Mao’s Rockets and the Eastern Afghan Border War, Part I

C.J. CHIVERS
Friday, 28-October-2011

 

Cold War Weapons and Afghanistan’s Unending Fight

Traveling at Mach 1.1, a 107-millimeter rocket gives little time for those along its path to react. Even if counter battery radar picks up an incoming rocket in flight, the warning might sound only a moment before the arrival of the rocket itself, barely allowing time to flinch. By then the rocket has either passed by or it has struck, delivering its warhead’s explosive blast.

This year American and Afghan soldiers along one part of Afghanistan’s uncertain border with Pakistan has become expert at these sounds and familiar with their perils. The rate and the severity of rocket attacks against outposts in eastern Paktika Province have spiked since mid spring, making 107-millimeter rocket attacks, once again part of the familiar fabric of the Afghan border war. Rockets had been fired at American outposts near the border for years, but during 2010 the attacks all but stopped. They spiked again this year. The data speaks for itself: During a roughly six-month period, May to October, in 2010, there were two rocket attacks from within Pakistan on three outposts near the border with Waziristan. This year, during the same months, there were 59. And there have been more than 100 attacks against the same base from rocket firing positions in Afghanistan but within a short distance of the border, compared with 13 such attacks in the same period last year.

Of course this is a political story; it is nearly impossible not to examine the data in light of the deterioration in American-Pakistani relations. But it is also possible to go deeper, past the sparks, to look at some of the fuel. The escalated attacks provide a fresh chance to examine modern war through the weapons that fighters choose, and they illuminate how so much of the war as we understand it in Afghanistan takes its shape from the combination of the vast stocks of munitions ordered into production during the cold war and the adaptability of local fighters in both acquiring them and adapting them to updated use. Add in the particular tactical restrictions influencing the fight along the border between Paktika Province and Waziristan, which favors the guerrillas by limiting the American and Afghan forces’ ability to stop the arms flow and the rules for firing back, and the insurgents’ reinvigorated 107-millimeter rocket campaign offers a case study in how a relatively lightly equipped force can harass,
in what amounts to tactical perpetuity, the army of a superpower. Styles of Fighting and the Afghan Map

First, some national perspective. The rockets, for all of the menace and the mix of tactical and political problems they pose, are not everywhere. And this fits an old pattern: In Afghanistan, the factors that propel the unending violence have roots reaching around the world, but the texture of many fights assumes local shapes. Those who take up arms against the American and Afghan government forces scattered about the country often do so in their own ways. Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades are standard tools, visible from one end of the country to the other and carried by both sides. Suicide bombers, while acting on a far smaller scale than gunmen, can strike most anywhere. After that, the list of weapons can shift as you go down the road. Thus, in one area, a particular Taliban mortar team can harass an outpost for months, shaping the experience of the war for those behind the blast walls. In other places, mortar fire is rare, or even, in practical terms, nonexistent. There are sections of Helmand
Province where snipers (we use the term loosely) are a menace, whereas in much of the country there are no snipers at all. Here and there Taliban fighters possess an SPG-9 tube (think: bazooka, post-World War II variety), and use it to try to destroy government trucks or guard towers. But most soldiers go a tour without even hearing of that weapon, much less having one of its heavy rounds slam in nearby.

Even the Taliban’s bloody campaign of improvised explosive devices is inconsistently applied. Some districts are populated by able and determined bomb makers and teams that hide the lethal handiwork along trails. Other districts — including districts considered hostile to American troops and the Afghan government — are not. Thus, soldiers walk near many villages with trepidation. Elsewhere their fellow grunts stroll, bombs far from their minds.

War is politics, we’re told. And politics is local. These paired lines frame well enough some of the reasons that if someone invested the time and examined the incidents in an organized way, a nation simmering with war could be broken down into a map showing, valley by valley, patch of steppe by patch of steppe, the varied ways that guerrillas try to kill.

If you were plotting that map, the 107-millimeter rocket would not shade all of it. It is hardly a new weapon to Afghan war, but it is not used across the full of Afghan territory, or even in most places. In those places where they are commonly used, however (Kandahar Air Field is one), they are an influential arm, driving up the war’s cost, increasing its dangers, and disrupting the tempo and outcomes of American and Afghan operations. Mao’s Small Mobile Rocket Launchers

So let’s have a look at what we’re talking about, in the historical and technical sense. The 107-millimeter rockets belong to a family of arms known colloquially and collectively as Type 63 rockets. The name was given to the first weapon in the class, officially unveiled by Mao’s China in 1963 as the People’s Liberation Army was moving beyond foreign handouts and Soviet patterns and expanding its arms production base. As first designed, the rockets were to be fired from mobile 12-tube launchers, typically mounted on a trailer that was to be towed. Below is an image of one of those systems, which in this case was being used to instruct volunteers to the forces fighting the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi this year in Libya. (NOTE: This post will draw on some of its recent images from Libya. This is because it was possible in Libya for a Western reporter to see and photograph the systems in use, whereas the Taliban’s firing of the systems against American-Afghan bases cannot be readily observed by Westerners,
at least not from the firing site. Western journalists in Afghanistan do get to observe the incoming. Those whose work over the years has brought them through Kandahar Air Field have often been present for rocket attacks, though the sprawling size of that base often gives 107-millimeter rocket attacks a distant feel. A rocket attack against a small outpost is often a different experience, due to the proximity of the explosions.) Back to the photo, below, of the common 12-tube launcher.

Each of those 12 tubes was meant to hold a single rocket. The full payload of a dozen can be fired in fewer than 10 seconds, via electrical circuits that ignite the rockets’ propellants, putting them to flight. Reloading the deck takes at least a few minutes, assuming the crew is well drilled and the rockets are already prepared (as in, removed from their wooden crates, with fuzzes inserted, and handy). Here is an image of one the high-explosive variants of the rocket (again, from Libya).

As the image suggests, the rockets themselves are roughly three feet long, (the precise length depends on the variant and the choice of fuze). They weigh about 40 pounds, with most of the weight tied up in the rocket motor and propellant that push the warhead through the air. What you see above is one of the common, standard munitions. In an e-mail last week, Neil Gibson, a technical adviser to IHS Jane’s Missiles and Rockets, noted that there were multiple warheads out there – several high-explosive variants, a fragmentation warhead packed with small metal spheres, an incendiary variant that includes white phosphorus, another that releases 16 small cluster bombs and a tactical electronic-warfare model that deploys a signal-jamming device beneath a parachute, to disrupt radio traffic for as long as 15 minutes.

The rockets common to Afghanistan are of the high-explosive sort, like that shown above. Although it is not immediately clear which variants are in play nationwide (because there may be different variants fired by different rocket teams in different provinces), a former American E.O.D. officer who often assists me with munitions identification said that images of the shattered remains of rockets I sent him appeared to be from one of the standard Chinese high-explosive variants, like that round above. These variants carry a high-explosive charge of just less than three pounds. (By comparison, the common F-1 pineapple grenade contains about two ounces of TNT fill.) Most have a maximum range of roughly five miles, which means that rocket crews can set up their weapons in Pakistan and fire them over the border at several American-Afghan outposts.

It is worth noting, before jumping to a conclusion that China is providing the rockets now in common use against American troops and outposts, that since its introduction, the Type 63 series has been widely exported and has also been manufactured, with or without license, by Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, North Korea, South Africa and Turkey, according to IHS Jane’s. And as is common for weapons made by several of these governments, and across such a run of decades, there is no reliable open-source estimate for how many of the weapons have been manufactured, or of how large remaining stockpiles might be, or of which countries have what quantities on hand.

We do know this: This year has been a busy year for 107-millimeter rocket fire, and supply did not seem an issue. Libya brimmed with the rockets, many of which have since slipped away (or been fired), and in Afghanistan the supply has never run dry. Long before the current American units arrived in-country, of course, Afghanistan was a munitions magnet. The rockets being used against American outposts could come from any number of middlemen or sources. Moreover, even with the presence of more troops, Afghan and American, nothing has managed to stop the flow. (Earlier this year, I checked with Kandahar Air Field to see if the influx of thousands of soldiers along the Arghandab River had stopped the perennial phenomenon of rocket attacks on the base. It had not. The Taliban’s 107-millimeter rocket crews, and their rockets, were still out there.)

It is also worth noting that 107s were not introduced to the battlefield by the Taliban; these rockets have been part of Afghan war since the Soviet Union made its own try at subduing the place. The American-backed mujahedeen once brought them over the Durand line and launched them toward Soviet bases and into government-controlled cities, sapping the Soviet Army and terrifying civilians who had crowded into urban centers to escape what was then, as now, a brutal rural war. Later, in the civil war that followed the Soviet-backed Afghan government’s collapse, various factions fired them into cities as well.

Given Afghanistan’s recent history, and the fact that Western troop levels have crested and soon will begin to fall, there is every reason to expect that for as long as American troops remain in the country, the 107-millimeter rocket will be there, too. Like the Kalashnikov, the rocket-propelled grenade, the suicide attacker and the hidden, makeshift bomb, Type 63 rockets will be a part of Afghan violence for the years of fighting ahead.

So how have Afghans put these weapons to use against the latest generation of conventional troops? We’ll take that up tomorrow.

Follow C.J. Chivers on Facebook, on Twitter at @cjchivers or on his personal blog, cjchivers.com, where many posts from At War are supplemented with more photographs and further information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

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