The foot patrol to Charkuchi, an impoverished rural enclave in western Kandahar province, didn't follow the script. Coalition forces operations in southern Afghanistan rarely do.
The Canadian soldiers, led by Afghan police, were to walk through the mud-walled village, speak to residents, wave at children and inquire about insurgent activity. The goal: to let war-weary Afghan villagers know that Canadian Forces and Afghan police are dug in at a police station a few hundred feet away.
Ten minutes into the patrol, on the outskirts of town, a shot is fired at the troops. The soldiers hit the ground. Crouching in a ditch, Master Cpl. Jason Thompson, acting commander of the unit, radios the police station to get a fix on where the shot came from.
It isn't a close call -- the gunman is far away -- but the patrol is aborted and the soldiers never get a chance to mingle with the Afghans.
Two years after the success of Operation Medusa, a Canadian-led routing of Taliban forces from this region of southern Afghanistan, the insurgents have returned, emboldened and newly confident. No longer organized into armies, they have traded the battlefield for guerrilla warfare. They plant roadside bombs, assassinate police officers and, most important, infiltrate villages, compound by family compound, insinuating themselves into the lives of the locals.
"They are everywhere," Cpl. Gord Martin, a Canadian Forces mentor for the Afghan police, said about the insurgents. "They mimic us. Whatever we do, they follow. We've seen them in trees, watching us. They're 300 meters outside these walls."
As Canadian troops wait for an influx of as many as 60,000 U.S. soldiers this year, senior military officials have quietly adjusted their goals. In western Kandahar province's Zhari district, the birthplace of the Taliban movement, the key word is "holding" territory. The now-modest twin goals are to keep the residents safe and prevent insurgents from using the region, as they do in depopulated northern districts, as a freeway into Kandahar city.
Canadian soldiers on their daily foot patrols try to persuade wary Afghans to spurn Taliban incursions into their villages and put their faith in Afghan and coalition forces, an effort that has been met with mixed results.
When a Canadian soldier has tea with a local elder, the Taliban show up five minutes after the Canadian has left, demanding to know what was discussed. When Canadians distribute posters urging locals to call the police with news of insurgent activity, the Taliban distribute its own literature reminding locals that cooperating with foreign forces is un-Islamic. Insurgents have killed civilians for cooperating with security forces; and while many Afghans would like to side with legitimate security forces, they are afraid, hedging their bets to see who comes out on top in southern Afghanistan.
On a recent foot patrol in another Zhari village, Capt. Fern Bosse stopped to chat with a bearded elder. The man was familiar with Bosse's unit, which has been stationed in the region since August. The Afghan was upset about a series of compound searches by coalition and Afghan forces. Villagers have grown to resent these searches, which disrupt their lives but bring no guarantee of security.
Bosse said the searches must continue. "It's not because I don't trust (the villagers)" he said as he walked through the winding streets of the village. "But the Taliban is just west of here," he added, raising his hand to a row of fields in the direction of the setting sun. "There's nothing to stop them from coming in at night and putting their weapons in a compound."
To a large degree, the insurgency's tactics have worked. Reconstruction and development plans have been delayed or shelved as securing the region becomes the chief priority of stretched coalition forces.
But the landscape is about to change with the imminent arrival of U.S. troops. The Americans will be dispatched to the countryside, while Canadian forces will be deployed closer to Kandahar city. Eventually, the provincial capital will become the main focus of Canadian efforts in southern Afghanistan.
Senior military officials say they're confident the new strategy will work.
"What we think is, if we can concentrate security, governance and reconstruction development in certain areas, we will reach a kind of tipping point in which we will see an accelerated progress," said Maj. Gen. Mart de Kruif, commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan.
"People will feel safe, reconstruction and redevelopment will gain fruit. We can open schools, open markets. We will have access to markets. ... And once you reach that tipping point, then the whole dynamic changes."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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