Taliban play hide-and-seek with US troops

It has not been an auspicious start to the morning. The heavy weapons squad has just been dropped into the wrong field of mung beans.

"Man, one of these days we'll be dropped in the right place," Pvt. Mike Patraw says, voicing everyone's thoughts. Being out of position means not only a longer walk, but possibly not being able to provide covering fire for units in the valley below as they search a village.

By the time they reach the village of Kunlalan, Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers and other members of the US 82nd Airborne are already going house to house looking for signs of Taliban weapons or support. Any Taliban who might have been in the village would have hid their Kalashnikovs at the first sound of the Chinook helicopters.

The 40-odd men of the 82nd Airborne - on a five-day mission with ANA troops in the mountains of northern Zabul province - know that their chances of facing an armed encounter with the Taliban are not great. But from a military standpoint, it has been foot patrols and air assaults like this that have produced a year of the most serious fighting with insurgents since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001. The key, US commanders say, is sending a message to the Taliban that their havens are no longer safe, and to Afghan villagers that they can begin to trust that the Afghan Army will be there to protect them.

"Most of the people say they haven't seen anything, never saw any Taliban," says Sgt. Joseph Parker of Cleveland, Ohio, as men of 2nd Battalion, Charlie Company search the mud-walled room of an Afghan home.

Sergeant Parker nods his head toward the residents of this home, some women and children, huddling in the shady corner of the yard. "As far as going and getting to the Taliban through local intelligence, it's not going to happen. The only way to do it is to sneak up on them."

Pvt. Jacob Rutledge, a quiet, lanky kid from Washington, D.C., searches through some baskets near one of the women, who is holding an infant in her arms. A chicken darts out of the basket, as if clucking its final prayer. The infant starts to cry. "I'm sorry," Private Rutledge says gently.

Outside the compound, which sits above a very healthy field of opium poppies, a crowd of old men and children are gathering around the US soldiers. One shepherd pleads with the soldiers to arrest another shepherd who has just passed through town with his flock. "He's a thug," the shepherd says in Pashto. Another villager, an elderly man, approaches an Army medic to ask for medicine for a child. The local people may not be ready to tattle on the local Taliban, but they grasp that the US Army is a possible source of help.

"This is what I love," says Spc. "Doc" Kris Tyte, a medic from Charlotte, N.C. "You get to sit down with kids and an interpreter and just talk. And you know, kids are pretty much kids everywhere. They don't say, I want to be a Taliban. They say, I want to be a policeman, or even president. Even after all these years of war, they want to be productive members of society."

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