NORTH CAROLINA: In a sandy clearing in the pine woods, Special Forces soldiers and civilians are struggling with the riddle of Afghanistan: Why is the United States, seven years after it invaded and threw out the Taliban, still falling short in the war?

From their varied backgrounds infantryman, farming expert, foreign aid officer they work under US army doctrine: You can’t beat insurgents with military force.

For years, everyone from politicians to generals have advocated ‘more troops’, and the Pentagon is deploying about 4,000 additional soldiers and Marines during January and February. Roughly 20,000 more are likely to be deployed in spring and summer.

But military officers acknowledge that pure force can be counterproductive, especially in regions hostile to outsiders, where civilian casualties and destruction accompany combat operations.

As US Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates observed recently about Afghanistan: “We cannot kill or capture our way to victory.”

Instead, counterinsurgency experts here say they believe the US must focus on building stability into the lives of ordinary Afghans. That sounds simple and obvious, but it’s a 180-degree turn from the current strategy. And it requires sending to Afghanistan Americans skilled not just in war-zone work, but in fitting development to local needs.

The United States can’t ‘fix’ Afghanistan’s poverty, illiteracy and other causes of instability. But Special Forces counterinsurgency experts say they believe they can stem the rising Taliban insurgency by refocusing the US effort. Instead of just chasing insurgents and heaping development projects such as roads, schools and clinics into a district, first determine the causes of local conflict. Then work to fix those problems.

Listening carefully to local people, they say, can help determine why a particular village or town is dominated by the Taliban, who are often disliked for their harsh methods. Probing further can determine what can be done.

This bottom-up strategy reverses the entrenched US approach: attacking insurgents where they gather and determining in Washington where to build schools and roads. Then measuring ‘success’ by checking off project lists not by measuring gains or losses in local stability.

“Our approach ties your actions to the root causes of instability,” said Thomas Baltazar, a retired Special Forces colonel who heads the Office of Military Cooperation at the US Agency for International Development.

Baltazar’s team, in a series of training sessions here, taught this new approach to soldiers and development experts who deployed to Afghanistan in November.

But it’s an uphill battle. Figuring out the causes of conflict can be a frustrating process of talking again and again with local villagers. Taking action on causes of instability whether training local cops and judges or helping local governments budget and manage contracts can require long-term investments whose success is hard to measure with specific numbers sought by sceptical politicians.

This kind of work is also dangerous.

“This is new warfare,” said John Mott, a Montana-bred cowboy who works on livestock management with a local government in eastern Afghanistan. “This is not the Peace Corps, it’s a counterinsurgency. If it were as simple as shooting bad guys, I’d be all for it. That’s easy to do.

“This other,” he sighs, “is slow and frustrating everything Americans hate to do.”

Americans were proud of a new school recently opened in Paktika province. But conflict flared immediately. Fighting broke out, and the Taliban arrived to threaten the teacher with death.

It turned out that unpopular and corrupt police assigned to protect the school were extorting bribes from villagers, and the Taliban became heroes for chasing the cops away.

Afghanistan “is a complex environment, and you got to ask a lot of questions and peel back the layers”, said Jim Derleth, senior adviser on conflict and stabilisation at the USAID. “We are not doing that.”

In Paktika province, American dollars would have been better invested in helping the local government select a new police chief and remove the corrupt police. That would have won the villagers’ good will, especially if some of them were hired as officers, and would have kept the Taliban away.

A critical piece of this new approach is to set goals and carefully measure results.

Derleth teaches soldiers and aid officials to meet with villagers to ask basic questions.

“If you go into a place and ask, ‘Would you like a school?’ Well heck, sure! Everybody wants a school,” Derleth told a group of soldiers. “You want to know what their priorities are.”

Ask questions, take action and measure the results. Adjust, act and measure again. It’s a repetitive process that requires time, patience and manpower. All are in short supply.

This year, in particular, budget analysts at the White House and in Congress will be looking for demonstrated results of foreign aid. Building a school is a measurable result. Working to build an honest police force: not so easy.

US development aid programmes are designed to provide measurable results. USAID recently boasted that it has paid for more than 680 schools and 670 health clinics throughout Afghanistan and distributed more than 60 million textbooks. It did not provide evidence that any of that investment helped build long-term stability.

This approach reminds some experts of what happened in the 1950s and the 1960s in Afghanistan, when the United States and the Soviet Union poured millions of dollars into development projects, building dams, roads, bridges, schools and health clinics across the country. Then came 30 years of war, reducing the development to rubble.

This time, Washington has spent $3.4 billion on development in Afghanistan. The war has gotten worse.

A shortage of manpower is another problem. Local development in Afghanistan is done through Provincial Reconstruction Teams, an American concept to dispatch groups of 80 soldiers and a few civilian experts to work with local governments. There are 28 PRTs at work in Afghanistan. Sixteen are manned by Europeans; 12 are led and staffed by the US military.

These teams have been led by experienced army civil affairs officers, but they are in such short supply that the military is taking volunteers from the Navy and Air Force.The civilian jobs are filled by volunteers like Kathleen Dobler, 54, a water-management specialist with the Agriculture Department in Portland, Ore. At Fort Bragg, she gets weapons familiarisation training and learns combat first aid. In her job at home, she said: “I’m a paper-pusher. I go to Afghanistan so I can actually make a difference with my 28 years of experience.”—Dawn/ The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Baltimore Sun