Sitting in his room at Camp Wilderness, a small outpost shared by soldiers from the U.S. Army and Afghan National Army (ANA) tucked away in Afghanistan's mountainous Khost province, Capt. Gada Mohamad of the ANA's 2/1 Kandak (battalion), talked about what his troops bring to the fight against the Taliban. "We know how to act with the people," he says. "The Afghan people are uneducated. We can explain to them that we're here for their security. Most importantly, we can read the people" in ways the Americans cannot.

Mohamad takes the pragmatic approach of a man who is ready to fight, but recognizes that fighting isn't always necessary. "If we get hit from a village," he continues, "we won't attack the village; our enemy is the Taliban. We will set a perimeter of security and apologize to the villagers, telling them this is our job, and we're trying to protect the people."

As part of the effort to train and increase the size of the ANA, Mohamad's unit is mentored by Alpha Co. of the 1st Btn., 121st Infantry Regt., 48th Brig. of the Georgia National Guard, which has been hammering away at lessons like this for months. The ANA is resourced pretty thin, fielding 87,000 soldiers, with plans to increase to 134,000 in the near term.

Reaching out to the population, Mohamad says, includes explaining to them that the Taliban is funded by Pakistan, and "Pakistan doesn't like Afghanistan. They don't want the Afghans to be educated, to be on the same level as them."

In Khost, near the Pakistan border, the "people are the prize," according to the commander of coalition forces, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who stresses as much to his troops. The situation on the ground for the thinly stretched 48th Georgia National Guard and its Afghan partners is trickier. The province's rocky landscape is spiderwebbed with dry riverbeds that act as ratlines for the Taliban to infiltrate men and supplies from Pakistan. Many of the illiterate villagers in the area--Afghanistan has an 80% illiteracy rate--have never had things like clean water, electricity or schools. The central government in many of these small communities is virtually nonexistent, other than patrols by the ANA and the Americans, and work by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The Taliban are in the hills in force, moving through villages with ease, and confident enough to regularly rocket and mortar the joint base of operations for a few companies of the Georgia National Guard and ANA at Camp Clark/Camp Parsa. On Sept. 30, a suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives rammed an American MRAP as it was leaving the Clark compound, blowing the truck clear across the road, killing 31-year-old Staff Sgt. Alex French and injuring several other soldiers. Earlier that month an ANA intelligence officer, acting on a tip, was lured to a nearby village, kidnapped and killed by the Taliban.

But the Afghans and their American mentors have formed a close bond at Clark/Parsa, so much so that the Americans host "movie nights" on their side of the base, inviting ANA officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) over to blow off steam. (Since the Afghans don't speak English, the group has settled on war movies, with "Rambo III," where Rambo fights the Soviets in Afghanistan, a favorite.)

The 2/1 and their American mentors conduct joint patrols, and smaller groups of Americans are spread out at small combat outposts with company-sized contingents of ANA to continue the partnering in the field. "The mentality for a lot of the military is to come over here and try and make them like us," says Staff Sgt. Seth Hern, one of the leaders of the 14-man team mentoring the 2/1 Btn. "It's not going to happen. But to come over here and give them ideas on how to do things better, that's a better approach." Afghan Army soldiers prepare to go out on patrol.

The 48th took over in June, and the team spent the first four months pushing and prodding ANA's leadership to improve everything from logistics and planning to weapon discipline and vehicle maintenance, while building a relationship with the officers. "We were spending 14 hr. a day [at Parsa]," says Sgt. First Class Tim Burd, "just talking to them about anything, their families, what it was like when the Russians were here." Spending so much time on the ANA side of the camp also gave the team a better idea of the personalities in the battalion, Hern says, allowing him to "see what you need to work on to get them up to speed. Then you can influence the right way to do it--it doesn't have to be the American way."

One afternoon in the office of a high-ranking ANA battalion officer--a man Burd says is the best tactical officer in the unit--the two NCOs were faced with the problem of a superior officer who was threatening to quit over rumored problems with a unit in the field that reportedly struck a deal with the Taliban; his ANA leadership; and his concerns over the new 6/1 Btn., fresh from boot camp in Kabul, who he feared wouldn't be able to handle their responsibilities. Essentially, he was complaining about things under his control and above his pay grade, while not coming up with solutions. Burd broke in that "you can only control certain things. Let's start there--control what you can control." To begin with, he says, veterans of the 2/1 are going to have to "step up and start training" the new troops. "It's going to be a transition, but you have to get on top of it right away."

Another complaint was that two ANA companies had been out in the field too long, and needed to come back to Parsa and retrain. Hern agrees that the longer they stay out at small combat outposts, "they start to build relationships with the locals as a matter of survival," and that's where problems begin. The ANA officer says that when companies stay in the field for 3-4 months at a time, weaker commanders "have to make friends with the Taliban" to survive. He wants to arrest anyone doing so. But Burd and Hern remind him that the 6/1 was moving to alleviate some of these manpower stresses, and the Kandak officers need to plan training and rotation schedules. The officer agrees with their recommendations, and says he will work through the issues.

"Planning isn't their strong suit," Hern says later, "but if you give them a blueprint, the better officers usually follow it."

One of the local villages is of concern to the American and Afghan troops, since the Taliban influence in Shimbowat is real, and the town resists central governing authority. Compounding the problem are occasional firefights between two tribes over the timber business, which dominates the local economy. "We're branching the ANA out tactically," Hern says, "and exploiting the tribal differences. We're forcing the ANA to get out there and show face a couple times a week." The ANA has no problem leaving the wire, but their tactics are often lacking. "They'll do an ambush every night in the same place, and keep walking on the same paths on patrol," Hern says, "so we'll go and make them push out a little farther, get off the paths. If you keep doing that, soon you've got them going everywhere. It's a building process, and it's slow. It's seeing how far you can push them."

Back at Wilderness, Capt. Mohamad complains that the Taliban rarely stand up and fight. "The Taliban mainly fights with improvised explosive devices in an ambush, they can't defeat me," he boasts. Mohamad is focusing his efforts on recruiting the local young men and teaching them that the Taliban don't have their best interests in mind. He seems sincere about focusing on winning over the people, and says that while he will fight anywhere, any time, in the end, "fighting is not the best way to win.

Photo credit: Paul McCleary