Soldiers Try To Trade Tech Support For Afghan Intel

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Soldiers Try To Trade Tech Support For Afghan Intel
By Spencer Ackerman
August 13, 2010 | 7:49 am

TOKCHI, Afghanistan – Captain Cristian Balan shows up to the computer lab holding a spool of Cat-5 cable, eager to play tech support. If he can get the computers running in this relatively-prosperous town of 4000 people, he figures, it’ll pay dividends in goodwill. Maybe the platoon will get some tips about local insurgent activity.

His fellow soldiers are skeptical. You go to talk to the Afghans and you help them if you can, but all you typically get back is a laundry list of complaints and a Stop Snitching posture of silence when it comes to giving up the bad guys.

So there’s some tension within this small unit, the 3rd Platoon of Alpha Company Sappers, 1-172 Cavalry, with whom Balan, the overall squadron’s communications chief, is riding along today to assist. The soldiers’ ultimate goal is to take down insurgents and stabilize the two districts of Parwan Province in which they operate. They understand that in a counterinsurgency campaign, that means listening to villagers’ gripes, shelling out for the odd development project and even sending out a makeshift geek squad every now and then. But here in Parwan, just outside Bagram Air Base, they’re not seeing enough return on their investment.

But then there’s Balan, a sunny Vermont National Guardsman who teaches digital forensics at Burlington’s Champlain College in civilian life. Since Tokchi requested computer help, he’s psyched that his techie skills may come in handy for 3rd platoon: “We finally get to do what we like to do!” If he wasn’t in Afghanistan, he tells me, he’d have gone to Def Con. Would’ve grown a beard and everything.

Now, Balan (pictured, above and left) is out in the baking heat, waving to kids who don’t wave back. He steps into the computer lab, a small cement box maintained by a social organization called the Bagram People Sultania Foundation. The room has nine black Dell desktops, looking maybe five years old. They’re running Windows XP Home Edition, got USB drives, optical mice – matter of fact, they wouldn’t be out of place in an American public school. Balan thought he’d be working on total dinosaurs. “I could teach off these!” he beams.