The next morning the frustrated Americans on Team Prowler helped the PR unload a truck full of rifles and ammunition. The Afghans had just tossed them in a pile without conducting any inventory or organization. "I"m at my wits" end!" shouted Sgt. Ryan Kilaki. Captain Westby was exasperated because many of the cops were at home and not on the base. They are a quick reaction force, he told me, and they are supposed to live on base.

The British and Helmand police command had mismanaged a few hundred thousand dollars in back pay for the police, and the Americans had stepped in to cover the loss. "Jesus, f.u.c.k, they got a long way to go," said an exasperated Sergeant First Cla.s.s Clark. The British army had taken sixty men from the Provincial Reserve with them on a recent operation in Babaji. The PR men didn"t want to go with them, and the Americans were p.i.s.sed off because the reserve was supposed to be one unit. Like many Afghans, the police believed that the British secretly supported the Taliban.

On the Fourth of July, Team Prowler set off with the PR to patrol Highway 601, the key road in the province. It connected to Highway 1, the main road in the country. All trade entering the province pa.s.sed through Highway 601, and it was also the land route to supply British, American, and Afghan forces. The "skuff " hall in the British-run base was running out of food. Villages along the road were controlled by the Taliban. The British were supposed to control the route. Sergeant Dyer, a brawny former Navy SEAL with the stern gaze, square jaw, and low raspy voice of a real-life Marlboro man, complained to me about nightly reports that Highway 601 was mined but that the police didn"t pursue the insurgents. Civilian vehicles avoided it because of IEDs. The police knew where the Taliban were but didn"t pursue them, and they were growing too dependent on the Americans. "At one checkpoint they were still wearing their man-jammies, not uniforms," he said. "IEDs are placed two clicks from police checkpoints, they don"t go on patrol, at the sound of the first shot they request air support. But they"ve cried wolf too many times, and then they say, "If we don"t get air support we"re leaving.""

Dyer was on his third combat deployment in Afghanistan. "There"s too much talk of COIN and civil affairs," he said. "It requires security. You can"t build a school if you can"t protect the teacher." The rules of engagement had changed over the course of Dyer"s three deployments. He worried that his men were more at risk because of limitations on when they could shoot. Like many American troops, he could barely hide his contempt for most of the other coalition members. Only the British, Australians, and Canadians were aggressive, he said. Americans joke that NATO"s ISAF actually stands for "I see Americans fighting" or "I suck at fighting" or "I stay at the FOB." Some of the European allies, meanwhile, complained that the Americans were too aggressive.

Driving down Highway 601, an insurgent with an itchy trigger finger prematurely detonated his IED on the road in front of Team Prowler and the police. The police discovered the command wire for it and fanned around to look in vain for the trigger man. The blast slowed down the police. Captain Westby complained to me that the police were "squirrelly" and that he had to do a lot of "mentoring" to get them to go forward. They headed toward a village called Balochan. The National Directorate of Security men accompanying them-the NDS is the Afghan equivalent of the FBI-didn"t know how to get there, and none of the police had ever been there, so they got lost. Westby worried that this would be a problem when the police ran their own operations. The Americans took the lead, but when they got to Balochan, Lieutenant Farid, the police commander, insisted it was the wrong town. In Balochan they were shot at from four hundred meters away. A British contingent was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades. The Americans, I was told, "lay devastating fire" on the tree line from where they received fire-then the insurgent fire subsided. The Americans couldn"t confirm any dead insurgents. "Afghans suck at shooting," they said. The Americans thought they were up against foreign fighters because of the accurate shots. One policeman was shot in the head. The others thought he was dead; they laid him on the ground and covered his face. The Americans saw the man was still breathing and had a pulse, so they evacuated him by helicopter. The Americans searched the maze of compounds. One policeman was killed; his friend insisted on going out to save him, but the other Afghans were too scared. The police had no radios, so they couldn"t communicate, and their fire was coming too close to the Americans. They also weren"t wearing their armor. "They don"t like it because it"s heavy," one American explained. Another policeman was shot in the chest. The others backed off, abandoning their friend. An American tried to figure out where the fire was coming from and drag the man to safety, as the interpreter Mansur ran to help. They extracted the dead policeman, and Lieutenant Farid was wounded in his calf. He was wearing a black T-shirt without body armor. "You and I as leaders have to make the decisions to set examples for our men," Westby told him. Farid made excuses, and Westby felt like he was talking to a kid. Armor was hot and heavy and wouldn"t have helped his leg, Farid argued. An American was wounded. Mansur picked up the American"s rifle and started firing (all the interpreters were trained to fight as well). Sergeant Dyer was disappointed with the PR"s performance. "They sucked," he said. "They folded," one of his soldiers agreed.

The next day Team Prowler and the PR trained at the shooting range. Sergeant Dyer was dejected. "The Provincial Reserve aren"t ready," he said. "Their training is too short. They can"t drive. They can"t shoot. They"re weak on tactics, lacking in motivation. In training the last few days, after two or three hours their performance drops even more. Squad leaders are terrible because in the Soviet system NCOs don"t do anything." Mansur joined in, laughing. "They couldn"t hit targets," he said. "Some hit the sand." Out of eight men in each group, three could aim at a target, Specialist Campos told me.

Police working in the south had a high rate of desertion. They often refused to work if Americans were not present, and they were afraid to go on operations. Their vehicles were more vulnerable to IEDs and attacks. They lacked ammunition, fuel, and other essential supplies, and they didn"t have the logistical ability to provide it for themselves.

Bill Hix, an experienced Special Forces colonel with extensive COIN experience, led the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command in Kandahar, which was in charge of training and mentoring the Afghan police and army in southern Afghanistan, including Helmand. There were forty-one portraits on his wall of Americans from his organization who had died. All but two had been killed by IEDs. He would need a much bigger wall for the Afghans. From January 2007 to April 2009, he lost 2,096 Afghan police and 949 soldiers. Hix did not believe more American troops were needed, merely an "adequate" police force and army, whose numbers he hoped would double. "The police should be identifying clandestine networks," he said. But there weren"t nearly enough of them: the ratio in southern Afghanistan was two police per thousand people. In the United States it was four per thousand; Afghanistan was at war, so more were needed. "We"re driving this car as we"re changing the engine," he said.

Should Afghanistan cease to be a protectorate of the West, it wouldn"t be able to pay for its own security forces. It doesn"t have the resources to fund such a large military. The result, instead, would be a heavily militarized society. With the end of American subsidies, the men with weapons and training would return to warlordism and militias, preying on the population. Pakistan"s army, which had been subsidized by the Americans for years, became a state unto itself, independent of the civilian control it should have answered to.

An effective police requires an effective justice system, including judges, lawyers, court clerks, prisons, and an administrative system. Corruption among the police and other government officials was also a huge problem for the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. Afghan cops couldn"t be expected to turn down bribes when they knew that everyone else in the system was taking them. And it was the cops who took the greatest risks in the country"s most dangerous job. The high illiteracy rate also made it difficult to build a system of justice. How could records be kept? Training lasted only a couple of months. Creating and training security forces were difficult enough in peacetime, but they were even more challenging during war. After training the cops returned to the same conditions: corruption and lack of support. They were the only face of the Afghan government most people saw, and it was too often an ugly one.

Helmand is not only the worst province in Afghanistan; it is also the wealthiest. It has a sophisticated irrigation system and some paved roads. Its dam helps to pump out cheap, stable electricity. It is little wonder that Helmand, with some of the best agricultural land in the region, is the world"s largest grower of poppy. With the best resources in the country, it has been a convenient place for an insurgency to sustain itself. Although taxing heroin sales is one source of the Taliban"s finances, in fact the drug trade funds everybody and all sides in Afghanistan, and the Taliban get most of their funding from donors in the Arab Gulf and elsewhere. Heroin is Afghanistan"s only real industry, but it has created a parallel shadow economy that undermines and corrupts the government. The drug trade is more of a consequence than a cause of Afghanistan"s many problems.

In the 1980s and "90s the Alizais dominated Helmand at the expense of their rival tribe, the Ishaqzais. Nasim Akhundzada was the top mujahideen commander in the area and was responsible for creating the poppy industry in Helmand. He brutally forced farmers to grow opium and established a sharecropping system that trapped poor indebted farmers in an endless cycle of planting opium. His brother Muhamad was his army commander, and Muhamad"s son Sher Muhamad Akhundzada, known as SMA, would go on to control Helmand. The Ishaqzais were dominant during the Taliban"s reign, from 1994 until 2001. But when SMA became governor after the Taliban were removed in 2001, the Ishaqzais were once again marginalized and punished. The Taliban took advantage of this rivalry to increase their influence over both majority-Ishaqzai areas and also Alizai groups. Most of the governors appointed by Kabul in 2002 were warlords. Helmand had no effective administration after 2001. The provincial government did not provide anything to locals, and it abused them. Between 2001 to 2006, SMA and those around him labored to build a strong base of support in Helmand, and he placed his men throughout the province"s police and government. Under his reign poppy growers affiliated with him were immune from eradication. SMA pressured farmers to grow poppy, leading to a 160 percent increase in the harvest. Meanwhile, the Taliban protected poppy farmers whose crops were targeted for eradication.

It took a while for Helmand to get really bad. In 2002 Afghan security locations in Helmand on the Pakistani border were attacked several times. In 2004 some clerics in the area urged their flocks to fight the Americans and Afghan government. Although militias allied with President Karzai helped ward off the Taliban, they also abused the population and took advantage of their power to punish rivals. They would also give false tips to the coalition or the Afghan security forces against their rivals. These fears drove many to seek protection with the Taliban. By 2004 it was clear that locals were being recruited in Helmand to join the new Taliban. Those who had suffered at the hands of Afghan security forces were especially susceptible to recruitment. In 2005 the Taliban began to set up strongholds in Helmand, and by 2006 they dominated most of Helmand. That year it became common for Taliban attacks in Helmand to involve hundreds of fighters.

Dad Muhamad Khan, the Helmand boss for the National Security Directorate under SMA"s reign, was known for being abusive. But the American military backed him because of his loyal service. In 2006 the British and the UN insisted that SMA be removed, and Karzai finally relented. The British had just taken over control of Helmand and discovered ten tons of heroin in the governor"s house. SMA"s successor as governor was Engineer Daud. Though Daud had not had a militia in the past, he demanded that he be allowed to set one up for his own survival. The government allowed him to have up to five hundred men. SMA still had a good relationship with Karzai, though, and was made a senator. His loyalists plotted against Daud, and Karzai made sure SMA was still the real power by appointing his brother as the deputy governor. Daud was pressured to support poppy eradication, which cost him the support of the local population. In late 2006 Karzai fired Daud, who was trying to go after militias and the unruly police of Helmand. Daud"s police chief was sent elsewhere. British Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to save Daud but failed. The British were angry and blamed the Americans for Daud"s removal. Daud"s successor was weak and too scared even to go to Lashkar Gah, the capital for Helmand, for the first few months. After SMA was removed his militias stopped fighting the Taliban, so security only worsened. The Americans got SMA to arm tribesmen to fight the Taliban, but many switched sides and joined the insurgency. Similar defections occurred when the Americans tried to set up tribal militias in other provinces. SMA kept his militia even after he was no longer in power; he and his men still worked with Afghan security forces and the British and abused the population.

Though the Taliban failed to set up a base in northern Helmand in 2004, two years later they succeeded-thanks to the increased popularity they enjoyed as a result of SMA"s abusive att.i.tude and arrogance. The rivalry between Alizais and Ishaqzais also led to fighting. When the government and the coalition began attempting to eradicate poppy in Helmand, the Taliban"s popularity increased. Pro-Taliban songs and sermons could be purchased in Helmand markets. Villagers would act as informers and help the Taliban set up ambushes, and they would throw stones at coalition convoys. Soon districts began to fall under Taliban control. The Taliban recruited from the displaced people"s camps in Helmand. During 2006 the area where poppy was harvested increased by 250 percent, and the next year it nearly doubled. By 2006 the Taliban had the support of the population in Helmand, and most of the fighters were locals. There were reports of the police collaborating with the Taliban against the coalition in Helmand, or even fighting against it. Helmand police would arrest people and demand ransoms for their release. Following six months of fighting in one district alone fifty-two Afghan police were dead. In another Helmand police unit of 350 men, seventy deserted in 2006. The British thought they would defeat the Taliban by the summer of 2006. Instead they realized they were besieged by up to two thousand of them in northern Helmand alone. Although the British had spent nearly ten million dollars on reconstruction projects in Helmand by the end of 2006, n.o.body seemed to notice. District governors and police chiefs in northern and southern Helmand were targeted. There were failed a.s.sa.s.sination attempts against Daud. Most districts were abandoned or unable to operate. The Taliban had a logistical base and a clinic for fighters close to the provincial capital that could handle nearly one thousand men. In May 2006 the British launched an operation to take control of Helmand, but in July the Taliban captured the Nawa and Garmsir districts. The British retook Garmsir, and then the Taliban re-retook it.

By the fall of 2006, the British were exhausted in Helmand and negotiated truces with the Taliban via village elders in two districts that allowed the elders to choose the governor, chief of police, and other officials in the district governments. The Afghan government and American military were opposed to this "surrender," but the UN backed the deal. A few months later the truces ended, with the British blaming the Americans for their demise. Daud had been crucial in negotiating the truces, but he was removed. Relations between the British and Afghan governments deteriorated. SMA maintained his pernicious control. In 2007 only four of the thirteen district police chiefs were appointed from Kabul, with the rest under the control of SMA, who remained close to Karzai. Karzai, meanwhile, complained that if it were not for pressure from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he would have reinstated SMA. Most police in Helmand were more like a militia, and mostly from the same tribe.

The year 2007 was the first in which the Taliban faced pressure in Helmand, but the situation continued to deteriorate. The Afghan army complained that police in Helmand were demanding road taxes from drivers and stealing private property. That year five hundred kilograms of opium were seized by security forces in the area and divided between the police and the army, with only fifteen kilograms given to coalition forces. The British were opposed to eradication, while Americans pushed for aerial eradication, which only further alienated the population. The British floundered, unable to hold territory or defeat an enemy that fought asymmetrically. On one occasion in 2007, the British responded to a single shot fired by the Taliban with mortars, heavy machine guns, and missiles, and they dropped a bomb for good measure.

In 2008 the deputy governor was a.s.sa.s.sinated by a suicide bomber while still inside a mosque. That year the U.S. Marines joined the eight thousand British troops. The Marines tried to take Garmsir and also failed. They spoke of implementing COIN, living among and protecting the people, holding the territory they cleared, and winning over the population. It seemed as though every year there was a new plan that was better than the previous one, and when the foreign troops moved on, the Afghans who had made the mistake of working with them would be killed. Although the stated goal of the Western coalition was to extend the reach of the Afghan government, in the past extending the reach of the very unpopular central government had only caused further instability. The Americans and the Taliban had a similar narrative: the Taliban promised to protect people from the Afghan government, and the Americans promised to protect them by extending the government"s reach. By 2009 half of Afghanistan was controlled by Taliban, and Helmand was the province most surely in Taliban hands. "Control" might be overstating the strength of the Taliban in some areas, but at a minimum they could deny the government and international forces the ability to control. In some cases insurgents did not formally belong to the Taliban. They may have been locals who resented the American and British occupation just as they had resented the Soviet occupation. Increased foreign intervention had made the security situation only worse for locals.

In Helmand the security forces were dominated by the Nurzai tribe. Colonel Shirzad, from the Nurzai tribe, served in various security posts in Helmand before being appointed police chief. Abdul Rahman Jan, the first postwar police chief, was also a Nurzai, as was Lieutenant Colonel Ayub, who had served as deputy chief of police following the overthrow of the Taliban. Ayub was known as an uneducated illiterate warlord. Colonel Torjan, the logistics officer, was a Nurzai. The Helmand pa.s.sport officer was a Nurzai. The Border Patrol chief for Helmand was a Nurzai. General Mirwais, the head of the police in southern Afghanistan, was a Nurzai. The Nurzais were a plurality in the province, especially in its important places. Marja, the district where the Taliban had its strongest hold, had a Nurzai plurality. In 2009 Marja had a b.u.mper poppy crop thanks to Taliban protection. A few months later Marja was the first district targeted for a major U.S. offensive in 2010.

Every police chief in Helmand, including Shirzad, bought his post from officials at the Interior Ministry. Police in Helmand were known to release prisoners for bribes ranging from five hundred to twenty thousand dollars. Shirzad"s predecessor arrested a Taliban commander and was offered fifty thousand dollars for his release, but the Americans caught wind of it, so he couldn"t close the deal. To ease the pressure he was facing to release the prisoner, he asked for the prisoner to be flown to Kabul.

In 2007 a district police commander went to Colonel Torjan to receive his two mandated Ford Rangers, but Torjan demanded ten thousand dollars for each. The Americans took the commander"s report, but two or three weeks later he was killed by an IED. Conducting routine affairs in the Education Department required a bribe. The Justice Ministry in Helmand was particularly notorious. In addition to the poor quality of the police in Helmand, there just weren"t enough of them. Helmand was supposed to have an increase of five hundred police as part of the surge, but so far only 211 had been recruited.

Locals complained that the police charged taxes at checkpoints. "The police know we"re here to watch them as much as fight the Taliban," said Sergeant Gustafson. "Shirzad is a wily adept politician," he told me. "He comes with a lot of baggage." Shirzad was tied to the warlords connected to the poppy trade. Following a large opium seizure in 2009, the drugs disappeared and the trail went cold at Shirzad"s headquarters. It was not that Afghans were corrupt and the Americans would teach them how to govern. The Americans helped bring corruption to Afghanistan by funding warlords, paying off tribes, and creating parallel inst.i.tutions and a network of foreign and Afghan contractors. They created an infrastructure of unaccountability.

July 2009 was the worst month since the war started for the Americans and their allies, with forty-two Americans and twenty-two British soldiers killed, and a total of seventy-five foreign troops killed. Most of the casualties that month occurred in Helmand, when the Americans launched an operation for the fourth time to secure the area. More than four thousand Marines descended on the Helmand River Valley in a mission that had been planned months earlier. It was the first major operation of Obama"s presidency. Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, Marine commander for the operation, stressed that the focus was on getting the Afghan government back on its feet. He urged his men to get to know the people, to drink tea and eat goat with them. Six hundred and fifty Afghan soldiers also took part. Nicholson promised that "where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold." The Marines hoped to win over the population. So too had the thousands of British soldiers who had been in the province since 2006. The British military was conducting a simultaneous operation in Helmand. Like the Marines, they hoped to provide enough security so that the August presidential elections could be held credibly.

About 750 Marines made it to an agricultural district called Nawa south of Lashkar Gah. Before they arrived there were only about forty British soldiers there, ensconced with some Afghan soldiers and police in the district center, unable to move outside a small secure zone one kilometer wide. Beyond that the Taliban manned checkpoints. "Everybody knew we were coming," a Marine colonel told me, "so we wanted to deceive the enemy about what that would mean." On June 19 three hundred Marines flew into Nawa and conducted patrols to lull the Taliban and give them ten days to think that was it, that they could handle the surge. The patrols had an average of one contact with their enemy every day. On July 2, the rest of the battalion came to block the Taliban escape and reinforcements. The Marines had expected their invasion to be more kinetic, meaning they had expected more shooting. They encountered a few days of stiff resistance and were impressed with their enemy"s combat techniques. But then the Taliban wisely melted away, laying down their arms or fleeing to Marja, fifteen miles to the west. The Taliban left poorly hidden weapons caches and poorly placed IEDs, and the Marines caught some of them fleeing. The first two IEDs destroyed vehicles, but the Marines uncovered the next twenty before they detonated. The Taliban also set up antipersonnel mines, placing an IED in a tree with a kite string attached to it as a command wire, and another IED in a wall.

The Marines were led by Lieut. Col. William McCollough, who operated out of a partially constructed brick building covered with sandbags. Although they officially had 650 Afghan soldiers with them, in private the Marines complained that it was more like four hundred and that the lack of an "Afghan face" was their "Achilles" heel." For an operation months in the making, it was a huge and inexplicable shortage.

Team Ironhorse and the ANCOP were to go to Helmand at the same time to increase the Afghan veneer. "We will deliver stabilization and development," a Marine colonel in Helmand told me. "The Taliban filled the s.p.a.ce. They took the governance high ground. The Taliban rule through intimidation and coercion. Hara.s.sment by the Taliban has become more intense, and the population is becoming more dissatisfied." There was now a civilian "stabilization adviser" in Nawa with the Marines, the colonel told me, who was "trying to coordinate with local Afghan leadership so that the district government and police chief can organize and take the governance high ground. We"re going to deliver governance by demilitarizing it as soon as possible. The most important lesson from Iraq was the transition piece. You need to have Afghans involved at every phase and remind yourself it"s about them and their country, and remind each other we have to get our Afghan partners involved at every level." The short-term goal was to provide security so they could deliver the upcoming August presidential elections in a meaningful way.

Major Contreras led Team Ironhorse and Prowler in mentoring the police. The ANCOP were a highly trained unit (by local standards) that took over temporarily for local police units while they were sent away for training. Contreras was excited about his role in the war. "This is in its infancy," he said. "We"re beginning to see the military might that we as a nation can bring." A true believer, he explained that he was fighting to protect the American way of life and because his wife had been working in the Pentagon when it was. .h.i.t on September 11. Contreras was concerned about the "negative tone" of my previous article on Afghanistan for Rolling Stone and hoped I would write a more positive article this time. "We can win this," he told me. "We were doing it one year at a time before for seven years."

But first he would have to overcome Afghan bureaucracy. He couldn"t go to Nawa to link up with the Marines because Colonel Saki had not received his official orders from the Interior Ministry. The order had been signed and sealed five days earlier, but it had to be delivered by courier to Saki. There was no e-mail or other way for Saki to receive his orders. This was minor compared with the problems Contreras usually had with the ministry, he joked. Colonel Saki had not received supplies like radios, ammunition, and fuel, so he did not even have the logistical ability to head down. Saki met Colonel Torjan, who was in charge of logistics, and asked him for a commitment to replenish the ANCOP"s weapons and ammunition. Torjan took him to his depot to show him that he had nothing to spare. The following day Contreras went to meet Torjan in the police headquarters. He stuffed a pistol between his belt and the small of his back, just in case.

Torjan had not received the official doc.u.ment from the ministry ordering him to equip the ANCOP. All he had was a letter from the ANCOP. The ANCOP could have made it up themselves, Torjan said. There was fighting in many parts of Helmand, and many people were running out of ammunition, he said. He received about one-third of what he requested from the ministry in Kabul. Two British officers advising the police headquarters sat in on the meeting, as did a portly civilian contract police adviser. The provincial reserve requested eighty radios. Contreras and the British disputed how many they actually needed. Then they struggled to figure out which form they needed to fill out to get the Interior Ministry to ship supplies to Kandahar and then to Helmand, and how to make sure the staff at the Kandahar headquarters didn"t keep most of the supplies for themselves. Contreras and Torjan discussed how the ANCOP would refuel in Nawa, with Torjan suggesting they find gas stations. n.o.body knew if there were any gas stations in the area.

That evening Ironhorse sat waiting to be briefed by Contreras. They were all scouts, and some were snipers, chosen by their lieutenant because they were "rough" and "shooters." The major"s original plan called for them to go to Nawa before the Marines got there. "We would have gotten eaten alive," one of them joked. The Marines in Nawa were attempting to provide a safe and secure environment for the Afghan government in order to facilitate the handover of the security mission to the ANSF, he explained. Ironhorse"s mission was to conduct a movement to Nawa-traveling through the eastern desert to avoid the much faster main road, which had not been cleared of IEDs-in order to link up with Marines and support their operations.

Contreras said guys in police uniforms were hara.s.sing civilians in Nawa. The men seemed very skeptical about the whole thing. "Duration of mission and number of legitimate police in Nawa, and how will ANP get along with ANCOP, and who is mentoring the ANPs there?" Staff Sergeant McGuire tersely asked without moving or looking at the major. Staff Sergeant Verdorn complained that they would be doing the Marines" job of clearing. As the major concluded his brief, McGuire loudly muttered, "It"s a c.o.c.ksuck." Contreras left. "That was very well thought out," McGuire said. I asked him to elaborate. "Fuel will be the biggest issue," he said. "We don"t know where we"re gonna live, we"re not taking tents." It was the worst operations order he had ever seen, he said, just telling them to go down there and the Marines would tell them what to do. "It"s a "fly by the seat of your pants" operation." There was no plan for what would happen after they got to the school where the Marines were based. McGuire wondered what the mission was. If it was to give an Afghan face, well then there were already hundreds of Afghan soldiers there. Staff Sergeant Thacker was also worried. There were "a lot of I don"t knows" in the brief, he said, like the radio frequencies for the Marines. "A normal op order, even the lowliest private knows what everybody"s going to do," McGuire told me.

The British warned against occupying a school, but Contreras dismissed the concern. "The point is to provide a safe and secure environment," he said. He told the men to plan for seven days before they returned to base. "The reason why we"re going down is to put an Afghan face on the mission," he said. "There isn"t enough ANSF there." Contreras explained to me later that the goal was to set the conditions to deploy the ANCOP to work with the Marines in that area. It was a clear-and-hold operation, a basic element of counterinsurgency. "The Afghans have to feel like we"re there with them," he said. The Marines would clear the area of Taliban, and the police would hold it. "My Afghan counterparts say that loads of Taliban want to stop fighting and reform," Contreras told me. He believed the Taliban had seen the error of their ways. All evidence pointed to the contrary, though. The Taliban were more confident than ever.

"The Marines are trained to go off a ship, hit the ground and f.u.c.king charge," Contreras told me, worrying that they might not be suitable for COIN. "I"ve never been to the place where I"m going. I have no idea what it looks like," he admitted. Contreras drove to the ANCOP facility, and we walked to Saki"s office. There was a marijuana plant in the garden. Saki was watching Bollywood movies. He had a picture of President Karzai on his wall, some plastic flowers next to it, a bare desk, and a coffee table in his office, along with a map of Helmand. Saki wore an ornate salwar kameez, cream-colored with shiny embroidery. He had thick eyebrows and a short, well-groomed beard. "Intelligence we received says that in two days all the Taliban will leave Nawa and go to Marja, because of the large number of Marines," he said. Saki warned that the Taliban planted at least one hundred IEDs in Nawa but added that most were of poor quality and would not explode. About twenty were properly planted and effective, he said, with remote control detonation. Saki showed the longer road through the desert we would take to avoid IEDs along the road to Nawa.

IEDs were the biggest threat, the perfect asymmetric weapon. In 2009 there were thousands of IED attacks on ANSF. Most of the American and British soldiers killed every month were victims of IEDs, not small-arms fire, but IEDs were not just effective when they exploded. The threat of them crippled foreign and Afghan security forces. It meant that their vehicles were not free to go to all areas, and that they had to proceed at a snail"s pace with bomb detectors walking in front of convoys or their vehicles crawling ahead. IEDs were built from homemade explosives like fertilizer and fuel as well as old mortars from past wars. Some were detonated by remote control, by cable or a pressure plate. In Iraq paved roads made it harder to conceal them; in Afghanistan the prevalence of dirt roads made it easier.

The men of Ironhorse had lost their lieutenant and a sergeant, as well as an interpreter and a cop, in a February 2009 IED blast. Lieutenant Southworth and Staff Sergeant Burkholder had gone to examine an IED the ANCOP discovered. They asked for an explosive ordnance disposal team to destroy it because they needed the road open and they worried civilians would get blown up. The British told them to mark the location and move on. As the ANCOP tried to dismantle the IED, it blew up. Ironhorse and the police spent an hour picking up pieces of their friends from the road and even a tree. Ironhorse later got a good tip on the IED maker who had killed their two friends. They raided his house, arresting him and his son, but when the two prisoners were in police detention they paid $1,500 to two guards and escaped. Ironhorse had returned to the house three times looking for them.

Although the men were chosen by their lieutenant for being "meat eaters," the months of daily operations and s.h.i.tting in bags had taken a toll on them. They hated being in Afghanistan and being sent on missions that weren"t their own; they resented the neglect they felt and the lack of progress. One sergeant"s parents owned a hardware store and sent the team four tow straps for their Humvees because their request through the military was going nowhere. One Humvee drove around with bad transmission for a month and a half because they couldn"t get a mechanic. "That"s the kind of s.h.i.t that just wears on you," Sergeant McGuire told me. "We were doing repairs above our mechanical level because there wasn"t anybody to look at it, and then we got an e-mail asking why we were doing it, a kick in the nuts." While stationed in southern Helmand, they had to find their own water supply because the Army wasn"t providing them with any.

Southworth had been very pa.s.sionate, his men told me; he believed he had come to give Afghan kids a better future, and he loved what he was doing. He paid Afghans $150 for pointing out IEDs. A rich aunt sent him the money. It was unusual but it worked, his men said. The men had been told they would be on a large base in a safe job. Southworth knew different. They were going into the s.h.i.t. He spent over a year putting the team together, sending them to schools for sniper, scout, combat lifesaver, and mountain skills. He gave a speech to the men before their final leave back home, warning them that a couple of them wouldn"t make it back. His death was a huge loss for the team.

Contreras agreed to go through the desert to avoid the main road. The Marines or police working with them would meet them on the other side of the Argandab River to guide them to the schoolhouse base. The Marines were in the desert between Marja and Nawa to prevent an exodus of Taliban to Marja and prevent reinforcements from Marja coming into Nawa. Saki thought the Marines couldn"t distinguish between Taliban and civilians. He asked for gunpowder residue kits so that people"s hands could be tested to see if they were handling weapons. None were available. Saki strongly believed most Taliban were local farmworkers who fired when they had a chance and then threw down their weapons and took up shovels. Contreras told Saki he wanted him to set up two checkpoints with thirty men each so there would be about thirty left for patrolling and other missions. "If there are Marines with us, we can man checkpoints," Saki said. "Otherwise we can"t." It was too dangerous for his men to do it alone.

But Saki had still has not received his written orders from the Interior Ministry to go on the mission on Sunday, and it was already Friday. He joked that by the time he got the orders the Nawa operation would be over. He worried that his chain of command would make problems for him, especially if he lost somebody there. Saki asked Contreras to tell the American training headquarters in Kandahar to e-mail the deputy minister of interior and explain that they needed an order to move to Nawa. He still could not even confirm that he would go there. He needed orders or he would get in trouble, but he didn"t have the authority to speak to the ANCOP commander in Kabul or the deputy minister of interior. He asked the Americans to do it for him and pressure his leadership to give him the mission orders. A key element in the year"s largest operation was being held up by bureaucracy.

Saki was concerned about his informant in Nawa, who was traveling on foot. He asked Contreras for money to get him a motorcycle. It would cost $500 at the most, he said. He lost informants because of lack of resources, he said, and asked for more to help them. But Contreras was noncommittal. Saki had not heard from one of his informants for the past two days. He worried that the man had been captured by the Taliban. Saki had no food, fuel, or water for the mission. The Marines would help provide food, Contreras a.s.sured him, while Ironhorse would take care of the water. This left only the need for diesel fuel. The Marines had fifty heat casualties yesterday, Contreras told Saki: "They haven"t learned to stop working in the middle of the day." Saki and his a.s.sistant laughed.

The next day Contreras met with Saki again. "The Marines are giving me a lot of problems because of the delay," he said. Contreras asked for an a.s.surance that they could leave in two days. Saki was still waiting for supplies. A quick reaction force of forty men from Kandahar would also go along with Saki"s sixty or so men from ANCOP, and he would equip them. "They will look like ANCOP, but will they act like ANCOP?" Contreras asked, worried that they might spoil the good name of Saki"s ANCOP. "As long as you and I are in charge it will be okay," Saki said with a smile. He told Contreras he heard the Marines were trying to get close to the people but the local police were making problems and people were complaining that the police were thieves. "We will tie Taliban to trees and shoot them," Saki said. Contreras looked down and shook his head, laughing. "Enemy morale is low," said Saki. "The enemy is nothing." Saki didn"t trust the local Nawa ANP. "They inform the Taliban," he said. He also didn"t trust the police in Lashkar Gah and warned Contreras not to travel with them. "If they could, the ANP would hand me over to the Taliban," Saki said. The ANCOP liked to say about the ANP that "you can change the blanket on a donkey, but it"s still a donkey."

Two days later they finally get the order to go. McGuire was in command of the first Humvee, and I joined him as a pa.s.senger. The gunner up top shot pen flares at cars that got too close. The pop sounded like a gunshot and served as a warning. We drove by a group of small kids fighting, punching one another in the face. The men cheered. McGuire opened the windows and shouted, urging them on. McGuire asked if I was sure I wanted to be in the first vehicle. It would be the first one to get blown up by IEDs.

The team linked up with the ANCOP and waited for them to get ready. Contreras met with Saki and a.s.sured him that he would also take part in all the meetings with the Marines. Saki suggested that the Americans" armored vehicles take the lead once they crossed the river because his vehicles were more vulnerable to IEDs, and recommended that the Americans stay in the lead in dangerous areas. Contreras agreed. He told Saki he still didn"t know who would meet them on the other side.

As we drove south the ANCOP stopped in front of every culvert to search both sides of it. Progress was slow. Some of the police pickup trucks got stuck in the deep soft sand. The Americans grew frustrated with the way the ANCOP plodded through the desert. Our vehicle searched for a place to cross the hundred-meter Argandab River, avoiding the unexploded mortars on the sand. McGuire emerged to walk across it, making sure the vehicles could cross. The water reached his mid-thigh. Water seeped inside the Humvee, reaching up to my calves. The rest of the vehicles followed. One of the rangers got stuck in the water and had to be towed out. "ANCOP is better than the ANP in running checkpoints," McGuire said, "but little things like vehicle movement, and it all breaks down." "Instead of following each other they race around," Sergeant Sadler said, laughing at the ANCOPs crossing the river like they were at Nascar. Two of the police got into an argument about the driving, and one pointed his rifle menacingly at the other. This had happened before, Verdorn later told me. Once, on their base, two of the ANCOPs got p.i.s.sed at each other and drew their pistols. "There was blood in their eyes," Verdorn said. The Americans were caught between them.

Two Marine Humvees met Ironhorse across the river. Thacker chatted with them about what kinds of IEDs they had encountered. We were in a thick vegetated area of farmland and trees. Cows grazed near flooded fields. We crossed narrow ca.n.a.ls and arrived at the schoolhouse. Sandbags lined the top of it. Hundreds of Marines wandered around shirtless, wearing green shorts and kicking up dust as they walked. It looked like Lord of the Flies. They slept on the ground outside or in cla.s.srooms that smelled of sweaty feet.

A Marine captain thanked Contreras for his arrival. "Our weak spot" was the shortage of ANSF, he said, so the additional cops were helpful. Nawa had been quiet for the past five days, since July 2. "The Taliban left for Marja to lie low," the captain said, "but this is their breadbasket, so they"re not likely to give it up." Ironhorse occupied two dirty arched rooms in the schoolhouse. The men hastily swept the broken gla.s.s, dust, and dirt and set up cots, unloading boxes of water bottles and food, making it home.

The Marine commander, Lieutenant Colonel McCollough, told Contreras that they had discovered "rogue" police who were abusing people in Aynak, to the north. In two communities people had complained about the police. When the Marines first encountered the local police in Aynak, the police were so startled that they fired warning shots and nearly got into a firefight. "They weren"t disciplined and appeared to be on drugs," he said, addressing Saki. "They had no mentors and had no connection to a higher headquarters. It worries me that that"s how those communities view the Afghan police, so I wanted the ANCOP to replace those police and show those communities what ANSF is about."

McCollough turned to Contreras and said, "I"m glad you"re here. You couldn"t have come at a better time." Nawa"s chief of police, Nafaz Khan, sat in on the meeting. He had a long beard and a long, nervous face. The Marines described him as a local mafia boss. "The Taliban come to people"s houses at night and demand collaboration," Khan said. "If people don"t get away from the Taliban, the elections will fail." Although he had 250 men officially working under him, he said the real number for this large rural area of 180,000 people was only 138. "We had a lot of tough days here and we cannot handle those days anymore," he said. "There were times when we had no food and n.o.body came to ask us how we were doing." Sergeant Sadler suspected that Khan was keeping his men"s salary for himself, forcing the police to steal for a living. Khan denied that the police in Aynak were under his authority and claimed he had never heard of them.

Saki didn"t trust the Nawa commander and waited until he left to speak freely. McCollough told Saki that he should supplant the "rogue police" in Aynak. "Those are not police officers," he said. "They"re criminals." He estimated there were about sixty of them. The Marines had to fight to get up to Aynak, and although it was only a few kilometers away, they planned our trip up there like a careful military operation.

The next day we waited. The men of Ironhorse played cards. The ANCOP sat in the shade of a tree.

The Marines promised that once in Aynak they would meet with locals in a shura, or council. But Thacker dismissed it. "These shuras are just a b.i.t.c.h session," he said. "They"ll complain about cops shaking them down. The major will make promises, and the ANP will come back and go back to the same ways." After their additional training, when the ANP returned to one district where Ironhorse had taken over, they went back to setting up illegal checkpoints and demanding money from cars pa.s.sing by. When Ironhorse and the ANCOP came in, towns that were formerly abandoned would slowly get re-populated with their residents, and when Ironhorse and the ANCOP prepared to leave and make way for the ANP again, people would flee and move back to Lashkar Gah. "We don"t see what it"s like after we leave," Thacker told me. One team of police who came back from training actually got into a firefight with the Afghan army and killed four men. In one district the ANP came back from their training with new body armor, boots, goggles, and rifles; later, when Ironhorse returned on a mission to support the British, whose base was in danger of being overrun, they found the same ANP wearing sandals but not their body armor or goggles. The problem with coming in for a short cycle as the local ANP were sent on training, Thacker told me, was that just when they got to know the area and the people, they had to leave.

The men prepared for a departure the following morning. The Marines gave them enough fuel for another day or so. McGuire worried about what they would do after that. "The homework wasn"t done in advance," he said. At 5 a.m. Sergeant First Cla.s.s Sadler showed the men the route. The military command for Helmand contradicted the Marines and Nafaz Khan, informing Contreras that the Aynak police were legitimate and that they belonged to the Nawa headquarters and Khan. We rumbled slowly along a green ca.n.a.l. Marine minesweepers walked ahead of us. At 9 a.m., nearly four hours after leaving, we had gone only four or five kilometers. It was a numbing pace and one that allowed the fleet-footed Taliban to flee well in advance. The Americans" enemy was elusive, normally engaging them from a few hundred meters away unburdened by the heavy body armor and gear the Americans had.

As we progressed, I watched children tending cows and sheep in dark green fields. It was almost idyllic. The men I was traveling with linked up with the Marines at 10:30 a.m. Dozens of their vehicles were parked off the dirt road on plowed fields, crushing corn plants. "This farmer is not gonna be happy," Corporal Chapman said. The Marines had paid damages to farmers in the past few days. They accidentally set one field on fire and ran around trying to put it out.

The shura meeting was canceled because we were so late. Instead, Marines lay about in the shade. Specialist Baker sat atop a Humvee. "We came, we parked, we relocated, then we parked," he said triumphantly.

Marine Captain Schoenmaker told Contreras that when they first arrived in Aynak and asked locals about the Taliban, they heard complaints about the police instead. He estimated that there were about 150 of them. They were stoned, he said, wearing beads and looking shady. "It was uncomfortable when we met them, they were all high," he explained. Aynak was mostly deserted, he said. The Marines didn"t know what to expect up there, and Colonel Saki was frustrated with the lack of a plan.

We languished in the heat for hours, eating watermelons purchased from a local farmer. McCollough complained that he had been given only one hundred Afghan soldiers. The night before he had watched satellite footage of twenty-five guys dressed in black meeting the cops at the Aynak checkpoint, he told Contreras. I thought they might have just been other cops. Saki called his boss, Colonel Shirzad, who said he would send somebody down to Aynak. Shirzad said one station in Aynak belonged to Nawa district and the other one belonged to Lashkar Gah, and both would be instructed to hand over control of their stations to the ANCOP. Saki said all the Taliban had left the area. I asked him if the ANP improved after coming back from their additional training. "Only for the first five days," he joked, then they went back to their old ways. "The academy has good showers, free food-the result is these first five days. They need more training." He told me of an incident where police returned and then deserted to join the Taliban.

"Why are we driving into this town to remove the ANP?" Thacker asked. "Because the Marines want us to," Contreras told him. "These ANP up here sound like the ANP everywhere in this f.u.c.king country," Thacker said. "The ANP are crooked. This problem is everywhere in this country."

We wouldn"t be leaving until 4:30 in the afternoon. Verdorn was concerned. "It seems like the Marines want to get in a firefight," he said. "5:30 PM is the beginning of fighting time." "I"m beginning to think these Marines are a bunch of cheese d.i.c.ks," Thacker muttered. I asked the major why the operation was being delayed. "Because it"s f.u.c.king hot," he said, and the Marines had to walk. Since the operation started they had lost dozens of casualties just to the heat.

A couple of Marines told Thacker that it seemed like there was going be a fight in Aynak. He dismissed them. "What, are there signs up?" he asked. "No briefing about what we"re doing, how far it is, how the convoy will be spread out," McGuire complained. As the vehicles slowly lined up on the road, the Marines and soldiers had trouble communicating, which made McGuire even more impatient. "Unbelievable, there"s no command and control. I"m awestruck. What a cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k. A good leader puts together a plan, formulates an op order, and then briefs our men."

We finally began to plod along on the rocky road, the Marines walking in front of us. Kids stood motionless in front of homes and glared at the Americans, unlike the children in Lashkar Gah, who often waved (though sometimes they threw stones too). Men with black beards and black turbans stared at the Americans, expressionless, standing ramrod-straight. "That"s a f.u.c.king Talib if I"ve ever seen one," McGuire said.

There were no paved roads in the villages we pa.s.sed, only rocky paths. We drove around a large crater. "That"s a pretty f.u.c.king good bomb there, h.e.l.l yeah!" McGuire said. The wall next to it was destroyed, and a new one was being built of fresh mud. A boy emerged from behind a metal gate and mud walls to talk to the ANCOP, but none of them spoke Pashtu and he didn"t know Farsi. The Americans" interpreter translated. There was an IED on the road up ahead, the boy said. His father came out wearing a green salwar kameez. He fingered red worry beads nervously. The IED was planted on the road on the side of their house. Several days before the Taliban were hiding in the house several hundred meters away, he said, pointing toward it. He worried locals would inform the Taliban that they had warned the Americans about the IED. McGuire walked five feet up to the IED and saw it partially buried and concealed by shrubs. "Plain as day," he announced. The minesweepers arrived but were dismissive. They didn"t think a guy from the Army could find an IED or that they could miss one. They sent a robot to place plastic explosives on it. On the first attempt, the explosives blew up but not the IED. The second attempt worked, sending up a huge cloud of smoke and debris. Rocks rained down on us a few hundred meters away. The men speculated if it would have been a catastrophic kill. McGuire thought it would have just tossed us up a bit in our armored vehicle but would have obliterated the police.

We made it to Aynak after nightfall. It had taken an entire day to go twenty kilometers. Clouds hid the moon. It was pitch black, impossible to distinguish faces at the checkpoint. Dozens of local cops surrounded the five Americans, Saki, and some of his men. Many of the cops wore turbans and the salwar kameez. They looked like the Taliban. They were cooperative and friendly, unlike what the Marines described. They shook hands and moved out. Thacker and McGuire were impressed with them; they seemed just like any other ANP, but their facility was cleaner than most. The Marines had never seen the ANP before and had nothing to compare them to.

We slept under the stars that night, the men taking turns on guard shift. Overnight we heard explosions and gunfire in the distance. The next morning we were able to explore the dusty abandoned schoolhouse. The police used an adjacent mud compound as a bathroom, and so did we. Sh.e.l.l casings from ANP battles with the Taliban littered the sand. There was nothing to do except wait. The men discussed the odds of getting into a firefight. The consensus was that there were too many Americans and the Taliban would not risk it. That morning an Afghan man approached the Marine captain. He poked him in the chest and said they were occupying his property. Then he slapped the Marines" interpreter.

Colonel Shirzad, the ANP commander for Helmand, showed up. I hitched a ride back to Lashkar Gah with him, sitting in one of the four Ford Rangers in his convoy. It took us thirty minutes to drive to Lashkar Gah. The trip from there to Aynak with the military had taken three days. Shirzad"s men did not stop to check the road for IEDs, which could shred their vulnerable Rangers. I scanned the road desperately.

The next morning Ironhorse went out on patrol with the ANCOP and found five IEDs placed on the road I had just taken. That day a twenty-vehicle Marine convoy from a base in the desert to the west tried to go to Aynak to resupply the Americans. Twenty kilometers away the Taliban attacked the convoy so fiercely that it turned back. Eight British soldiers had been killed in Helmand the previous night. On the afternoon of my return to Lashkar Gah, two mortars landed just outside the base.

The Afghan army refused to come to Helmand, the Americans said. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers had been trained at the cost of billions, and yet the Afghan army was a no-show in a major operation contingent on an "Afghan face" that wasn"t there. What was the point of an army that didn"t deploy?

EIGHT YEARS INTO THE WAR, the Americans and ISAF were making their big push. With more international troops and more combat would come more civilian casualties. The American focus on the south had allowed provinces like Logar and Wardak in Kabul"s backyard to fall into Taliban hands. With only sixty thousand Afghan soldiers it would take too long to increase the size of the army and there would never be enough foreign troops to remain in villages and control them, a British counterinsurgency expert in Afghanistan told me, so the Americans would remain like firemen responding to crises but never achieving sufficient density to get to know the community.

Meanwhile, the Taliban were seamlessly embedded into communities. They were the locals. They did not need Kalashnikovs; a simple knock on the door could be as effective. The police were useless, timid during the day and terrified at night. Neither the Americans nor the Afghan security forces conducted night patrols. At night the Taliban controlled the communities, undoing whatever the Americans had tried to accomplish during the day. The Taliban took a step back in reaction to the American surge to measure their adversary. It did not matter if the Americans were effective here and there. "Emptying out the t.i.tanic with a teacup has an effect, but it doesn"t stop the ship from sinking," the Brit told me. The insurgents were learning, avoiding direct encounters. They could continue placing IEDs despite the increase in troops, which could make getting around close to impossible and easily neutralize police units.

The much-hailed operation in Helmand didn"t fail, but there was little to show for the tremendous amount of effort that went into it-the operation merely advanced the stalemate longer. The Taliban weren"t winning so much as the government was losing. Next the focus turned to nearby Kandahar, and there was talk of pouring troops in there. It was the same mistake. When the Americans were focused on the south, they let Logar and Wardak provinces slip under Taliban control; by the summer of 2009, it was clear that much of the formerly safe north, such as Kunduz, was falling to the Taliban as well.

Bill Hix, the commander of the American task force in charge of training Afghan security forces in southern Afghanistan, believed the Taliban had slid their Kalashnikovs under their beds and were waiting, observing their opponents, just as they did following a similar operation the Marines undertook in southern Helmand"s Garmsir district in 2008. The Taliban melted away to other districts in Helmand. This year the Marines were back in Garmsir again. According to Hix, the lack of Taliban was not a sign of weakness but of strategy. "Their target is the Afghan people, not the British or the Americans," he said. "They are waiting and seeing." Hix spent twenty months working with the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command, and he enjoyed his job. In his view the Afghan army should have been pushing the enemy away from the population while the police should have been protecting and controlling the population.

Control is essential to a successful COIN campaign. According to Stathis Kalyvas, a Yale political scientist and expert on civil war whose book The Logic of Violence in Civil War was very influential among counterinsurgency theorists, "The higher the level of control exercised by the actor, the higher the rate of collaboration with this actor-and, inversely, the lower the rate of defection." Control leads to collaboration and allows the counterinsurgents to separate the insurgents from the community. But the Americans would never have enough troops in Afghanistan to achieve control. Unlike in Iraq, where the surge focused on Baghdad, a densely urban environment where a census could be conducted, neighborhoods closed off with Americans at the access points, in Afghanistan the war was rural. The Americans got lucky in Iraq, benefiting from sectarianism that changed the dynamics of the conflict from an anti-occupation struggle to a civil war. Millions were displaced, hundreds of thousands were killed. The Americans looked good in comparison, and they decided to focus on protecting the people. Then the Shiites defeated the Sunnis, and Sunni militias chose to ally themselves with the Americans. But a caricature of the surge dominated popular culture. Both Washington and the military came to believe that COIN just might be the magic formula in Afghanistan. While ignoring the right lessons from Iraq, such as the use of community outposts, there was much talk of bribing Afghan tribes, which misunderstood why Sunnis stopped resisting in Iraq and gave way too much importance to tribalism in Afghan society. The Americans were unable to grasp that material benefits were not the only thing that could motivate people. McChrystal called for a new focus on the urban population centers of the country and less on the rural areas. This was also the failed approach favored by the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Like the mujahideen, the Taliban are strong in the rural areas, in mountains and valleys.

McChrystal insisted that securing the people of Afghanistan was his goal. But why, then, were the Americans operating out of large bases and not in the communities? The community outposts that existed in Afghanistan were actually away from the population. In Iraq the Americans" best success came with their use of community outposts. If they set up similar outposts in Afghanistan, they would not have to "commute to work" on roads vulnerable to IEDs in mammoth vehicles that keep them removed from the people, staring at them like aliens in s.p.a.ceships unable to breathe in their atmosphere. It was a paradox of population-centric COIN in Afghanistan that the areas where the population was most concentrated were not the insurgent strongholds; instead the insurgents were based in the rural areas, away from population centers. The surge in Iraq was urban-based, and much easier. In Baghdad the Americans figured out who lived where, what they did, and what they wanted. That lesson didn"t make it over to Afghanistan.

THE AMERICANS" OBSESSION with Afghanistan"s elections also resembled their Iraq approach, which erroneously focused on landmark events. Just as in Iraq, when elections helped enshrine sectarianism and pave the way to civil war, so too in Afghanistan the elections empowered warlords; enshrined a corrupt order; and, in the case of the August 2009 elections, completely discredited the government and its foreign backers. Strategy in Afghanistan was put on hold so that the elections could be held. Turnout in the south was less than 10 percent, and zero in some places. There was overwhelming evidence of systematic election fraud and ballot stuffing. The Taliban managed to reduce the turnout compared with previous years. There were seven thousand polling stations throughout the country, so the Taliban could not actually disrupt voting too much. It would have also been bad PR for them to kill too many civilians. Their lack of operations might have shown that even they knew the elections didn"t matter and that nothing could better serve their ends than letting the elections take place and ending up with a deeply flawed result. Meanwhile, the Americans and their allies immediately hailed the elections as a success, merely because violence was low, thus further a.s.sociating themselves with a corrupt government. How could Afghans take Americans seriously when they backed a corrupt government and were deeply implicated in corruption? The failed elections were a message to Afghans that there was no hope of improvement or change.

In September 2009 McChrystal"s a.s.sessment of the war in Afghanistan was leaked to the media. He had been advised by a team of experts, many of them celebrity pundits from Washington think tanks. Only one of his advisers was an expert on Afghanistan. When Petraeus conducted his Iraq review, he called on people who really knew Iraq to join his "brain trust." McChrystal called in advisers from both sides of the political divide in Washington who already believed that population-centric COIN was the solution to everything. It was a savvy move, sure to help him gain support in Congress. There was a cult of celebrity in the D.C. policy set. Many of the same pseudo experts who were once convinced that the war in Iraq was the m