Pfc. Cody Nusbaum jumped instinctively when a man in an Afghan National Army uniform suddenly emerged from a grape grove and turned on him, firing his rifle and throwing grenades.
The incident outside Kandahar left Nusbaum with 11 bullet wounds and destroyed his right hip, ripped up his bladder, severed a femoral artery and claimed one testicle. The Army flew his parents to Germany, where he was expected to die, but Nusbaum, 23, rebounded.
After arriving in San Antonio a year ago last week, he's undergone 57 surgeries.
"The sad part is one of the bullets went through him and killed his sergeant," said Nusbaum's father, Rick Nusbaum Sr., 59, of Camden, Ohio, who is living here to care for his son.
The assailant, an insurgent wearing a stolen Afghan army uniform, was part of a growing trend of grim "green-on-blue" shootings, those carried out by supposedly friendly forces against NATO troops.
The attacks have occurred for years in an increasingly bitter guerrilla war.
Through today, 76 of them have taken place since 2007, with 114 coalition troops killed.
They have risen sharply this year, with two occurring in the past week, prompting the U.S.-led coalition to announce Sunday the suspension of training for 1,000 Afghan Local Police.
In the first eight months of the year, the U.S.-led command in Kabul told the San Antonio Express-News, 45 coalition troops have been killed in 34 attacks. No one can explain why things have worsened, and while the issue has been studied intensively, commanders haven't found a way to stop it.
"We think the reasons for these attacks are complex. Some of them we do believe are about infiltration, impersonation, coercion," Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, said recently.
Some "are about disagreements, animosity which may have grown between the individual shooter and our forces in general or a particular grievance," he added.
The "insider threat," as it's called, was on the radar at the coalition's Kabul headquarters two years ago. NATO's top commander for Afghan training, Gen. William Caldwell IV, ordered an analysis led by a 1989 Marshall High School graduate after a November 2010 incident in which an Afghan border policeman killed six U.S. soldiers.
Caldwell, commander of U.S. Army North, didn't comment, but his former intelligence operations officer for the training mission, Professor Derek Reveron, coined the term "insider threat." He calls it "a bad claim to fame," but after studying the issue, he made recommendations on how to better protect NATO training forces.
Some of the tactics, which were shared with commanders throughout the alliance, were as coldblooded as the attacks, 21 of which in 2011 left 35 coalition troops dead and at least 43 wounded.
One of them was to assign a "Guardian Angel" to every meeting where Afghans were present. His job was to spot Afghans who might pose a threat to coalition troops and be prepared to kill them. Those in Caldwell's training command were given more time at firing ranges and were told to practice shooting people while sitting in a chair.
That order occurred after an Afghan officer, Ahmed Gul Sahebi, gunned down eight Air Force trainers and a civilian April 27, 2011, at Kabul International Airport. One of the victims was Maj. Jeff Ausborn, 41, who had been an instructor pilot at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph.
An Air Force investigation found that the victims, who had mentored Gul and other Afghans, were shot multiple times with a 9 mm handgun, all but one of them in the back of the head.
No one saw the attack coming until after it began. The element of surprise, the elder Nusbaum and others agree, is a big reason the incidents continue.
"It puts the guys in a real precarious situation because these folks could be friendly or they could not be friendly, and this is what goes through their mind: 'Do I shoot them or do I not shoot them?'" he said.
"If you shoot them and they are friendly, you are in a lot of trouble."
The insider threat has increased distrust, at times shutting down training missions, as it did this week. That's prompted Afghanistan's government to act, as well as NATO. President Hamid Karzai issued a decree requiring recruits for the rapidly growing Afghan National Army to be interviewed by a four-person council.
Killings breed distrust
The country's National Directorate for Security last year transferred hundreds of agents to the Ministry of Defense to round out personnel shortfalls and scrutinize officials. Reveron said the action, pushed by NATO to better vet personnel, didn't go down well with Afghans who recalled Soviet forces embedding spies in their agencies.
The Afghan National Army also has outlawed the sale of uniforms, some of which were sold in local markets by troops in the fledgling force. The decision came after a foiled infiltration of the Ministry of Defense last year.
"There was almost a near-catastrophe at the Afghan Ministry of Defense, where an insurgent, not a service member, wore an Afghan uniform, went into the Ministry of Defense and was probably about five seconds away from killing one of their most senior officers," said Reveron, who teaches national security at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. "And at that moment, the Afghans got it."
NATO and Afghan forces have been given cultural training to help avoid misunderstandings that can escalate into violence.
Echoing Allen and other top leaders, Reveron calls the problem a shared threat driven by combat stress, physical strain from being in a war zone, soldiers sympathetic to insurgents and guerrilla infiltration of the Afghan army.
The specter of infiltration emerged over the past few years because the Afghan army has grown dramatically, taking on 8,000 recruits a month from late 2009 through June.
When Caldwell began supervising the force in November 2009, it had 190,000 soldiers and police. There were about 330,000 when he left last November.
A Navy Reserve commander, Reveron said he didn't find evidence of serious infiltration in his analysis. Combat stress and disagreements were the most common drivers of deadly violence.
But the problem won't stop because people like Gul are hard to detect, he said, adding, "When people look at terrorism, I think most people in the business say the lone wolf is just really tough to get after."
Recovering Friday from his second surgery in a week, Cody Nusbaum stepped gingerly outside Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston's Liberty Barracks with his mother, Kim, at his side, both determined to prove wrong those who said he'd never walk again.
As he and a buddy who was with him the day of the shooting talked in the barracks' lobby, Nusbaum's father, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, said he didn't care how the insider threat affects the outcome of the war.
All he and his wife are concerned about is their son.
"It's almost like a second war," he said. "Now they're battling for their life."
sigc@express-news.net
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