Shkin firebase

'What's interim? A year or 40 years?'

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.

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"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."

Afghanistan's lawless border region

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.

Pakistani border guards erratically man hundreds of posts along the 1,519-mile frontier, but are poorly armed and unreliable because they and their families are local natives, US officials say. "There's a great deal of frustration with the border guards," says Lt. Col. Mike Howard, noting that someone shot at US troops from a Pakistani border checkpoint near Shkin in Paktika during a September firefight in which one of his men died.

It is these same forces that Colonel Howard must rely upon to set up additional checkpoints and block retreats when he is mounting operations in Paktika. Tenth Mountain troops do not cross the border, even in "hot pursuit" of the enemy, although elite US forces may have leeway to give chase a few miles into Pakistan. With Al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan beyond his reach, Howard's only option is to disrupt the fighters' infiltration via Paktika's mountain roads and impoverished, isolated villages.

'They hate us the most'

Wearing a camouflage uniform without a flak vest, the Afghan militiaman tallies his losses against Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents with a somber pride.

"We've had 20 or 22 AMF [Afghan militia forces] killed working with the Americans in the past two years," says Mohammad quietly. That's out of the 200 to 250 militiamen he says have joined US forces based at Shkin and Orgun in Paktika.

Interviews with a dozen militia members, interpreters, and other Afghans employed by US forces in Paktika suggest their jobs are as dangerous as they are critical to the US-led counterinsurgency. Indeed, the rate of AMF casualties described by Mohammad is far higher than that of US soldiers in Paktika.

"We are the main target of Al Qaeda," says Mohammad, who is troubled by what he calls the suicidal behavior of Al Qaeda fighters. "They hate us even more because without us, the Americans can't work here."

An AMF commander standing nearby agrees. "I've been working with the Americans five months, and I've been ambushed four times," he says.

Afghan soldiers like these bring speed, keen eyes, and local knowledge to US-led missions. Unburdened by heavy body armor and other gear, they can more swiftly chase guerrillas through the mountainous terrain. In a village they can also more easily pick out suspect individuals.

Yet the Afghans are highly vulnerable to retaliation for allying with Americans; all those interviewed said they had faced death threats.

In Paktika in recent months, Al Qaeda nailed "night letters" on compound doors warning that Afghans - along with their families - would be killed for working with Americans and setting up girls' schools. "I stayed up all night," says one interpreter, Ajab (not his real name) who received such a warning. He fears his neighbors could be guerrilla informants.

In response, US officers made a point of locating the homes of Afghan employees and gave them "SOS" flares to shoot if they were attacked. The US military also compensates the families of Afghans killed on missions. Ajab said his family received $2,400 after his cousin died in an ambush.

Despite their sacrifices, some Afghans feel their loyalty is doubted. "We can never ask [the US soldiers] where we are going. This shows the Americans have only a little trust in us," says Mohammad (a pseudonym). In Paktika, Afghan laborers have been warned by US officers that they will lose their jobs if coalition troops are ambushed in their communities.

Still, having cast their lot with "the helmeted ones," most Afghans say their only choice is to keep fighting. "We have to help the Americans," he says. "If the Americans leave Afghanistan, we will be in big trouble."

AP SOURCES: AP/AFGHANISTAN INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SERVICES