Elizabeth Rubin, contributing writer to the New York Times magazine, follows up on last week's excellent article with Taking the fight to the Taliban.

Some excerpts:

One morning this summer, I headed out with a U.S. Army convoy of Humvees, a truck called a wrecker and a packed supply truck into the Afghan mountains. I was among some two dozen American and Afghan soldiers from Task Force Warrior, an infantry battalion based in Zabul Province, just north of Kandahar. We trundled up a path fit for goats because the nearby riverbed was perfect for concealing improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s. Soon enough, the truck keeled over into the riverbed anyway. To hoist it up, the wrecker had to crash through wheat fields, and within minutes a gray-bearded farmer appeared brandishing his stick. “Are you Afghan?” he shouted at Farooq, my interpreter. “I have 30 members in my family. Why did you destroy my wheat?” The old farmer then clasped my wrist with his ancient garden tool of a hand. “You Americans are all friends of Bush the persecutor. You see this area” — he swept his other arm in every direction — “these are all Taliban. But they don’t have power. As soon as we find power, I will kill all of you.”

Farooq tried to calm him, but the farmer was fixated on his crushed wheat stalks until he spotted First Sgt. Ruel Robbins, a red-cheeked, chest-first sort. Robbins looked the farmer over, then said, “Tell him I’m real sorry to drive over his wheat, but I had to ’cause my vehicle turned over.” The farmer eyed the sacks in the supply truck; Robbins gave him one of rice and two of flour.

The farmer watched us take off in a swirl of dust, and Specialist Melissa Elliot, who was driving our Humvee, said to Farooq: “We’re not trying to hurt them. We’re trying to protect their security. Why’d he get so upset with us? Is their wheat part of their religion or something?”

“It’s the food for his family, ma’am,” Farooq said patiently.

And so began our mission into the mountains of Zabul Province, 6,500 square miles of desert, farmland and 9,000-foot peaks with almost no paved roads to link one patch to the next. It’s a place where, just decades ago, families lived as nomads, until King Mohammad Zahir Shah gave them government land to settle on, and where national politics is superseded by Pashtunwali — the Pashtun codes for tribal coexistence, based on retaliation, mediation and hospitality. In 1994, when the Taliban movement of young religious students swept into Zabul offering an end to illegal road taxes and warlord rule, Zabul’s leaders simply joined hands with their Pashtun brothers. After the Taliban’s fall, President Hamid Karzai’s nephew was dispatched to head the Zabul Police; in July 2002, I found him besieged by locals, who put feces in his food and threatened to kill him. For five years now American forces have been chasing the Taliban in Zabul and attempting reconstruction. The police buildings have improved. A new hospital (financed by the United Arab Emirates) was finished. Roads were being laid in terrain so remote that when the Americans turned up, the villagers thought they must be Russians. The Americans opened a trade school in Qalat, the capital. But the pace of progress has been painfully slow. These remain the Taliban’s mountains.

There are 42,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan today, trying to secure a country that is a third again the size of Iraq, where there are almost 150,000 U.S.-led troops. In the past two years, more than 300 American and NATO soldiers have died trying to stave off a resurgent Taliban. Already this year, some 1,500 Afghans have been killed. And while there were just two suicide bombings in 2002, there is now one about every five days.

With the Taliban’s alarming offensive, which began last spring, American generals began speaking of a different war — not a war against terror but a war of ideas. In military jargon this meant balancing kinetic and nonkinetic activity. Or, in plain speech, fighting the Taliban versus nation-building, two goals often at odds. “This is the war for the people,” Lt. Col. Frank Sturek, the battalion commander of Task Force Warrior, told me. Sturek served in Iraq under Lt. Gen. David Petraeus — one of the military’s leading thinkers on counterinsurgency — in Mosul, a city with 50,000 university students. In Zabul, by contrast, the literacy rate is 15 percent, at best. Sometimes Sturek couldn’t tell if people wanted to be catapulted to the 21st century or just left alone. On that he deferred to Delbar Jan Arman, the governor of Zabul Province and a former anti-Soviet mujahedeen, who mentored him on local ways — distinguishing a Taliban killing from a tribal feud or a quarrel over a boy lover. Arman explained cultural sensitivities: how pulling off a man’s turban or opening the clothing box of a woman could set off a revolt. Sturek would nod. “The standard military play is, Land in, round up the men, find someone who is nasty and mean and arrest him, drop off supplies and split,” Sturek told me. “We’re trying to humanize ourselves. It’s uncomfortable. You train an infantry battalion to kill the enemy, and it’s hard to tone it down.” The governor’s response was always: “The people are simple. We can win this war if the Army stays nice with the people and if we embrace them.” ...

The final draft of the U.S. military’s latest counterinsurgency manual, written under the direction of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. James Mattis, emphasizes that if you skimp on resources, endurance and meeting the population’s security requirements, you lose. Yet for the past five years, the Pashtun provinces have been plagued by a lack of troops and resources. James Dobbins, President George W. Bush’s former special envoy to Afghanistan, blames the White House, which he said had a predisposition against nation-building and international peacekeeping. The Bush administration rejected Afghan and State Department appeals to deploy a peacekeeping force in the provinces, dismissed European offers of troops and had already begun shifting military resources to Iraq, Dobbins told me, while U.S. troops in Afghanistan were to be limited to counterterrorism. “In manpower and money,” he added, “this was the least resourced American nation-building effort in our history.” In Afghanistan, the White House spent 25 times less per capita than in Bosnia and deployed one-fiftieth the troops. Much of the money that was pledged didn’t show up for years. “The main lesson of Afghanistan is low input, low output,” Dobbins said. “If you commit low levels of military manpower and economic assistance, what you get are low levels of security and economic growth.”  ...

With a corrupt justice system, young Afghan men on the receiving end of injustice have often felt their honor could only be restored through acts of revenge. One night, a doctor introduced me to a young farmer who asked me not to use his name. He had been shot by U.S. forces in a gunfight a year earlier. Seven metal clamps were holding his leg in place. Though deeply religious, he never liked the Taliban regime. His family was relieved when Mullah Omar and the “Afghan Arabs” who first came to fight the Soviets in the 1980’s fled Kandahar. He believed that Karzai and the international community would help build the country. “But they didn’t,” he said in the dark little flat where we met. “They just came to arrest the people.” His father was a tribal leader with pomegranate orchards, and relatives often appealed to him to get their family members out of Afghan and American prisons. He would urge the Americans not to be fooled by false reports naming “Taliban.” The real Taliban had mostly fled to Pakistan.

About a year and a half ago, he told me, a mine exploded next to an American convoy. His father was sitting in a mosque when he was rounded up by coalition troops. Twenty days later, his father’s body was dropped off at a hospital. “I couldn’t control myself,” the young man said, nearly knocking over the gas lamp with his awkward, pogo-stick leg. “I wanted to avenge. I knew where the Taliban operated, because they would come at night, and so I found the commander of a small group. He welcomed me warmly and told me: ‘It is the time of jihad. You are a lion and a hero.’ ” ...

As we rambled back down under the noonday sun, exhausted and thirsty, plucking apricots, almonds and mulberries off the trees, I remembered the Afghans I’d met complaining about Americans pillaging their harvest. It wasn’t hard to see how a few apricots could transmute into theft or how speaking to a woman after you have rounded up all the men could transmute into “Americans are abusing our women.” One afternoon, I had a car accident in Zabul. Within minutes, some 100 men pulled over and began heaving the wreck out of the ditch. As I crouched in the dirt wrapped in a tentlike Kuchi shawl, not a single man glanced my way. Rather, they asked my wounded translator if his wife was O.K. Someone must have sensed a foreigner, however, because 10 minutes after we left for the hospital, the Taliban showed up. They pummeled the driver, demanding to know what happened to the foreigner. He lied and saved his life. But that moment, when not one person glanced my way, offered a window into how seriously they abide by rules that are utterly alien to a 19-year-old American soldier. Sturek constantly struggled with pushing “cultural sensitivity” down the chain of command. It was nearly impossible. ...

The next afternoon, we flew by helicopter to Andar, a nearby village. I sat in the fields with a former teacher named Anwarjan. The governor had appointed him district chief for all of Day Chopan, but Anwarjan could barely travel. The entire province, he said, was Taliban. Still, he was busy with Shields getting hundreds of kids to school in the central town. He had convinced the parents that Pakistan wants their children to stay wild and uneducated. “I have 300 students now,” he said. “They’re changed. They are polite, greet people, treat their mothers well. One man can change a generation.”

But his efforts, he said, were being undermined by the constant incursions of Taliiban from Pakistan. “The leader of Day Chopan, Mullah Kahar, lives in Quetta,” in Pakistan, Anwarjan said. “All the heads are there. So why don’t you do anything?”

U.S. intelligence knows the same thing. As Seth Jones, an analyst with Rand, told The New York Times earlier this year, Pakistani intelligence agents are advising the Taliban about coalition plans and tactical operations and provide housing, support and security for Taliban leaders. Sturek told me that the U.S. is well aware that the Taliban heads are in Quetta. On one side, he said, most U.S. policy makers argue that the Pakistanis are our friends. On the other side are those, including some in the military, who say, “Let’s just drive into Quetta.”

I often received updates from Charlie Company soldiers after leaving Afghanistan. One of their platoon was killed heading up to an observation post in Day Chopan. After they pulled out of Day Chopan, one of the soldiers told me, they heard that things weren’t going so well and that the Taliban were using the fact that the Romanians had taken over to claim the Russians were back. And another soldier wrote: “Our platoon got sent to a National Guard unit to help them out. They’ve lost like six people in the last week, but none of them were from our platoon.We were in Kandahar for a little while to get resupplied, and you’re notkidding about the Canadians going down.We kept having to go to the big ceremonies for their bodies to get loaded on the plane.It seemed like they were getting messed up pretty bad. I definitely don’t get the whole ‘success story’ thing.”