Going in small in Afghanistan.

"We presented a force of size and type that would possibly not deter the enemy from fighting, but was large enough and lethal enough to fend and fight for itself" until reinforced, he says. His soldiers returned unscathed, while two guerrillas were confirmed dead and three others wounded.

Indeed, as the ambush attempt near Mangretay showed, US forces usually overwhelm militants who stand and fight. Since arriving last summer, 1-87 has lost three men in Paktika, while killing scores of enemy. Still, soldiers here realize that if this war is fought as one of attrition, the road ahead remains long.

As the snow line drifts lower on the gray-blue peaks, 1-87 plans to step up incursions, denying insurgents a traditional winter lull in which to regroup. "If you ... hunt down the bear where he sleeps, there will be no hibernation," says Sullivan. "We will go there."

In Afghanistan's timeworn landscape, one often has the feeling that Americans troops are battling history itself. Against a backdrop of foreign occupation and warlord feuds, ethnic rifts and militant Islam, they can only hope to impose an uneasy peace.

Alone in his lookout tower back at Shkin firebase, Pvt. Gary Holt watches the sun rise over a ridge of mountains marking the Pakistani border two miles away. As the mist thins over fields below, villagers stir from their mud huts, and donkey carts take to the dirt roads. The smoke of cooking fires hangs in the air.

"It seems this place hasn't changed much since Kipling," says Private Holt, mature beyond his 20-odd years. "This place is like the last frontier."

In Paktika, the US presence has allowed a degree of progress to unfold. Hundreds of new mud-brick compounds housing extended families have sprung up around Shkin and Orgun, while stores, and some industry have moved in. Schools have opened. Meanwhile, US troops are making inroads to improve security in hostile areas such as Barmal.

Still, a degree of success at Shkin, like a pebble in a stream, has shifted the flow of insurgents to other border crossings.

"We're succeeding in disrupting their operations and denying them sanctuary within our area," says Sullivan. "What I can't say is whether we are having a long-term impact. I don't know how easily they regenerate combat power."

In the end, Sullivan and other officers agree that US forces are only an "interim fix" until the Afghan government and a national army gain strength.

"What's interim? A year or 40 years?" he says. "Ask me in 40 years."

For U.S. troops, Paktika's challenge lies in its network of border crossings, from major mountain passes to shepherd trails. For centuries, the region's fiercely independent tribes have freely visited kin across the border - a poorly marked, British colonial vestige known as the Durand Line. Drawn in 1893, it has been ignored by the ethnic Pashtun populations on both sides.

Yet today the porous border also serves arms traffickers and drug smugglers as well as Al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban insurgents concentrated in the neighboring Waziristan regions of Pakistan. There, the Taliban, who are also mainly Pashtun, find safety in the customary hospitality of Pashtun tribes. They operate training camps and draw recruits from fundamentalist Islamic schools known as madrassahs. Meanwhile, they regularly infiltrate Afghanistan to stage attacks on military and civilian targets.

Stepped-up Pakistani military operations in the tribal areas, encouraged and heavily funded by the US, have met with violent resistance - including a rocket attack that killed four Pakistani troops last week. Despite the arrest of some high-level Al Qaeda operatives, Pakistan has so far failed to crack down effectively on the Taliban, which it sponsored until 2001. "For the Pakistanis or us to go in there and suddenly break the code is a lot to expect. It's just hard," says a senior Pentagon official.

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