to a halt. "You got them!" Dawran congratulates someone by walkie talkie. "Allah is great!"
The idea that God is on one's side has been used by every military commander in the world to urge on the troups (perhaps with the exception of Mao and Stalin...). That doesn't diminish its effectiveness. These men are defending their homes, and God is on their side, as they scramble through terrain that the best-equipped army in the world struggles to address. The fultility of our quest, and the naked vulnerability of our soldiers, is clear from this footage.