All Counter-insurgency Is Local

Page One article in today's Wall Street Journal on how the US Army is learning to swim like fish among the people in rural Afghanistan (sub req):

A year ago, U.S. commanders here would have been reluctant to insert a small force of infantrymen into a remote village. But, along the Pech River and tributaries such as the Waygal, one 750-man U.S. Army battalion is trying a risky, grueling way to isolate the insurgents and win the support of the villagers. Instead of operating out of safe rear bases and commuting to the war, for the past year the soldiers of the First Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment have lived on the battlefield, in a series of small, rudimentary encampments situated among the disputed villages themselves.

It's an intimate style of warfare and, for the Americans, a brutal one. They go weeks without showers or decent food. They live every day exposed to enemy fire, and it has cost them dearly. Over the past year, 1-32 has lost 19 men, almost half of the deaths in the entire 5,000-man brigade.

The Americans and their Afghan National Army allies live among the people on the valley floor, while the insurgents -- Taliban, al Qaeda and other fighters of various stripes -- are up in the steep, rocky ridges. When the insurgents attack, they fire down on American soldiers and Afghan civilians alike. "The semiotics of it are great," says Lt. Col. Chris Cavoli, commander of 1-32, a unit of the 10th Mountain Division. "You can't buy press like that. The way the fight is constructed is to deliver one message: We're here to protect you, and the bad guys are here to ruin your lives."

Engaging the Taliban at such a level means getting down and dirty:

The men still clean themselves with baby wipes and use half of a 55-gallon drum as a toilet. Every couple of days they get trays of hot food trucked in, but they frequently fend for themselves, grilling pizzas, toasting biscuits or deep-frying chicken patties over an open fire. Unlike at the major bases, there is no Internet or phone service, no refuge from the war.

"I live like an animal here," says Spc. Marcus Whited, a 26-year-old from Wichita, Kan., manning a machine gun atop a Humvee at the camp entrance. "I've never in my life smelled odors like this."

And he's from Kansas too.

But how are the ignorant, dead-end losers who joined the military out of sheer desperation and are now stuck in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, coping with the immense challenges of a foreign land and culture?

First Lt. Michael Harrison, a platoon leader in the battalion's Dog Company, studied law and nuclear engineering at West Point, where he was a minor troublemaker, doing punishment marches for such offenses as keeping a rice cooker in his room. But along the Pech River, the 25-year-old has a fan club of neighborhood urchins -- a counterweight to insurgent propaganda that, the military says, claims the Americans are here to convert Muslims to Christianity and eat their children.

When the lieutenant approaches Patrol Base California, he lowers the bullet-proof window on his Humvee, reaches out and slaps high-fives with the children. "Michael!" they shout as he passes, mimicking his two-finger peace sign.

"Whassup, Hussein? Haircut!" Lt. Harrison says to a close-shaved orphan boy in a dirty-white jersey and loose trousers. He gives a set of baby bottles to a boy whose sister died after giving birth.

When he isn't patrolling, the lieutenant spends much of his time sounding out the locals, listening to their troubles and trying to arrange solutions. One recent day he sat on a bit of carpet, sipping sweet yellow tea with a group of police auxiliary officers outside their sandbagged station. Ras Mohamed, a 34-year-old police chief, pointed across the Pech to a small brown-brick house, halfway up the valley wall.

"Last year the enemy was coming all the way down there and shooting at jingle trucks," he said, referring to the decorated freight trucks seen everywhere in Afghanistan. "Now they don't dare."

These are the kind of stories, and Lt. Michael Harrison is the kind of person, that we should be reading about on a much more regular basis.