by Rone Tempest, Los Angeles Times
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 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 after 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. Khan worked with the Pakistani military to set up U.S. bases, interviewed Afghan informants about al-Qaida operations, coordinated the rescue of American aid workers, led a U.S. State Department diplomatic team into Kabul, the Afghan capital, to secure the embassy and participated in several missions with special forces outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. 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-Qaida 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.
Working in secret
The overall number of Afghan and Pakistani Americans involved in the war effort has not been released, although their recruitment by the CIA and U.S. Defense Department agencies has been very public. They range from the 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.
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, recently was 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 U.S. flag over the coalition base near Kandahar. But until his recent return to his post at Camp Pendleton, Calif., the four months 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 percent of the Afghan population, including most of the Taliban. Only 6 when his family emigrated from Pakistan to the United States, he also speaks idiomatic American English and is comfortable with U.S. culture.
Several weeks after Sept. 11, U.S. diplomats in Islamabad began hinting that they had some special assets with linguistic skills 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 the 42-year-old be awarded the Bronze Star for valor, one of the country’s highest combat awards.
According to the document, 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-Qaida safe houses on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”
Khan’s great-grandfather, grandfather and father were all military men who served in Kashmir during the British colonial era.
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 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.”
New life in a new land
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 attended Babson College outside Boston, where he met his future 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.”
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 that had developed 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.
Aid workers’ rescue
Chamberlin turned to Khan to direct the November 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.
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.”