Change of mission in Afghanistan

McClatchy:

Army Chinook helicopters whipped up a fury on a desolate peak in Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan as American soldiers, in war paint and with camouflage netting over their helmets, scrambled down the rear ramp in the predawn light.

They plunged into the scrub on a mission to uncover hidden weapons and arrest members of a bomb-making team and other insurgents who'd been terrorizing local villages. Two platoons from Combat Company of the 10th Mountain Division's 1-32 Brigade, with a platoon of Afghan soldiers, also were to make contact with local elders, log their identities and gain their cooperation against the Taliban.

Sniper teams crawled through the matted grass to take up positions above a string of Afghan hamlets beneath a snow-capped peak in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, a sanctuary for al Qaeda and other militant Islamic groups less than a mile from the border with Pakistan's tribal belt.

A key element was missing, however. As the troops descended, the sun rose, illuminating the approaching Americans and eliminating any chance of surprise. As they marched down the goat path, officers and soldiers grumbled about the timing of their assault.

''The Afghans saw us coming down the mountain from the second we were here,'' said Lt. Jake Kerr, 25, of Lake Placid, N.Y.

The airborne assault had been three weeks in the making; it employed Army Apache attack helicopters and Air Force F-15 jets to provide air cover, and it cost millions of dollars. More than anything, however, the mission illuminated the hurdles the U.S. military is facing as it tries to move from a war focused on killing the enemy to a counterinsurgency campaign based on securing the population -- mountain-to-mountain and valley-to-valley -- in a land of 40,000 villages.

The first hurdle is a lack of detailed knowledge of the area. The 10th Mountain forces, from Fort Drum, N.Y., have been charged with plugging the Taliban and al Qaeda infiltration routes from Pakistan, but this area and much of the rest of the country remains what the military calls a ``black hole.''

No U.S. troops had ever visited the village of Loya Gorigah, where the 10th Mountain soldiers were headed, but a pre-operation briefing described the hamlets there as a ''staging and cache area'' for insurgents streaming into Afghanistan from Pakistan.

''We believe they have been there this year, but we do not have information on their current location,'' said Maj. Andy Knight, 32, of Ann Arbor, Mich., pointing to footprints in the snow on Kargha Pass -- at 8,000 feet elevation, a low point on a mountain ridge.

Still another challenge is the inherent conflict between fighting a deadly enemy and winning the hearts of the local villagers with whom the enemy lives. Some officers wondered aloud if a large airborne assault was appropriate for the tiny villages they were about to enter.

''This place is way too big to search in its entirety,'' Kerr told his team. The mission quickly morphed into an odd combination of ''get-to-know the villagers'' and a less sociable attempt to ``control and catalogue military-age males.''

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The villagers said they had no weapons but fought the Taliban with sticks and stones. That is a pretty good line of BS for some isolated villager who had never seen an American before. For the troops it turned into a walk in the sun, but the officers who planned it said they ahd bad intel. That is what happens when you don't have sufficient forces to live among the people and gather intel from them.