Security, development slow in coming in Afghanistan
By Doug Grindle Community Reporter
Editor's note: Our Marlborough Community Reporter Doug Grindle is still in Afghanistan, embedded with U.S. troops. While there, he sends us reports whenever he can so that we can provide our readers with a glimpse of what's going on in the region.

Above: Afghan students at a school in Garboz District, Khost Province, about 10 miles from the border of Pakistan. PHOTOS/DOUG GRINDLE

Doug's return is now scheduled for mid-November.

As always, we are grateful to Doug and other journalists like him who put themselves in harm's way so that those of us safe at home can be wellinformed.

The following is his next contribution. Khost Province, eastern Afghanistan - American soldiers file into a district center in the western edge of the province of Khost. A soldier has been killed nearby the day before and they are here to do something about it.

This area is a bad one. The road runs through the K-G Pass, a gap in the mountains running from the cities of Khost to Gardez. Insurgents lurking in the mountains, which rise above 10,000 feet, routinely attack supply convoys going from north to south and back again.

Right: American Humvees at Forward Operating Base Wilderness, a base on the southern portion of the K-G Pass.

The soldiers sit alongside the district sub-governor, the local Afghan National Army commander and the police chief. A handful of local village elders arrive. Beside the entrance they pass the bodies of six insurgents, lying under blankets, killed by the dead soldier's comrades in the same action.

This meeting, or "shura," is one strategy of engagement that aims to pull the villagers closer to the government, expel the insurgents, and solve the problems of security in this province, which borders Pakistan. It is a twin strategy of security and development. But it is taking a long time to bear results in the most remote areas where it is needed most.

Today is one step in that process.

"We want to make sure the locals understand what our objectives are out here and we don't want the anti-coalition forces coming in here and disrupting our operations," said Maj. Paul McNamara, from Waterloo, Iowa.

He is in charge of mentoring the local Afghan National Army battalion.

Forty minutes after it begins, the meeting is done. The soldiers and Afghans stream out, pause near the bodies and disperse. The elders said they were asleep when the attacks happened and besides, the Americans killed three civilians when they used artillery to attack the insurgents.

Attendance at the meeting was sparse; the attack not a popular topic. Then again it is Ramadan, and walking three miles each way from the village in the midday heat without food or water probably did not help.

The government's strategy of economic development and improving security is designed to wean the villagers off insurgent money. The government is willing to spend millions of dollars, mostly American-sourced, to build wells and roads and other projects to bring the villagers on board. The government hopes the villagers will turn insurgents away when they come knocking, and report them to security forces.

But for that to happen, the security forces, often thin on the ground in the countryside, will need to be beefed up to protect the villagers, who are vulnerable to insurgent threats.

"In the remote areas it's tough for them. They are in a tough spot," McNamara explained. "We try to have as much presence and local security patrols as possible."

But the security forces cannot be everywhere all the time.

The Army and police are expanding recruiting. Pay for policemen is being raised above the current starvation wages, of $60 or $70 a month. The increase will hopefully swell the numbers. The police are estimated to be at 60 percent strength, out of 82,000 proposed members. The army is more than 10,000 men short of its projected strength of 70,000, the American advisers say.

On another day, advisers working with the Afghan Border Police stop in at a school. They talk to the school officials and the children. The children swarm around the American and Afghan security forces, ask-

Continued on following page ing for pens and wanting their pictures taken.

"What's your name?" the soldiers ask.

"What's your name?" the children ask back.

Supporting schools is a major winner in Afghanistan, where the locals are obsessed with education. Down the road the Border Police are building a brand-new $5.5 million training center for their new recruits, only seven miles from the border. Across Khost Province the government is building district centers, and each district is projected to get new building.

"We have to get in with the populace, we have to do patrols, they have to see a legitimate and prosperous Afghan government," said Maj. Timothy Sulzner, an adviser for the Border Police hailing from Tipton, Iowa. "In some of these remote areas they haven't seen government officials ever."

! e people in the remote areas are key to this strategy.

Advisers drive regularly to Spira district in southern Khost Province, three hours from the provincial capital. Often less than a dozen policemen are on duty here. But intelligence reports indicate 500 to 5,000 insurgents are using the district to move into the interior of the country.

It is a tale that is not uncommon in the remote districts. Soldiers say security and development are the key to the war in the villages, but they are slow in coming.

Soldiers also say, though, that the strategy can work, and villagers can be influenced.

"! ey start to se the government workings of new roads, new school news clinics, and then they support the government," Sulzner said.