By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY
KHOST PROVINCE, Afghanistan — In this isolated part of Afghanistan 10 miles from the Pakistan border, U.S. Army Capt. Joshua Zaruba and his soldiers have a mission they hope will help impoverished peasants from falling under the sway of emboldened insurgents: handing out flour, rice, blankets and toys.
However, the local Afghan police aren't much help. They join in only after cajoling from the U.S. troops, and contribute only three officers in a pickup commanded by an illiterate lieutenant.
At the camp, strips of meat, mostly bone and sinew, hang from the tents' ropes and dry in the sun. Barefoot children in filthy clothes grin at Zaruba and his men, snatch the toys and scamper back to their tents. The Afghan police mostly stand in the background, clutching their AK-47 rifles.
For most Afghans, the local police are the main representatives of a government the United States and its allies are trying to prop up in what President-elect Barack Obama calls the key front in the war on terrorism. In the eyes of the local villagers, the government is losing the fight.
"The government doesn't do anything for us," says Mustafa, a village elder. Like many Afghans, he goes by one name.
Such scenes illustrate the enormous challenge Obama faces in Afghanistan at a time when his administration will face a series of them, from the hoped-for reduction of troops in Iraq to the struggling economy at home and a new war in the Middle East.
Seven years ago, the war in Afghanistan seemed over. Allied forces invaded in October 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks masterminded by Afghanistan-based Osama bin Laden, and ousted the Taliban that had harbored the al-Qaeda leader.
But the March 2003 invasion of Iraq took the Bush administration's attention away from Afghanistan, according to Obama and other critics, including the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in 2006. Now, the Taliban and other insurgents have a permanent presence in at least 72% of Afghanistan, according to a report released last month by the International Council on Security and Development, a global think tank. That's up from 54% in 2007.
Stopping the Taliban requires more U.S. troops in Afghanistan and fewer in Iraq, Obama and U.S. military officials say. Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces here, wants a force of 60,000 — about double the number of U.S. troops here now — in Afghanistan for up to four years.
Only a capable Afghan government can push back the insurgents, McKiernan says. To succeed, the Afghan government must overcome many challenges, including:
• Corruption. Police make about $3 a day, not enough to support their families, Zaruba says, so many take bribes and steal from people they're supposed to protect. Police corruption weakens the government's influence and its ability to target Taliban insurgents, says Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution.
Corruption among officials, including the police, "is a huge concern and will continue to be," Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview with USA TODAY. "We've got to root corruption out if we're going to have a successful government."
• Inexperience. Few Afghan leaders have run a government office or a military unit, McKiernan says. "Where is the human capital to occupy governmental positions, to be leaders, to be mayors, to run budgets, to contract labor, to be the civil administration of the country?" he asks. "It takes a long time to develop."
• A drug-based economy. Afghanistan's farm-based economy is dominated by opium farming, which feeds the world's heroin trade.
In 2007, Afghanistan supplied 93% of the world's opium, the State Department said. Government revenue last year was $715 million, according to the CIA. Illicit poppy production, meanwhile, brings in $4 billion.
• Poor security. There currently aren't enough troops to secure large parts of Afghanistan, particularly in the south, McKiernan says. Afghanistan's army has only 76,000 troops, and is trying to boost its army to 134,000 troops over the next five years. There are also about 30,000 NATO troops.
The stakes for the incoming Obama administration are high, McKiernan says, although he thinks Afghanistan is "headed in the right direction. The Afghan people are a wonderful people. They are worth the commitment of the international community."
Mullen said that in September he said U.S. forces weren't winning in Afghanistan. "But we can," he said. "I still hold to that."
A 'dangerous' enemy
Not all Afghan insurgents are part of the fundamentalist Taliban, McKiernan says. In an interview with USA TODAY at the NATO headquarters in Kabul, he said Taliban militants control the south, while several other terror organizations linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban hold the east.
Among them is the Haqqani network. It takes its name from Jalaluddin Haqqani, the militant who fought the Soviets in the 1980s and became a top aide to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.
Combined Joint Task Force-101, the U.S.-led military effort in eastern Afghanistan, calls the Haqqani network "the most dangerous and challenging foe for the coalition forces." Haqqani's home province is Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, near Pakistan.
Attacks in eastern Afghanistan increased 11% in 2008 compared with 2007, says Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the task force. More soldiers will arrive early in 2009, bolstering the force of 23,000, including 19,000 Americans.
In eastern Afghanistan, insurgents slip across its porous border with Pakistan. There may be hundreds of passes that can be traversed by insurgents on horseback and thousands more by foot, Nielson-Green says. Militants can attack and return to safety in Pakistan.
Securing the border requires more coalition troops, says Said Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States.
Harsh weather arrives in October, and the snow drives insurgents out from their mountain caves and into Khost, where milder weather lasts through winter. "It's their Florida, if you will. There is no off-time here," says Lt. Col. David Ell, commander of the 4th Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment at Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost.
Ell's goals are to pursue insurgents through the winter, help complete a road from Gardez to Khost and provide security for those registering to vote in the 2009 presidential and provincial council elections.
There are many reasons why Afghanistan hasn't progressed since 2001, McKiernan says. Forty percent of the people are unemployed, and life expectancy is 44 years. That's compared with 78 years in the USA.
"There's no such thing as an easy counterinsurgency," McKiernan says. "But when you put the problem with the insurgency on top of the physical environment in Afghanistan, it's a very, very difficult environment."
Shades of Iraq
As in the war in Iraq, the main threat to U.S. troops is the roadside bomb, also known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), McKiernan says.
Their use has risen in Afghanistan, McKiernan says. "It's part of a change in tactics by the insurgency to go into more complex, smaller scale, more asymmetric ambushes that attack softer targets," he says.
Vince Martinez, a blunt Navy captain, is deputy commander for Task Force Paladin, the military's counter-IED effort. He works at Bagram Air Base, about 30 miles north of Kabul. Martinez refers to the "tyranny of troops, time and terrain" in explaining how difficult it is to fight insurgents and beat IEDs in Afghanistan.
Coalition troops are spread too thin, the country's so big — a bit smaller than Texas — that it takes too long to reach them when they need medical evacuation after a bomb attack, he says, adding that mountains reaching 20,000 feet limit mobility.
"It's extremely difficult to support the government of Afghanistan with the limited number of troops we have," Martinez says.
Drive the roads here and it's plain why insurgents attack vehicles with IEDs. Pavement is rare in rural areas, and rough, rutted roads easily conceal bombs. IED attacks have increased each year since 2005, according to Pentagon data. There were 315 IED attacks in November compared with 188 in November 2007, according to the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization.
Martinez says he's confident that his task force can counter the IED threat by dismantling bomb-making networks, defusing bombs that have been planted and training Afghan bomb squads. More intelligence collection equipment, such as drones that provide imagery of insurgents at work, and devices that intercept communication, is the top need, Martinez says.
"My job is to reduce casualties from IEDs and to remove them from the battlefield," Martinez says. "That's my job, not diplomacy. Whatever it takes that's legal and moral."
Zaruba's men have firsthand experience with IEDs. On July 6, a bomb made up of two anti-tank mines and 40 pounds of homemade explosives blew up beneath an armored vehicle.
It lifted the 35,000-pound Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle off the ground, shot its wheels 150 feet in the air and left a waist-deep crater.
The three soldiers and their interpreter inside survived, the worst injury a broken arm.
"It felt like we hit a wall at 25 mph," Staff Sgt. Daniel Smith, 27, of Champaign, Ill., said of the blast. "MRAPs are amazing. If it had been a Humvee, I'd have been one of four KIAs."
The insurgents, he says, "are kind of like ghosts. They grab their wounded and dead and leave before we get there."
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