Taskforce Spartan aims to separate friend from foe

The old man smiles and offers tea, salaams and blessings. He listens attentively as the commander from the Afghan National Army explains that the soldiers sitting on the low mud walls either side of his home are there to help.

A few metres away stands Captain Jose Vasquez, of Cherokee Company, 3-71 Cavalry, Taskforce Spartan, Tenth Mountain Division. He, too, is listening attentively.

The house is that of a suspected Taleban sympathiser.

Last Saturday President Barack Obama announced his new strategic plan for Afghanistan. There were few surprises. A major diplomatic effort, civilian officers, aid for Pakistan which underlines the cross-border nature of this conflict and, Obama said, new troops for enhanced training of local forces.

A "surge" of more than 20,000 more troops has already been announced.

Vasquez, originally from El Paso, Texas, and his men are among the first to arrive.

Taskforce Spartan, 2500 men with everything from portable internet cafes to the very latest in armoured, air-conditioned trucks, were sent to the volatile Logar and Wardak provinces. Their aim is to roll back growing insurgent influence to the south and east of Kabul.

General David McKiernan, commander of the 73,000 international troops in Afghanistan, said the new troops would "allow a persistent presence that we have not had before to protect the populace".

This is the new mantra of the coalition forces in Afghanistan.

"Our aim is to separate the people from the enemy," said Colonel David Haight, who leads Taskforce Spartan.

The tactic is known as the Petraeus doctrine, after the ambitious and controversial American general David Petraeus who pioneered it in Iraq and who now commands all US troops there and in Afghanistan.

It is based on the idea that if local people could be made secure and insurgents kept away from them, then progress in reconstruction and economic development would win and retain their loyalty, allowing the country to be stabilised, the local government to be reinforced and the international coalition to withdraw.

"I can become someone's worst enemy in a second but that is a short-term solution," said Haight. "My aim here is governance, security and sustainability."

Haight says his key asset in Logar is Bohumila Ranglova, head of the Czech PRT or Provincial Reconstruction Team.

With a budget of US$4.5 million ($7.90 million) - to be supplemented by some of the US$600 million the US Army has available for development projects in five eastern provinces - Ranglova's specialists have been working on reforestation projects, refurbishing schools, building police stations and restoring traditional irrigation systems.

Working on women's rights, in this profoundly conservative region of a profoundly conservative country is hard, she admits.

Haight is convinced that much of the insurgency "is criminal ... financially motivated".

According to Colonel Steve Osterholzer, Taskforce Spartan's media spokesman, "if a man is holding a shovel, then he isn't holding a gun".

Yet out in the villages, things appear more complicated.

Vasquez led his men out at dawn. The force of well over a hundred heavily armed men drives out into the fields and plains, dismount and move slowly through the villages past sheep flocks, tethered cattle and low, fortified farmsteads. Vasquez and his men do not have the right to search these compounds, though several score insurgents could be hiding in any one of them, for fear of offending local sensibilities.

The villagers are poor, seven years of drought have taken their toll, and the brightest and most literate locals have left for Kabul, 95km away. It will take a lot of development to dry the insurgents' recruiting pool. The villagers watch the troops walk past with studied impassivity.

"They are pretty neutral here," says Vasquez, "but 5km up the valley they love to get involved ... sadly, not on our side."

The Afghan National Army, though improving, still relies on international logistic help and command and is also dominated by northern ethnic groups, virtual foreigners in the south and east of the country.

"We are trying to teach them to run, they are still at the crawling stage," said one US soldier.

Soon the weather will be warmer and the fighting season will begin in earnest.

"We are in something of a honeymoon period," said Colonel Haight.

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