Learning a Hard History Lesson in 'Talibanistan'

To Accommodate New Troops, the U.S. Military Expanded a Base and Inadvertently

By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
Wall Street Journal

Karezgay, Afghanistan

Deep beneath the desolate landscape here are miles of canals that have watered wheat fields and vineyards for untold generations. They're also at the center of a dispute that handed the Taliban a propaganda victory and angered the very people the U.S. military hopes to win over through its troop surge.

Rushing to expand a base to fit the new forces, American commanders seized farmland and built on top of these ancient underground-irrigation systems. The blunder is an indication of how fragile the effort to win public backing for the U.S.-led war can be. In some cases, the tension is over civilian casualties; in others, it's about the corruption of U.S. allies in the Afghan government. Here, it's an accidental clash of infrastructure technologies separated by a few yards of dirt and 3,000 years.

Now American and Afghan officials are scrambling to mend relations with the farmers, dispatching a mullah to pray with them, a lawyer to pay them and engineers to redesign the base to accommodate them.

(More here.)