Putting Afghan Plan Into Action Proves Difficult

By C. J. CHIVERS
NYT

ALAM KHEL, Afghanistan — If the American-led fight against the Taliban was once a contest for influence in well-known and conventionally defined areas — the capital and large cities, main roads, the border with Pakistan, and a handful of prominent valleys and towns — today it has become something else.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the United States military has settled into a campaign for scattered villages and bits of terrain that few people beyond their immediate environs have heard of.

In and near places like this village in Ghazni Province, American units have pushed their counterinsurgency doctrine and rules for waging war into freshly contested areas of rural Afghanistan — even as their senior officers have decided to back out of other remote areas, like the Pech, Korangal and Nuristan valleys, once deemed priorities. In doing so, American infantry units have expanded a military footprint over lightly populated terrain from the Helmand and Arghandab River basins to the borders of the former Soviet Union, where the Taliban had been weak.

Depending on point of view, this shift — which resulted from both the current military leadership’s reconsideration of past commanders’ decisions and the troop buildup ordered by President Obama — is either an operational achievement or grounds for exasperation, even confusion.

(More here.)