It could be Armageddon for the lightly armed bad guys. But I doubt it.

Ever since U.S. combat troops descended on Afghanistan in October 2001, the Taliban fighters have been flaunting their ability to fade away when facing this kind of combat power. It seems childishly petulant even to repeat it: insurgents simply don't fight big modern armies head-on. They disappear, only to pop up later at a time and place of their own choosing.

In fact, that's what they did almost exactly eight years ago when I covered the first big conventional U.S. military strike against the Taliban. Operation Anaconda was designed as a classic anvil-and-hammer maneuver, where you drive the enemy up against an anvil of dug-in troops, then pulverize them with the hammer of assault forces.

Except in that case, the Taliban fighters vanished from the high Shah-e-Khot valley into the towering mountain passes, and by the time the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne troops arrived, the trap was empty.

Now, just 48 hours after the battle for the southern Afghanistan market town of Marja was launched, military commanders are confirming that many of the Taliban fighters who had made Marja a base of operations had slipped away during the weeks that U.S. forces were loudly preparing the assault and freely broadcasting its location and purpose. A senior officer told me this morning that the Taliban leadership had "bugged out,'' leaving behind 100 to 150 fighters with orders to fight and die in place. "And they are,'' this officer reported. As in previous battles, the Taliban are fighting from compounds jammed with families, and there have been resultant civilian casualties. Given all this, it was odd to hear a British military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Gordon Messenger, assert that the goal of "surprising the Taliban'' seemed to have been met. His evidence: "The Taliban have not been able to put up a coherent response. They appear confused and disorientated.''

I saw the same thing happen 18 months ago with the Marines in Garmsir, a town just down river from Marja. There again, the Marines assaulted the town with waves of helicopters, but the Taliban counter-attack they expected (hoped for, actually) never materialized. With the insurgents gone or just mingling with townsfolk, the Marines took over the town, re-opened the market and stayed for a few months. As soon as they left, the Taliban moved back in, reportedly executing those who'd befriended the Americans.

That's not going to happen this time, Obama administration officials vow. This time, as soon as the insurgents are chased out of town, U.S. aid will pour in to make Marja a model, modern community. U.S. and Afghan security forces will stay on, officials say, indefinitely.
What could make a difference is the capture by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence teams of the Taliban's top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani. His detention in Pakistan, where he is said to be talking with his captors, could at least temporarily paralyze the Taliban, hampering its ability to maneuver in southern Helmand Province.

This concept for the Marja operation grew out of the intense political-military studies undertaken last summer and fall by the Obama White House, counterinsurgency experts drawn from the State Department, CIA, the Pentagon and academia, and the battle staff of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied commander in Afghanistan. The problem was this: given limited military manpower (American, allied and Afghan) and an impatient and skeptical public at home, how could U.S. forces score an impressive victory and demonstrate that this eight-year war is not lost and could, in fact, be won?

Thus was conceived the idea to demonstrate, in microcosm, what U.S. counterinsurgency strategy could achieve in Afghanistan with a potent application of military and civilian power.

What was attractive about the idea of a mini-victory was that it would nimbly skip around the obstacles that the United States has placed in its own way in Afghanistan: too few troops, too few military resources, too few civilian reconstruction experts and too little time, attention and money. If there were too few combat troops spread across Afghanistan to be effective, that could be fixed by pouring Marines and soldiers into the town of Marja. If there were too few Afghan soldiers and police being trained and equipped to make all of Afghanistan secure, at least there could be enough for Marja. And if the U.S. civilian aid effort was under-funded, under-manned and disorganized, those problems could be fixed, at least temporarily, in Marja.

The hope behind Operation Moshtarak ("Together,'' in local Dari dialect), is that a victory in Marja can buy time for the same approach to be used elsewhere, at some point in the future.

Moreover, some of the planners told me, a victory -- clearing out the Taliban, setting up Afghan government services, bringing in civilian aid to restart a vibrant marketplace, open schools and begin weaning local farmers away from growing poppies -- could reverse the deepening pessimism about the war and convince Afghans and Americans alike of eventual victory.

And public opinion, in both Afghanistan and America, needs some shoring up. A series of polls by the Independent Republican Institute found that Afghans who believe that their country is "headed in the right direction'' dropped from 67 percent in 2004 to 30 percent last year. A huge majority -- 68 percent -- said their government should talk to and reconcile with the Taliban, not try to kill them.

Here at home, meantime, opposition to the war has risen to 52 percent, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Poll in January. After eight years of war that has killed or wounded 5,684 Americans, two-thirds of Americans said they believe neither side is winning in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is a notoriously difficult place to pull off elegant concepts conceived in faraway capitals. Ask Alexander the Great of Macedonia, or Alexander Burnes and William McNaughton, two 19^th century British diplomats who led a well-intentioned but ill-fated expedition to Kabul. Or any of the Soviet officials who planned to create a new Afghanistan in the 1980s.

It's not likely that the United States will follow their fates in being violently ejected from Afghanistan. It seems more likely that the battle for Marja will dwindle into a peacekeeping operation which will, save for tragic combat deaths, be described as a success. The Taliban will regroup. Suicide bombers eventually will reappear in Marja. And the war will go on.

Meantime, of course, the larger war against Islamist extremists rages on well outside Marja, with a U.S. drone attack this morning in Pakistan that reportedly killed four Taliban insurgents in North Waziristan. They were part of a network allied with al Qaeda and the brutal Haqqani gang who have been killing Pakistanis as well as U.S. troops and Afghan civilians across the border.

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the war's various fronts, during a speech at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, on Sunday, " Extremists have recently attacked pilgrims in Iraq with the intent of destabilizing the government and reigniting civil war. In Nigeria, extremists are exacerbating Muslim-Christian tensions. In Somalia, they are working to take down the government. And in Yemen, al-Qaeda seeks to exploit internal and regional divisions to create a new base for global terrorism.''

Even as American and Afghan troops continued what a spokesman described as "steady, methodical'' progress into Marja, Clinton summed up the U.S. policy toward Afghanistan: "The United States has no interest in occupying Afghanistan,'' she said, adding: "We also have no intention of abandoning Afghanistan.''

Yes, "sleep in a hole," was essentially the response of Gen. James Conway, commandant of the United States Marine Corps, when I asked him Tuesday afternoon whether the he has enough "infrastructure'' to feed and house the 20,000 Marines who will be in southern Afghanistan by early summer.

But his insistence that Marines can live in the dirt (and prefer it!) raises an important point about the cost of the new strategy and the "surge'' of 30,000 troops announced two weeks ago by President Obama. Most of the additional troops being sent to Afghanistan are not Marines and will not be living in the dirt.

Just at Bagram Air Field, the major U.S. air hub, contractors are just completing huge concrete apartment complexes for Air Force personnel who are vacating undesirable prefab housing. (At Bagram, the Burger King outlet home-delivers!) Most soldiers lived in less desirable circumstances, many in tents that in Afghan summers are stifling and in winter, freezing. At remote outposts, many soldiers live in what could charitably be described as plywood shacks.

Even those cost money, however, along with the pretty decent chow that most military people enjoy in Afghanistan. Thirty thousand more people is a pretty heavy and expensive footprint. In the absence of a better cost estimate, Washington is figuring on about $30 billion a year added cost for the "surge,'' but no one seems to put much credence in that number. The $30 billion is in addition to the $68 billion the administration has asked for to fund operations in Afghanistan for fiscal year 2010.

Neither figure includes the cost of what the military calls, somewhat deceptively, "life support'' for the surge reinforcements headed for Afghanistan this spring and summer. Both numbers are based on past experience, and given past experience in Afghanistan and the Pentagon's record of estimating and controlling costs, I wouldn't bet against that number growing even larger. According to Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank, it costs about $1 million to keep one troop in Afghanistan for one year. That is substantially higher than the cost in Iraq, where, at the height of the Bush administration's "surge'' in 2007, it cost $685,000 per troop per year.

Afghanistan is more expensive because it's hard to get to and hard to get around in. The equipment for a light infantry combat brigade, like the 10th Mountain Division's 1st Brigade, for example, includes vehicles and spare transmissions and tires, but also computers, medical and dental supplies and equipment, water purification equipment, cash, and thousands of other items packed in heavy steel containers and either flown in or shipped by rail to a seaport, transported by freighter to Karachi, Pakistan, and trucked over some of the world's most treacherous roads.

Fuel, according to a study cited by Harrison, costs $25 to $45 per gallon delivered - when the trucks are not hijacked by the Taliban -- and the U.S. military in Afghanistan consumes 8,000 gallons of it per troop per year. Another factor will inflate that $30 billion guesstimate: Defense Department strategists expect the Taliban to fight back this spring and summer with more IEDs and by attacking Afghan government facilities in places where there are few U.S. troops. Both tactics will increase U.S. costs. Additional aircraft will be needed for surveillance, money will be needed for costly jammers and other devices, and troops will have to be moved to the areas where the Taliban are attacking.

All these costs are reasonably straightforward. More worrisome are the less visible costs that are inexorably swelling the defense budget.

America's professional army is acclaimed as the world's best, and that doesn't come cheap. The Pentagon has managed to attract and keep good people by offering terrific benefits, including enlistment bonuses, high quality health care, and a lifetime pension after only 20 years of service (pension payments are kept off the Pentagon's books and hidden elsewhere in the U.S. budget). Military health care costs over $47 billion a year, nearly 10 percent of the Pentagon's base budget, Harrison figures. He projects that the military health care bill will nearly double every ten years. Another less visible cost is for replacing the equipment that's gotten busted or worn out in combat over the past eight years. A lot of it has simply become obsolete, like the thinly-armored Humvees originally sent to Iraq. Equipment that still works is being shipped from Iraq direct to Afghanistan, rather than being shipped home to be refurbished.

Many of these costs are put off from year to year and never funded. For the Marine Corps alone, the backlog of unfunded equipment needs is $15 billion. "It's started to reach a little bit of crisis proportions,'' Conway said Tuesday.

All of this budget analysis, and all other discussions of defense spending, is based on unreliable data, according to the Government Accountability Office, the independent fiscal watchdog agency of Congress. The GAO has been at the Pentagon's throat for two decades trying to get it to clean up what the GAO delicately calls "management weakness'' in figuring out how much it is spending and what it's getting for the money. In part, because of high turnover at the Pentagon, financial management problems have never been fixed. The upshot is the defense budget goes up, Congress cuts where it's the easiest, and the troops often come out on the short end.

This fall, the GAO examined the Pentagon's own oversight agency, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA). It found widespread violations of GAGAS, which are Generally Accepted Government Accounting Standards. GAO gumshoes looked at 14 DCAA audits and 62 pricing reports and found that each one smelled.

For example, the GAO and the Pentagon's inspector general's office uncovered a case in which a DCAA auditor, examining a major Pentagon contract, came across irregularities and was pressured to ignore them. A DCAA bureaucrat ordered his auditors to overlook the problems and the contractor was paid over $100 million on the contract. No indication of who squealed, but the incident is already subject of a criminal investigation. Maybe the perps should be sent to Afghanistan to live in a hole.

SHAW AIR FORCE BASE, S.C. -- American strike fighters and bombers are pounding insurgents in Afghanistan with increasing fury, despite a standing order by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander, to avoid civilian casualties.

But air strikes have proven essential as U.S. and allied ground troops grapple with shifting Taliban forces and tactics, according to officers here at the headquarters of U.S. Air Forces Central, which plans and directs all air operations in the Middle East region.

"We expect [close air support missions] to increase. As ground forces become more dispersed and separated from their supporting forces, air power is going to be that capability that allows them to have that kinetic or non-kinetic effect as required,'' said Air Force Lt. Col. John Edwards, deputy chief of plans for the command, known as AFCENT.

"Kinetic" is the military's polite term for "explosive.''

New data from AFCENT shows that ground combat engagements between U.S. troops and Afghan insurgents increased 55 percent since January. The number of air strikes by U.S. jets surged 39 percent from January through October. But the number of bombs dropped per month more than quadrupled, from 138 in January to 647 in October.

U.S. officials said the increase in air strikes and in the number of bombs dropped was in correlation to the increase in fighting across Afghanistan, and reflected, in part, the operations of the 20,000 additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by Obama last spring.

The U.S. effort to push back the widening Taliban-led insurgency and to win the support of the population has been marred by repeated incidents in which Afghan civilians have been killed or injured in air strikes. In Kunduz Province, for instance, as many as 83 villagers were killed in an attack in September by two U.S. F-15E jets. That air strike, which was ordered by a German officer, was investigated by the U.S. and allied commands but the results have never been released.

U.S. data on civilian casualties does not include any casualty numbers from the Kunduz air strike. "Frankly, we may never have an accurate tally from that event,'' said Air Force Lt. Col. Edward Sholtis, a spokesman for McChrystal. He said the report on the incident was still classified and has been passed to the German government.

Despite the Taliban's accusations against the United States for causing civilian casualties, independent organizations, including the United Nations, have documented the Taliban as the cause of most Afghan civilian casualties, primarily through the use of roadside bombs and suicide attacks.

Taliban insurgents often launch attacks on U.S. forces from civilian housing compounds, according to American ground combat commanders, deliberately exposing civilians to risk. If there are casualties, the Taliban blame Americans, they said.

To minimize civilian deaths as well as damaging accusations, McChrystal in July ordered a crackdown on the use of aerial bombing. Air strikes that might endanger residential compounds would be authorized only under "very limited and prescribed conditions,'' McChrystal ordered.

The effect of his directive on combat pilots was immediate: the responsibility to determine whether to drop bombs on enemy targets shifted from ground commanders to pilots. The air commander at Bagram Air Base, Brig. Gen. Steven Kwast, directed that even when American troops are under fire, pilots should not automatically agree to drop bombs.

In many circumstances, pilots say, they can see a better solution than the ground commander. Often this means the pilot will swoop down low over the insurgents to scatter them, and then strike when they are fleeing and at a safe distance from civilians.

"In no way was the (McChrystal) directive intended to limit air support to a ground unit,'' Air Force Col. Keith McBride, deputy director of the CENTAF air operations center, said in a telephone interview from Al Udeid air base in Qatar. The order was "to minimize collateral damage - NOT to minimize effects on the enemy,'' he said.

Sholtis, McChrystal's spokesman, said the number of civilians killed by U.S. and allied forces are "steadily trending downward,'' with 251 confirmed dead in the first 10 months of last year compared with 176 during the same period this year. The number of civilians killed by insurgents is "holding steady or trending a bit upward,'' he said, an assessment echoed by investigators for the United Nations.

"This is not tremendously great news for Afghans, because they need to be protected from insurgent violence, too,'' Sholtis acknowledged. "But if the trend holds, you could see the relative levels of violence further alienating the insurgents from the population.''

Although U.S. efforts seem to have reduced civilian casualties, it may be impossible to eliminate them. And the Kunduz incident demonstrates how a single error or misjudgment can have a profound effect, angering Afghans, tarnishing the U.S. claim that its forces are protecting the Afghan people, and handing the Taliban a propaganda bonanza.

Villagers have provided a list of civilians killed in the Kunduz air strike to Amnesty International. If those 83 people were included in the civilian casualty statistics, it would indicate that civilian casualties caused by U.S. and allied forces are rising, not declining.

Casualty calculations aside, air war planners here are scrambling to anticipate the president's war decisions, which will dictate a likely increase in aircraft and an acceleration in the pace of air operations. Each new idea emanating from the White House causes a spurt of additional planning.

"Just as you've heard numbers, we've heard numbers,'' said Col. Ken Craib, deputy chief of operations for CENTAF. Responding to news leaks from the White House, he added, means he and his planners work "a lot of weekends.''

Air operations planning is a complex process. The main air bases in Afghanistan, Bagram and Kandahar air fields, are already crowded with additional cargo planes and a squadron of fighters sent in earlier this year. Moving additional strike aircraft into Afghanistan would require building more ramp space to service and park aircraft, and would demand additional support from aerial refueling aircraft. Heavy KC-10 and KC-135 refuelers are based outside Afghanistan, flying mostly from Persian Gulf bases in complex orbits to rendezvous with fighters, which need regular tanking.

"You do it over and over again,'' Craib said, describing the work of planners. "You work off certain assumptions, talk with the allies and the ground forces, refine your assumptions, the plan begins to take shape, then you get new assumptions.'' he said.

Like everyone else, he said, "we are waiting to see the guidance from the president and secretary of defense on the way ahead as they see it.''

In 30 years of covering wars, I've never seen anything like it. At the big U.S. military bases in Afghanistan and even at small combat outposts, troopers coming in for chow at the DFAC (dining facility, e.g. mess hall) dutifully wash their hands ... with hot water and soap. And dry them on paper towels. And put the wet paper towels carefully in waste bins.

Maybe this doesn't sound unusual to you. But bear in mind these are young men and women barely out of their teens, a demographic not known for meticulous personal hygiene standards, with carbines slung over their shoulders and mud on their boots. And they're in a hurry; they're here simply to fuel up. Many of them are fresh off of combat missions, or they're grabbing a fast meal before launching downrange (and there are always a few soldiers balancing a half dozen Styrofoam containers of eggs, sausage and hash browns to take back to buddies waiting in idling MRAPs or choppers.

Swine flu has only hardened the military's already stern attitude toward hand-washing. You can't get inside the DFAC without washing up. Not that the Army doesn't trust its soldiers, but here's a squinty-eyed NCO checking IDs and making sure everybody lathers up and rinses carefully before they're allowed through the door. And these are no bus station wash stands. The water is strong and hot, the soap dispensers are full, and there are plenty of paper towels. (Another feature of war, American-style: virtually all bases have portable toilets that contractors clean out daily with high-pressure hoses and disinfectant; they snap in new rolls of T.P., and top off the hand sanitizer disperser outside the door. But that's another story.)

OK, granted, in many places in Afghanistan troops don't get hot food or hand washing stations (let alone hot water). I've many times shared a spot on the ground with goat droppings in 120 degree heat, squeezing that runny MRE apple jelly on an MRE cracker and idly wondering when was the last time I washed my hands, not that I really cared at that point. Lots of soldiers and Marines live that way for weeks and longer. Eventually, though, they end up at a DFAC, where they join everybody else in the hand washing ritual that has become routine and thoughtless, like snapping on a seatbelt.

Hand washing isn't completely new, of course. During the first Gulf War (1991) and in Bosnia (1996), deployed troops would find these 5-foot high, green plastic hand wash stations outside the food lines, which were supposed to spout water when you kneaded the pump. Back then, hand washing was thought of in the same way as regularly changing underwear. There was something vaguely fussy and unmanly about it. Even the command seemed not to take hand washing seriously: somebody arranged to have these things delivered out to the troops, but nobody connected up the water or put in soap or paper towels. Soldiers ignored them and soon they were covered in dust. MREs come with a tiny foil-wrapped piece of "moist towelette'' which you can use to swipe your hands either before you eat, or after (to get rid of that sticky apple jelly), but not both.

But in the age of swine flu, the days of dirty hands are over. According to Pentagon data, swine flu has infected 3,849 members of the military since April 2009. No new cases have been reported since July, says Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith. In the military, at least, hand washing seems to be effective in preventing the spread of the H1N1 virus.

But just to make doubly sure (this is the military, after all), Army headquarters has just sent out a directive commanding all medical personnel to carry "at all times'' two small bottles of 60 percent alcohol hand sanitizer. "One bottle will be for their personal use, the other is available to give to Soldiers who do not have any hand sanitizer,'' the brass advise.

In case soldiers are confused about how to use the stuff, they should be instructed, the directive from headquarters says, to "rub their hands together until the gel is dry; water is not required ...''

The Taliban's response to the Afghan war strategy proposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal could be shocking and grim, with insurgents redoubling suicide attacks and ambushes against American troops, aircraft and road convoys, triumphantly setting up "liberated zones,'' and executing Afghan police and collaborators in areas abandoned by U.S. and allied forces. The first months of the new strategy, rather than feeling like a winning new campaign, could feel a lot like losing.

In the short term, at least, that's the dismaying expectation of a wide range of counterinsurgency and Afghanistan experts if President Obama authorizes McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, to implement a wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign with as many as 40,000 additional U.S. troops. Pentagon and White House officials say that decision will be made within weeks.

The United States is likely to be badly bruised in the coming months no matter what strategy it adopts in Afghanistan, according to military and civilian experts, many of whom asked to remain anonymous because of the political sensitivity of the current strategic review. But between the extremes of making no change in war strategy, and cutting back troops and other resources, the McChrystal plan is said to entail the fewest -- but still significant -- dangers.

Most public attention has focused on the pending request by McChrystal for troop reinforcements. But more significant than the troop numbers is his blueprint for a radical shift in the way the United States and its allies intend to fight the war.

Key among his proposed changes: rather than trying to fight everywhere, shifting forces to "critical areas,'' where the Afghan population is most at risk. Another key change: getting American troops -- and increasing numbers of U.S. civilians -- out of their armored vehicles and fortified bases into Afghan communities, and getting them to shuck body armor and helmets and to walk among the population unprotected, like the Afghans themselves do.

"Once the risk is shared, effective force protection will come from the people,'' McChrystal wrote in the strategy proposal now under consideration at the White House. "Accepting some risk in the short term will ultimately save lives in the long run.''

But as the overworked yet accurate phrase in vogue at the Pentagon has it, "the enemy gets a vote.'' And this particular enemy, as the Jihadist fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, is highly adaptive, quick to learn to blunt the impact of American precision weapons and to emasculate the U.S. doctrine for mass conventional warfare. Cheap IEDs, for instance, have demolished the U.S. advantage in armored vehicles, field commanders say.

McChrystal and his top aides, together with a dozen counterinsurgency experts, put together the 66-page proposal for a new counterinsurgency strategy this summer - and then set up an aggressive "Red Team'' to play the Taliban, looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Satisfied that he knew the risks and found them acceptable, McChrystal sent the proposal on to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the White House.

Yet, the public may feel differently about the risks, especially in the short term. And that gives the Afghan insurgents a pressing motive to surge American casualties, to mount spectacularly bloody attacks, to impress on the American and European public the high cost of the campaign, analysts say.

"Nobody I know thinks this war can be won in a year or two years,'' said

Stephen Biddle, a senior analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of McChrystal's strategy brain trust. "You could certainly lose political support for the war in the U.S. much sooner than that.''

Politically savvy insurgents are familiar with that timeline. And, because it would take a year to get U.S. reinforcements in position, the 68,000 American troops now in Afghanistan will be at risk. The Taliban will respond with "a cheap campaign of IEDs, mortars and rocket and mortar attacks'' on clusters of U.S. troops, said T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and counterinsurgency expert. Others expect the Taliban to deepen their infiltration of the Afghan army and national police force; already, insurgents have been discovered with Afghan police uniforms and vehicles. "You have one of them 'go postal' and kill an American - that just poisons the relationship between our military and their security forces,'' said David Isby, a Washington-based defense expert and author of several books on Afghanistan.

Experts also express worry that the insurgents yet could find a supply of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, perhaps from Iran, to use against troop-carrying cargo planes and helicopters, the lifeline of U.S. forces in the country.

Under the McChrystal campaign plan, some regions of Afghanistan would be left sparsely defended if at all, opening new opportunities for Taliban propaganda victories. Some senior U.S. military officers are worried about how to blunt powerful Taliban messages that would say, in effect, "Look, we forced the powerful Americans out and they have abandoned you, just like they abandoned Afghanistan before.'' There is concern as well about reprisal killings of Afghan police and others who cooperated with U.S. forces before they were withdrawn.

A Taliban "surge'' across large swaths of undefended rural Afghanistan would mirror the strategy they used in the mid-1990s in their successful sweep to power, building bases of support from one village and rural district to another while rival Afghan militias tried to defend large towns and cities. That strategy was "innovative and ruthlessly effective,'' Seth G. Jones of Georgetown University writes in a new book about the Afghan war, In the Graveyard of Empires.

"Afghanistan is fundamentally about legitimacy, and having the Taliban set up liberated zones would be huge,'' said Isby.

The largest Afghan insurgent group, the Quetta Shura Taliban, already has set up shadow governments in most Afghan provinces, complete with grievance boards, courts, tax levies and military conscription. U.S. officials say they have only a superficial knowledge of the depth and breadth of these networks.

Senior military officers also expressed concern that insurgents might use existing shadow networks in the major southern city of Kandahar or even in the capital, Kabul, to stage a spectacular attack similar to the 1968 Tet offensive. That was a surprising but largely bungled series of attacks across South Vietnam by Viet Cong insurgents. Although the insurgents suffered huge losses, scenes of fighting inside the U.S. embassy in Saigon and elsewhere shocked the American public and helped turn opinion against the war.

Even short of such drama, the costs of any Afghan war strategy, "to have any reasonable chance of success, are going to be high,'' said Biddle. He and others believe it will require a major effort by Obama and European leaders to convince the public on the necessity of accepting high up-front costs. "I suspect it will probably require a very systematic, deliberate attempt by the executive branch to make the case to the public'' he said, "that on balance, the costs are worth paying.''

The bombs fell about three hours before dawn. Two seven-foot-long steel torpedo shapes sliced silently through the darkness, each packed with 192 pounds of Tritonal high explosive, released and guided by American F-15E strike fighters high over Kunduz province, Afghanistan.

Hours later the news broke, briefly interrupting reports of the latest bickering over health care reform, Michael Jackson's memorial service and unrest in China. Two gasoline tanker trucks, hijacked by the Taliban, had exploded in the attack, killing dozens of insurgents and perhaps civilians. The incident in early September ignited a brief flare-up of questions about air strike policy and civilian casualties, before attention turned back to point scoring on health care and speculating when Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Afghan war assessment would be unveiled.

Maybe there's no other way to think about the Afghanistan war except in the most abstract terms. Air strikes or "boots on the ground"? Nation-building, or population-centric security? Counter-insurgency strategy, or counter-terrorism strategy?

But it has struck me, coming back to Washington after six weeks inside the war in Afghanistan, how disconnected the debate over Afghanistan seems from the reality that Afghans live through, day, by day, by day. Here, the Kunduz air strike has become a data point, used to stake down one corner of the argument about whether the war is immoral and unwinnable, or just temporarily going badly.

Perhaps part of our difficulty, as the world's most powerful nation grappling unsuccessfully with a very small, if nasty, collection of terrorists, is that we sometimes ignore the continuing human struggle to accommodate the realities of the war. It may be that the struggle of ordinary people, caught up in violence not of their own making, might help guide our thinking on the war's abstract issues.

Here's an extraordinary piece of reporting on that struggle by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad of the British Guardian newspaper. It's well worth reading the entire piece, but here are excerpts:

At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike. They picked their way through a heap of almost a hundred charred bodies and mangled limbs which were mixed with ash, mud and the melted plastic of jerry cans, looking for their brothers, sons and cousins. They called out their names but received no answers. By this time, everyone was dead.

Taliban drivers had gotten the two hijacked fuel trucks stuck in a stream outside the village of Eissa Kheil; desperate to move before daylight, they demanded that villagers come help.

The air strike, for which McChrystal apologized, is still under investigation, both by the U.S.-led command in Afghanistan and by German authorities examining the role of the German officer who called in the air strike. It may be that either the German officer or the U.S. pilot, or both, violated strict U.S. military guidelines designed to minimize civilian casualties. Clearly, the Taliban also are responsible for involving civilians in a military operation.

It may also be that none of that matters to the villagers who are living with the aftermath.

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- Soaring across the velvet black sky on a night mission over Afghanistan, F-15E fighter pilot Steve Kwast peered through his high-resolution, infrared targeting pod. He had spotted insurgents running across open ground toward a line of trees. As he swooped down for a closer look, Kwast watched one of the men slip behind a tree - and as his fighter roared past, he could see the man's hands on the tree as he inched around to stay behind it. "All I could see were his fingertips - I could see him moving around the tree as I flew by,'' Kwast, a brigadier general and wing commander here, told me later.

The insurgents, he concluded from this and other encounters, "are incredibly smart fighters. They know how to defeat us by understanding how our technology works. They are cunning and agile and good at adapting . . . at every turn. This enemy has shown how to get around our technology.''

In the sputtering debate about Afghanistan and what to do about the war, I haven't heard anyone advocate surrendering to the Taliban. What I have heard are lots of thoughts about how to make the war less painful, at least for us. Force the allies to do more. Train the Afghans to fight in our place. Cut back our own forces, just a bit. Find a cheaper way to fight, one that doesn't involve so darned many American troops. I particularly like this last one, because it feeds into the fantasy that superior American technology can overcome any adversary almost bloodlessly, especially the bearded primitives of Afghanistan.

I'm sorry, but there is no cheap way to win in Afghanistan. There is no way to turn this into a high-tech war. American technology can and does assist. But this war - like every other - requires the active presence on the ground of American men and women.

Every president since Harry Truman, says my friend Bob Scales, "has learned that, in irregular warfare, technology is a poor substitute for 'boots on the ground.' '' From recent conflicts, Americans should have learned that an adaptive enemy (Viet Cong, for example, or Somalis) can shift tactics and overcome U.S. technology faster than we can invent it (remember the "people sniffers" of the Vietnam War?). And technology "fixes'' can come at a lopsided cost. In this war, the Pentagon is spending billions to defeat IEDs made from a few cents worth of fertilizer, diesel oil, discarded batteries, and old wire.

Scales is a combat veteran, military historian, retired major general and former commandant of the Army War College. In a paper written for the Center for a New American Strategy, he goes on to make the case for more infantrymen. "The bottom line is that, in irregular wars fought for limited ends with limited means, numbers count.''

That was the lesson some learned from a horribly bloody conflict half a century ago. "[Y]ou may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life,'' T.R. Fehrenbach wrote in his classic history of the Korean War - "but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.''

Fehrenbach had it right about Korea. With American infantrymen, I've tramped up and down enough Korean mountainsides to know you could never defend the place with air power alone. There are too many places for bad guys to operate unseen, unless you're right there on the ground. Afghanistan is that kind of place too, only more so. It's not only that the enemy is cunning and can adapt to our war-fighting technology quicker than we can change it. It's that, plus the terrain.

From 12,000 feet, this country looks like a barren crumple of brown paper dusted with cocoa powder, horizon to horizon. Closer in, the landscape reveals itself as undulating waves of jagged rock peaks and deep valleys. Occasionally, runoff from autumn rains or melting snow coaxes a thread of green vegetation along a valley floor, attracting a cluster of adobe buildings. Only a few far-flung flatlands, such as Kabul and Kandahar, are able to support sizable human populations.

This cruel landscape has given the technology guys the fits. Five years ago, with the Iraq invasion turning into a bloody slugfest, they feverishly set about new ways to find and "fix'' the enemy so he could be destroyed. They designed all new look-down sensors, including high-resolution, real-time video, carried by manned and unmanned aircraft and satellites, and wired all of the intelligence "take'' into fusion centers where analysts, commandos and battalion commanders could puzzle out where the enemy was, what he was doing, and where he was vulnerable. That worked remarkably well, helping to roll up al Qaida and its IED networks in Iraq.

But Iraq is flat, and the technology was designed to work across the tabletop city streets where the Iraq war was fought. The stuff doesn't work very well in Afghanistan.

This is Kwast's immediate war-fighting problem. He commands a fleet of fighter-bombers, and also a vast array of intelligence "platforms,'' including drones and specialized aircraft like Navy EA6-B Prowlers and EC-130 "Compass Call'' planes that collect electronic intelligence. These are collectively called "Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance'' assets, or ISR for short.

"There are ways the enemy takes advantage of the fact that we have a constellation of ISR that was really built for flat ground, and where we are here requires a different solution set,'' Kwast told me. "You hear this mantra, we need more and more ISR - well, what we really need is different ISR. We need ISR that stares straight down, so that instead of seeing just one side of a mountain, you can see both sides.''

ISR guys are reluctant to talk much about their work, but here's one example they offered: in Iraq, they got good at eavesdropping on the enemy, one of the primary ways they penetrated al Qaida cells. Not so easy here, they've found. Eavesdropping requires a sensor to be placed in a direct "line of sight'' between the two people talking. Easy enough in flat areas. But in Afghanistan, insurgents can talk from opposite sides of a steep valley where it's difficult to get a sensor down to intercept the line of sight between them. "All our orbits and CAPs (combat air patrols) and listening devices - useless, if the enemy is smart enough to know that as long as they're not in a line of sight of an aircraft, no one can hear them,'' said Kwast. "And they're using that to their advantage.''

There are technical solutions to these problems, probably, but Kwast said they haven't yet been invented.

This is why commanders like Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who directs all U.S. and allied combat operations in Afghanistan, are talking about needing more troops, additional "boots on the ground.'' Clearly they are not going to send infantrymen up every distant valley. But much of this war can only be fought on the ground, in direct close-quarter confrontation with the enemy.

That much seems true. Even if it takes an Air Force guy to point it out.

KHOWST, Eastern Afghanistan -- When I got up to leave, Shakar Khan gripped my hand and held it. My friend, he said. Do not go. Behind a trim black beard, his sun-beaten face crinkled into a broad smile. He cast an eye around the room, as if to find something to tempt me to stay. The shabby, one-room police office held a bed, a few cushions on the concrete floor, and two battered cooking pots. Outside, several of his men, Afghan National Police, bantered with American infantrymen, talking about joint training they'd be doing in the coming week.

I'd been talking with Shakar Khan for an hour. He's in his early 50s, a district police chief in this boisterous, commercial city. Security here is entirely in the hands of Shakar Khan and other police and Afghan army units, as it is in other cities in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban are active and vicious here, but the local cops manage to keep the streets relatively safe. American troops work from small outposts well outside of town, coming into town to assist the police in tactical training and to help local officers learn how to take more responsibility for budgeting, logistics, recruiting and long-range planning.

What surprised me was the emotional bond evident between American GIs and the Afghan police. In their high-fives and hugs of greeting, they are clearly fond of each other. And having well-armed Americans around surely provides comforting reassurance that the out-manned and out-gunned Afghan police aren't facing a ruthless and better-armed enemy alone.

For six weeks, I'd been deep inside Afghanistan, trying on my fourth trip here to get a fix on this vexing conflict. What I already knew: the U.S. intervention here has been badly bungled. Many Afghans blame us for liberating their country in 2001 - and then abandoning them when the Taliban surged back two years later. The U.S. has poured billions of dollars into badly designed development projects; corruption has blossomed. Seven years were wasted.

What I learned: That Americans in Afghanistan, both military war-fighters and military and civilian development experts, finally have their act together. As a result, at least in some parts of the country, people are becoming more secure, more kids are literate, more people have jobs, and more people have a glimpse of a better, non-Taliban life.

The last thing I learned was from reading the polls showing that American support for the war has plummeted. It is hard to know whether people only oppose increasing U.S. forces here, want troops brought home, or have some other option in mind. I have not seen anyone defend the chaos, bloodshed and triumphant return of radical Islamist jihadists that would follow. Granted, this is a complex war, difficult to comprehend from the lurid headlines and bloody TV footage. But I have seen gains here that are worth preserving, and there is not much time in which to do it.

The U.S. is running a full-court press across eastern Afghanistan against IEDs and suicide bombs, an effort that ranges from aerial sensors and electronic surveillance to on-the-ground police work penetrating IED cells and rolling up the organizers and financiers. GIs work with local cops to collect intelligence and encourage Afghans to report IED activity. Result: more than half of all known IEDs are discovered and disarmed before they detonate - by no means perfect, but solid progress.

Increasingly these cases are headed to Afghan criminal courts. U.S. military and civilian police experts work with Afghan cops and prosecutors on crime forensics, preserving evidence, building cases. "It's painstaking work anywhere,'' said George Clay, a police advisor with the 82^nd Airborne Division in central Afghanistan. "But multiply that by the [Afghan] legal system and cultural barriers and the red tape, it's a really hard thing to do.'' In one recent case, Afghan police turned up with evidence collected with gloves, stored in plastic bags, tagged and with affidavits attesting to the chain of custody. "I was elated!'' said Clay.

Don't yawn: This is important. "That's what's gonna win this thing,'' Lt. Col. Rob Campbell, a combat commander in Paktiya Province, told me. Farming means jobs; better, more effective farming means more jobs, giving people an alternative to accepting $40 to plant a Taliban IED in the roadside or to allow Taliban fighters to hide their weapons in the village mosque.

A team of agricultural experts from the Indiana National Guard is training a dozen Afghans to teach farmers to improve crop yields with better planting techniques, careful water conservation, more powerful livestock feed. They are teaching mountainside villagers to build "catch dams,'' constructed simply of local stacked stone, to slow spring runoff and soil erosion. Together with Afghan farm experts, they are experimenting with mulberry "bricks,'' high-protein animal feed made from local materials.

In a related program, soldiers are teaching village women to make high-protein baby formula from locally available produce. That's a project of the civil affairs teams led by Special Forces Maj. James N. Schafer. "I wish I had more teams,'' he told me. "We are doing better; things are better than a year ago. But we need more civilians - we don't need more guys carrying guns.''

These aren't simply feel-good projects; they are ruthlessly assessed as part of the U.S. counterinsurgency war-fighting plan. Rather than simply asking local Afghans if they'd like a new school or a baby nutrition program, soldiers ask detailed questions to understand local origins of instability: What causes the conflicts that the Taliban can exploit? It may be a lack of jobs, or corrupt officials, or high child malnutrition. Action is taken to meet those needs. Then the results are carefully measured - did the project really provide jobs? Was the corrupt official removed? If necessary, new actions are planned. Results must deliver more security, more jobs or better government.

PETAVAH, Afghanistan -- When American soldiers and Marines invaded Iraq in 2003, GIs riding in Humvees and on the backs of trucks tossed candy to waving children. It was like Paris 1945! (Without the flowers and wine and women, of course.) But it was grand -- the kids loved America. So much so that soon there were clouds of children swarming around armored vehicles. Inevitably someone was run over, and soon the word came down from the brass: No more throwing candy to kids. And the kids turned to throwing rocks at us.

In a large field near the center of the village, the paratroopers' four armored trucks pulled into a circle, watched intently by a growing and jostling crowd of kids, white-bearded elderly men and a few self-appointed young Afghan law-and-order guys with mulberry-branch switches to beat the kids back. This was going to be the equivalent of a one-hour, all-you-can-carry free shopping spree at Walmart. Except that women, of course, were confined somewhere indoors.

Under the armed and unsmiling gaze of the paratroopers, a few elders were beckoned forward to unload the trailer. Sacks of corn and rice, containers of cooking oil, plastic sandals, cooking pots and other goodies piled up on the ground as the crowd's agitation rose to a fever pitch. Suddenly a young girl bolted from the crowd, scampered between two paratroopers and made off with a bag of -- what? Anything! She raced away clutching her prize with the mulberry-stick men whacking the air behind her. Then another kid broke from the crowd, and another. The paratroopers swiveled this way and that, but now they were laughing as kids, and then men, scooted past them, and there was pandemonium inside a cloud of dust that enveloped the mountain of H.A. In a few moments it was all over, with people carrying off armloads of H.A. and a few dogs and toddlers disconsolately picking over the bits of torn bags and broken sandals that were left.

On the long ride back to base, an officer voiced my thoughts about the whole thing. "I didn't see any starving kids, and I didn't see anybody who didn't already have sandals. So what was the point?''

More important, what was the effect? Uneasily, I remembered accompanying a Marine officer through villages in Iraq's Anbar Province. He'd pull out a handful of candy as kids crowded and jumped. Then he'd ask, "Who'd like a soccer ball?'' and he'd summon an aide and hand out a few balls. In the distance, I noticed men who'd just brought their kids to school standing in the shadows, glowering at this scene. Their resentment seemed palpable, that their kids were crowding around an American handing out presents that they couldn't afford for their own children.

Here in Afghanistan, a different war but the same American impulse of generosity. And to what end? I put this question to an American officer, a man who works closely and professionally with Afghans and whose opinion I respect. "The feedback we get from Afghans,'' he said, "is that this kind of give-away makes them feel like dogs."

COMBAT OUTPOST ZORMAT, Eastern Afghanistan -- Just about the time the laughter here was dying down, U.S. Sens. Carl Levin and Jack Reed were touching down in Kabul for a whirlwind, suit-and-tie "fact-finding'' tour of the war zone. That was hundreds of miles from this remote U.S. Army base, home to a small, well-armed contingent of soldiers from the 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment COP Zormat that was under the onslaught of a slashing evening rainstorm. Turret gunners on the gun trucks returning from patrol were soaked and shivering. The rain beat against the plywood walls of the "permanent'' buildings here while tent roofs sagged and dripped and soldiers wearing headlamps (the COP is blacked out at night) splashed through mud. Cardboard cartons of supplies slowly collapsed in puddles.

Inside, I had set off the guffawing and hooting myself. I hadn't meant to: I just asked the specialists and sergeants in the Tactical Operations Center whether anyone from Congress had ever dropped in to see how things were going. Normally the TOC is a serious and tense place where combat patrols and attacks are monitored. Mention of a congressional visit caused an outbreak of raucous levity, of which "Yeah, right!'' is a printable version.

I don't mean to pick on Carl Levin and Jack Reed, Democrats from Michigan and Rhode Island, respectively. I believe John McCain came through Kabul for a few hours; at least that's what I heard from the air crews who flew him. For all I know - and news is sparse out here - other members of Congress have whizzed through Afghanistan recently, as well.

It's too bad none of them made time for a few days with these Cavalry guys, or with soldiers and Marines in any of dozens and dozens of similar places where the war is really being waged. Instead, according to what I read in Stars and Stripes, the daily GI newspaper that comes sporadically and a week late, Levin and Reed had an audience with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, sat through the usual run of high-level military briefings and even met with some senior Afghan elders in Helmand Province (let's guess how much brutal ground truth came out of that ceremony). Then they rushed away and held a press conference to announce what sounded like a pre-cooked finding: Afghanistan doesn't need more U.S. troops; it needs more Afghan troops.

That's the damned trouble with whirlwind visits and high-level briefings, of which I have suffered my share. War is reduced to simplicities and slogans. The military loves PowerPoint presentations - they're easy for generals and politicians to understand -- but they make war into an orderly series of colored arrows that always point toward progress. Add some bright, ornate graphics and a chart or two and pretty soon you've absorbed the illusion that you can sit in Washington and affect the outcome by adjusting an arrow here and tweaking a graph there. Eager briefers, colonels and brigadier generals do nothing to dampen that idea. And because PowerPoint doesn't talk back, you come away with your previously held positions unchanged. Add more U.S. troops, or add more Afghan troops. We're winning the war, or we're losing the war, so we should pull out or try something else. Pick one or the other and let's move on to health care and Obama's school speech.

Had the senators instead spent their two days at COP Zormat, they would have come away with a visceral sense of what is really going on in this country.

They would have seen the straight, bright line that runs from the 9/11 terror attacks that were planned here, straight to COP Zormat, right on the front lines of Preventing it From Happening Again. They'd have seen Afghan and American Army officers putting their heads together trying to figure out where best to position their forces to interdict the stream of insurgents coming in from Pakistan, and how to apportion their fuel so their generators are working and their radios get recharged. They are working out joint maneuver tactics, sharing intelligence, and working out how many Afghan enlisted guys to take off daily operations for some in-depth training with their American sergeant counterparts. In other words, they're fighting a war.

Behind that effort to provide security in this region, the visiting senators would have seen other soldiers and American civilians helping to fortify the foundations of a society that Afghans will soon have to defend on their own, one with a decent local government, access to education and health care, and a vibrant economy. It's an uphill battle, all right, but the Afghans and Americans engaged in the effort are energetic and brimming with optimism.

Our imaginary visitors would understand, from talking to cops and storekeepers, local radio DJs and truck drivers and soldiers and the kids thronging the dusty streets, that there is a long way to go. But they would have felt, from watching American sergeants and Afghan police hugging each other in fond greetings, that good people are committed here to making it work.

I'm afraid very little of that reached the senators' ears and eyes. Had they all spent a few days here at COP Zormat, their views on the war and its conduct might have remained unchanged. But their sense of what's happening on the ground would have deepened.

All this raises an interesting question. High-level briefings and meetings can be (and usually are) held via secure video teleconference without leaving Washington. That being the case, do the senators have the Air Force fly them all the way over here just for the souvenir photos and dinner-party cachet?

COMBAT OUTPOST ZORMAT, Afghanistan -- When a warning crackled over the radio of a suspected ambush ahead, Lt. Col. Rob Campbell swore softly and ordered his three armored trucks to a halt. What happened next illustrates why the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is failing, why commanders here are asking for more manpower -- and why they are pleading for more time.

Carefully, they approached a tumbledown building beneath a dusty grove of wilted trees. Three disheveled young Afghans emerged, blinking in the sunlight: Afghan National Police. There was little sign of the U.S. training and equipment they'd received.

The ambush report was a false alarm, but for Campbell, it was a teachable moment.

"Who's in charge here? Where are your boots and helmets and uniforms?'' Campbell demanded. "You have to look professional, then people will respect you and the Taliban will not attack!''

The young police managed to look both sheepish and skeptical. Through a translator, they complained that an overnight rain had left a foot of water in their sleeping quarters. When the Taliban mortars them at night, they have no mortar to shoot back.

"You have to go out and patrol,'' Campbell lectured them as they stood sullenly. "The Taliban will run away. That's how you stop them from attacking. You don't need a mortar.'' He climbed back in his multi-ton, air-conditioned armored truck. The police did not wave goodbye.

The plain fact in Afghanistan today is there are too few U.S. troops, and too few reliable Afghan security forces, to protect the population from the Taliban and other insurgents. But, in this complex war, simply pouring more American combat power into Afghanistan isn't enough, commanders here say.

"We need the support of the population -- the insurgents only need to control the population -- and they do that by making them scared to act,'' Col. Michael Howard told me. Hunting down and killing enemy insurgents is necessary, he and others argue, but it's not enough. Winning means enabling Afghans to resist the Taliban on their own -- militarily, politically, socially and economically.

Howard is an intense, sinewy war-fighter who commands the 4^th Brigade Combat Team of the 25^th Infantry Division, which is spread across three provinces (Paktika, Paktiya and Khowst) of eastern Afghanistan. This is his fourth deployment in Afghanistan, and he's seen enough to know that firepower alone is insufficient to win. This time, he wields an impressive array of combat troops, plus military and civilian experts working on economic and agricultural development, mentoring local government officials, and training and advising Afghan army and police. In his secret daily battle-update briefing, officials from the State Department, Agriculture Department, USAID and other civilian agencies sit at his side. "And they're in charge of things and make decisions and produce results,'' Howard stressed.

But for U.S. soldiers and Marines trained to seize and hold a hilltop or other objective, this is a complicated, ambiguous and seemingly endless campaign. Their biggest fear is than an impatient American public or Congress will reach the same conclusion, and not understanding the complexity and long-term nature of this war, will pull the plug on what looks like a losing quagmire.

"We are winning here, but the requirement to win faster is real because at some point, people will lose faith,'' said Howard, referring both to Afghans and the American public. "The war is really over-simplified to the American public, and that's a function of how it's reported,'' Howard scolded me.

But another officer, an artillery officer, struggling here with small-town tribal and political dynamics, confessed: "Even my family doesn't understand what we're trying to do here.''

Small wonder, for the requirements of this war turn conventional military thinking on its head. The very presence of American troops in body armor, helmets and ballistic sunglasses can be intimidating, Afghans say. And American combat power and tactics, no matter how judiciously applied, often alienate local people. An insurgent killed by U.S. forces is likely to have a local family committed to revenge, no matter how they view the war. Kill an insurgent, create four new ones, as the saying here goes.

"I could do nothing but kill the enemy all day long, while public support goes down to nothing,'' said Campbell. His men are excruciatingly careful about wielding their power. In seven months, they haven't kicked down a door -- formerly a common practice by troops conducting house searches.

But Campbell also told me of an operation one night when overhead surveillance showed what looked like a team of insurgents planting IEDs beside a road. He and his staff watched until they were certain, and then called in a strike -- on local farmers engaged in midnight planting.

"It was horrible, something I'll have to live with,'' Campbell said with anguish on his angular face. He took a goat and compensation payment to the family of the dead farmer, and apologized. "They forgave us . . . so we didn't create any new insurgents,'' he assured me.

Still, deadly errors like that have set back the war effort during the seven years that American forces have been operating here in east-central Afghanistan, a region of broad plains and towering mountains. In March 2002, two battalions of infantry, from the 10th Mountain and 101^st Airborne Divisions, mounted an assault into the mountains above what is now Combat Outpost Zormat. The plan was to surround and kill fleeing remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Instead, the insurgents escaped into the jagged peaks and narrow defiles of the Shah-i-Khot Valley.

Having covered that operation first-hand, I was curious to see how seven years of U.S. military operations here, and costly training and equipping of the Afghan army and police -- $5.6 billion in Afghanistan this year alone -- had improved security.

Sadly, things have gotten worse.

In Gardez, the nearest city, a young Afghan told me the insurgents still hold the Shah-i-Khot, and U.S. commanders said they avoid that area, content for the moment to leave insurgents to themselves up in that relatively unpopulated area.

"We're focused on the population centers, which is not ideal,'' said Capt. Brian Johnson, the 27-year-old who commands the modest Zormat combat outpost. Insurgents travel through the area in groups of 10 or 20, he said, but a neighboring combat outpost that could intercept them is not manned "because of a lack of [U.S.] troops.''

In the more populated valleys below, Johnson's men run joint patrols and targeted attacks with the Afghan army unit based next door. "There's more good news than bad news here,'' he insisted. A year ago, a trip up the road to another combat outpost required the brigade commander's permission and attack helicopters hovering overhead. "This morning, we went back and forth twice'' with no permission or escort needed, he said.

Still, U.S. and Afghan forces have been unable to effectively protect the civilian population across the region. Insurgents have set a record number of IEDs, about 45 percent more than a year ago. About half of those are detected or avoided before they detonate -- but Afghan civilian casualties have still risen sharply. Here in Paktiya Province, the number of civilians killed, mostly by insurgent IEDs, is up 29 percent from last year, while across the broader region of eastern Afghanistan the number of civilians killed and wounded rose about 45 percent.

Col. Howard, the brigade commander, told me the rising violence is a deep concern that has led him to raise the issue of getting additional U.S. troops, although he wouldn't say how many he needs.

"The violence has to come down to a level where it doesn't affect the daily lives of the people, to a point where people aren't afraid to take an active part in their government -- and right now we're not at that level,'' he said. In particular, he is struggling with IEDs and official corruption, the two scourges that Afghans complain about the most. Corruption, Howard said, "is a cancer without a cure in Afghanistan. If we don't come up with a cure, it will cause us to fail.''

The IED problem is manageable, with more resources, he suggested. Jalaluddin Haqqani and his sons, who run a violently dangerous Taliban network in this region, have poured tens of thousands of dollars into attacking the civilian population. "Those IEDs cost a ton of money, those suicide vests, the suicide truck bombs, cost thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of explosives.

"If your enemy ups his resourcing by 10 percent and you don't -- and you're not already winning by 10 percent in the first place, you're gonna have a setback,'' Howard said, explaining his current situation. The result is an increasingly intimidated population unwilling to vote, for example, or even risk routine travel.

Doctors at the Afghan civilian hospital in Khowst used to regularly make the short drive to visit the U.S. military hospital at Forward Operating Base Salerno, Howard's sprawling headquarters. No longer.

"It's very dangerous to be known to be working with the Americans,'' said Lt. Col. Patricia Ten Haaf, the hospital commander. "Two years ago there was a lot of back-and-forth, but now I wouldn't send my only eye surgeon there, and their doctors won't come here for internships. And I regret that."

A middle-aged Afghan doctor also lamented the deterioration of security. "In 2002 to 2006, the security situation was better. It was easy for an American doctor to come to Khowst hospital. Walking around the city was no problem. Now . . .'' he crinkled his eyes in an apologetic smile. "Not possible.'' He asked not to be identified by name.

U.S. agricultural experts hired four Afghans from Khowst to be agricultural advisers. Their families received threatening "night letters'' from the Taliban, and two of the four advisers quit. With the safety of the Afghan people eroding, Howard acknowledged that "we have to have an increase in resources -- certainly an increase in ground troops.''

U.S., allied and Afghan forces are winning every fight with insurgents. "But are we winning fast enough, are we bringing the violence down fast enough? I don't think we are,'' he acknowledged.

That concern is widespread among American military officers here. "You can't be here and not want to help the Afghan people, and I do think Afghanistan could again become a breeding ground for international terrorism,'' said Col. Cindra Chastain, deputy commander of the Indiana National Guard's agricultural development team in Khowst Province.

"Is the public willing to have us stay long enough to do what we need to do? I don't think so,'' she told me. "But if not, everything we're doing here will be wasted.''

FORWARD OPERATING BASE SALERNO, Afghanistan -- They are the invisible casualties of this war, the 2,194 Americans who have been badly wounded in battle here. More are coming.

Stunned, torn and bleeding, they are extracted from dusty battlefields in wild, shouting chaos, and because they are so quickly rushed into the hands of trauma nurses and surgeons, more of them survive than in past wars.

But their wounds are often grievous, even more severe than those inflicted in the Iraq war. It is not uncommon for a casualty to arrive at a combat surgical hospital with two, three or even more immediately life-threatening injuries. Simultaneously drawn to the soldier's side will be specialists in setting broken bones, repairing deep abdominal wounds, attending to crushing chest injuries and cleaning the stumps of amputated limbs, while a neurologist works to assess brain damage.

The battle dead, deservedly, are venerated and honored by name. They are memorialized by their comrades in formal, intense, battlefield ceremony, honored as their remains are carried past rows of saluting troops onto waiting aircraft, and their sacrifices are sanctified again during and after their various journeys home. Their deaths are announced by the Pentagon and recorded on gravestones.

The wounded receive no such recognition. They are moved swiftly and anonymously; their names and sacrifices are not publicly recorded by the Department of Defense, which effectively bans interviews and photographs.

But as they are tenderly passed along -- from the combat medics who bandage them and the dust-off pilots who fly them away under fire, to the surgeons who perform emergency battle-zone surgery and the aero-medical evacuation pilots and crews who fly them toward home -- they are known and respected, honored, and treated with urgent compassion.

Darting through mountain passes like an angry hornet, Army Capt. Thomas Lemmons drove his UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter toward the landing zone where two badly wounded soldiers lay. Short of the landing zone, he started taking heavy enemy fire despite - or perhaps because of - the red cross emblazoned in a white circle on the fuselage. He backed away while a pair of Apache attack helicopters made their strafing runs. Afterward, Lemmons slid in to the LZ, touching down in an immense cloud of brown dust, and as his medics dashed out with litters, he started taking fire again, calling out to the Apaches, "Targets at my ten o'clock! Targets at my four o'clock!"

One soldier had been shot through the throat and was barely conscious. Working feverishly, medics applied a gauze pressure bandage and the blood gushed from an exit wound. They swathed him in bandages and sprinted with him on a litter through the dust and bullets to the helo. The other soldier had a clean upper chest wound; he was loaded in and Lemmons lifted off.

Minutes later they were touching down in bright, clear sunshine on the concrete ramp of the joint theater hospital at Bagram Air Field, the major U.S. base in Afghanistan. As the rotors coasted to a stop, the aircraft was swarmed with blue-gloved trauma nurses, medics and orderlies. The throat-wound soldier had died in flight, bled out. The soldier with a chest wound was rushed into surgery.

Tom Lemmons is a 35-year-old California National Guard pilot who volunteered to fly medevac choppers, known as "dust-off" missions in Afghanistan. In private life he runs a construction company in Livermore, Calif.

U.S. military field medicine treats all wounded - Americans, Afghans, French, Brits . . . and, yes, even enemy insurgents, who get the same priority medical care as American troops. One time recently, the "dust-off" birds retrieved a pair of casualties, one American, one insurgent, wounded in the same battle (and perhaps by each other). They were loaded into the helicopter side by side ("We sedated 'em pretty good so they wouldn't wake up and start fightin' again,'' said a medic) and went into surgery on adjoining gurneys. The enemy fighter was then taken to a separate recovery room, in restraints and under armed guard. "Some of them are amazed and grateful,'' said a doctor, speaking of the enemy wounded. "Some of them, you know they'd kill you in a heartbeat if they had the chance. We treat them all the same."

Scott Russi is working out at the gym when the call echoes across Forward Operating Base Salerno. "Attention on the FOB! Attention on the FOB! Shamrock Black, I say again, Shamrock Black!" The code signifies multiple casualties, inbound. And the Combat Surgical Hospital's chief surgeon is sprinting, barely in time to throw on a camouflage-patterned hospital blouse and draw on gloves before medics burst through the hospital doors with men in blood-soaked dressings writhing on their litters.

Roadside bombs, or IEDs, are the principal cause of injury in Afghanistan, and the numbers are rising - tripling in the past three years in this region. The initial blast can collapse lungs and rupture eyeballs, bowels and other internal organs. Shrapnel slices through tissue. The blast flings its victims about, causing blunt-force trauma. Burns and smoke inhalation often follow.

Four gurneys are in the emergency room. Four casualties, attended by a throng of nurses, surgeons, orderlies, specialists, and a babble of urgent, yet calm and confident, voices. Russi, still wearing a ball cap and his gym shorts, snipping off a sodden uniform, inserting a chest tube, probing for additional unnoticed wounds, quarterbacking his team as he manages multiple trauma wounds, repairing enough to get the patient wheeled down the hallway and into the operating room.

Within 15 minutes of the Shamrock alert, the emergency room is virtually empty, with only orderlies cleaning up blood-stained bandages, scrubbing down the floor. Three patients are in surgery. One soldier had arrived dead. He is covered with a sheet and gently removed.

Hours later, Russi is walking to dinner, musing about his life here. Back home in Colorado Springs, Colo., he is an Air Force colonel and runs hospitals, clinics and a large medical staff. Here, he works out at the gym and saves lives. "This is the most rewarding work I have ever done in my life, helping people who are trying to make a difference," he says in the twilight.

He tells of a young Afghan girl brought in, comatose, from Khost city hospital near the U.S. military hospital here. She'd been hit by a car. Russi and the staff worked on her for three weeks while her father slept at her bedside. Now she is almost fully recovered.

"If she'd been left at Khost [hospital] she would have died,'' says Russi. "It is important that the interaction with Afghans shows them what America is really about - caring for each other. I still believe we are a good people - I guess I still bleed red, white and blue,'' says Russi, 48, who volunteered for six months away from his wife and six children. This is his second combat deployment. "This is the way life should be,'' he says. "Everybody working together, not like in the U.S. with all that pervasive superficiality.''

"We have people horribly wounded,'' a nurse told me. "And yet . . . we had a Marine in here the other day. He'd lost one leg and the other was cocked at an odd angle. We asked him if he'd like something for the pain, and he said, 'Ma'am, I surely would appreciate that."

There are also the wounded who are not obviously wounded, the ones who may be dazed or momentarily stunned by an IED blast, but who shake it off.

"These are the ones that worry me," says Col Joseph P. Chozinski, a psychologist and Air Force flight surgeon at Bagram Air Field. "They go through multiple IED blasts and may have severe headaches but they press on, and not until they get home do they begin to have problems."

One doctor, not entirely in jest, has proposed that anyone blown up by an IED four times automatically gets to go home.

Once the wounded are stabilized, they are flown out of Afghanistan aboard specially outfitted aircraft that are essentially airborne Intensive Care Units. Air pressure and temperature are carefully adapted to individual patients' needs (burn patients need heat; chest-wound patients often can't fly at high altitude). For the medical and flight crews, these are emotional missions.

"It really hurts to see how young these wounded kids are, some of them terribly wounded, on ventilators and with horrible head wounds,'' Lt. Col. Jeffrey Briere, a pilot with the Nebraska Air National Guard, told me at the start of one such 21-hour mission.

"Helping these guys on their way home is the most terrible, and rewarding, mission we do."

On one flight, among the patients was a military working dog, used to hunt for explosives. The dog had been wounded in a firefight. He was in a body cast on which was written: "Taliban tastes like chicken."

All military medical staff, from medics to surgeons and pilots, are on call 24/7, and they jump to the sound of an alarm -- most often a "nine-line'' radio request for casualty evacuation from a soldier or Marine kneeling for cover in a firefight. They work 12- to 14-hour days with no days off. It is a high-stress business.

"We've seen some gruesome things, but luckily your mind is wonderful in the way it can absorb things,'' Madelin Schwitzke told me at Bagram Air Field. She's an Air Force master sergeant and medical logistician on her fourth deployment away from home in Charleston, S.C. She is accustomed to running to the sound of incoming medevac aircraft.

"When you get home, some time you'll hear a plane and you'll go through a moment of emotional crisis,'' she said. "And then you will go on. That's what we do.''

OVER FARAH PROVINCE, Western Afghanistan -- At an unseen point in the dark, Lt. Col. Wil Baulkmon slams down the flaps and pitches up the nose of his lumbering C-130 airlift plane. On the sharply canted cargo bay floor behind him, six tons of cargo strains against its web straps toward the open ramp and the roaring emptiness outside. "Come a little to the right ... a bit more," the navigator says crisply on the intercom. "OK, on course and looking good.''

This is the largely unseen but critical part of the war here, the routine air resupply without which the Obama administration's war strategy would falter. It is the ability of the U.S. to airdrop supplies with precision -- and to land the stubby workhorse C-130s with cargo on remote dirt airstrips -- that enables smaller troop units to break away from big bases and operate from remote sites with the food, water and ammo they need.

Dispersing the troops is a key element of the new strategy to provide security for Afghanistan's population, which is scattered in thousands of rural villages and dusty crossroads and deep mountain valleys. Supplying American and allied troops by road is costly, time-consuming and -- because of persistent insurgent attacks on convoys -- often deadly. In the past eight years, 252 American troops have been killed by IEDs on Afghanistan's roads, according to the most recent Pentagon data, with another 1,624 wounded.

The roads are dangerous for other reasons, too. Last year, the U.S. military lost 44 trucks carrying 220,000 gallons of fuel. The skyrocketing appetite for critical resupply has outrun the capacity of U.S. military truck convoys, so local truckers are hired to haul non-lethal cargo, an Army logistics officer told me. But because of bandit roadblocks, insurgent attacks and breakdowns, it takes an average of 21 days for local truckers to struggle from Bagram Air Field, where cargo flights arrive from the U.S. and Europe, to Kandahar, the staging base for allied forces in southern Afghanistan. In winter, it can take twice that long.

"Convoys are favored targets of insurgents,'' a senior Pentagon official told Congress a few months ago. It's not hard to figure out why: strangle the supply of food, water, ammunition, reinforcement troops and blood, and military operations come to a halt. Here, in other words, all roads lead to...the skies. And American forces still control the air.

"Airlift keeps people off the road, and we can save lives," Air Force Gen. Arthur J. Lichte, who leads the Air Mobility Command, told me before I came to Afghanistan. The "surge'' of 21,000 additional U.S. troops into Afghanistan and their dispersal to remote bases has also surged the Air Force resupply effort. This year it's on track to airdrop 28 million pounds, more than triple the amount airdropped in 2007. "You put boots on the ground, they need supplies, and airlift requirements go up - doubling every six months,'' Lichte told me in his office at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.

It takes a furious and continuous ballet of parachute riggers, pallet handlers, loaders and air crews to move the supplies, including 15,000 pounds a day of the most valued cargo in Afghanistan: U.S. mail.

"We're running on adrenalin and three hours of sleep a night,'' Master Sgt. Dave Vesper, a C130 loadmaster, shouted at me as he helped push pallets into an aircraft cargo hold. Like many of the air crews flying these missions, Vesper, 43, is an Air National Guardsman who volunteered for an active-duty assignment here. He's from Mansfield, Ohio.

In fact, Air National Guard crews fly the majority of airlift flights. On rotations of one or two months, they fly their C-130s from their home state to Afghanistan, fly airlift missions four to six times a week, then swap out with another Guard crew before making their three-stop flight back home. It's an expensive shuttle, at $14,762 per C-130 flight hour. But there is no way the active-duty Air Force can met the demand.

Flying airlift in Afghanistan is taxing work. Heavily loaded C-130s have to dodge jet fighters, unmanned drones, commercial 747 cargo liners, transport and attack helicopters and even occasional artillery shells. They squeeze through Afghanistan's high mountain passes and battle heat, blinding dust, heavy winds, radios that fade in and out, and inevitable schedule snafus. Missions last up to 12 hours only on paper.

But Air Guard crews bring deep experience to the job. Torque 46's pilot, Baulkmon, 43, also flies for the Ohio Guard. He used to fly Navy F-18 fighter jets. Now, he's a Continental Airlines pilot when he's not volunteering for Afghanistan. Scrambling around the cargo bay on our flight is 51-year-old William Raby. He's been a National Guard loadmaster for 34 years and has deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan seven times.

"It is tiring,'' he said before Torque 46 took off at dusk one recent evening. Like most airmen, he speaks reverentially of "the guys on the ground'' who are taking the risks, living in harsh conditions, doing the fighting. "They do the real work,'' Raby said in his gravelly voice. "We just make sure we get them the stuff they need.''

Guys like Raby and Vesper work industriously and expertly in the hours before an airdrop, helping Army riggers sent here by the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, to pack cargo into bags and stack them onto pallets, strapped down tight and rigged with the proper size parachute. Each pallet is cushioned with eight inches of heavy cardboard honeycomb designed to crush on impact. They get the pallets out to the waiting C-130s and up into the hold, where everything must be packed and trimmed precisely, so the loads will slide out and the chutes will open properly. Any error could result in a "streamer,'' a heavy pallet whose chute fails to open. Streamers are a black eye for the air crews - and the demolished packages a great disappointment for the guys on the ground.

Now here is Raby at work, seconds after the first airdrop and minutes from a second drop. Baulkmon has the plane on one wing, in a tight turn towards the drop zone. Raby is out by the rear ramp, which is open to the night and the barely visible ground sliding along below. He's furiously cutting and slicing away bits of webbing, clearing the way for the next multi-ton set of bundles waiting behind him deep in the cargo bay.

"One minute!'' the navigator intones on the intercom as the nose goes up.

"C'mon, Loads,'' someone urges Raby. "Get the heck out of the way.''

"Forty seconds!'' the navigator announces, just as Raby climbs back over the bundles to safety.

And the second load of the night slides away to the troops below.

"Four bundles away,'' Raby announces. "No streamers.''

It doesn't always go as smoothly. One typical 5:30 a.m. mission called for a Missouri Air Guard C-130 to haul U.S. troops and cargo from Bagram Air Field to Kabul, pick up Afghan National Army soldiers and more cargo, off-load it all in Kandahar, fly different cargo back to Kabul, and then head back to Bagram.

Among its first cargo load on the manifest: a deceased Afghan, identity and circumstances unknown to the C-130 crew. Problem is, the HR ('human remains'') hasn't shown up. Designated flight ISAF 44, the C-130 waits on the tarmac with engines idling.

"Think we can beat that Prowler out of here?'' asks Maj. Chuck "Fig'' Newton, the Missouri Guard co-pilot, nodding toward a Navy EA-6B preparing to taxi.

"Nah, he's already turning (engines)'' says Capt. Cade Keenan, pilot.

"Tell him he's got a door open, that'll fix him,'' responds Newton, a former Marine Harrier jet pilot.

Eventually - hours off schedule - they're told to go ahead without the HR. Thirty minutes later, as Flight ISAF 44 is gear-down and seconds from landing at Kabul, the crew receives a text-message: Come back for the HR. The message is ignored.

As several dozen Afghan National Army soldiers in brand-new uniforms line up to board at Kabul, Keenan and Newton confer: Should they hold the Afghan troops here and fly back just for the HR, or tell Bagram, no way?

They tell Bagram, no way. As the Afghans clamber aboard, smiling bravely but clutching air sick bags, there comes a text message from Bagram: OK, forget the HR.

It is blazing hot in Kandahar and the C-130 needs fuel. No fuel truck is in sight, and Keenan, grumbling, goes stomping off in search of one.

Hours later, fueled and loaded, ISAF 44 heads toward Kabul, where heavy winds have churned up a dust storm that turns blindingly opaque in the setting sun. It's like flying directly into a pastel yellow wall. Keenan gets the C-130 onto the ground, all right, but the cross-winds are fierce. Too fierce, it turns out, to take off again. And a delay of even 90 minutes means the crew would exceed the maximum allowable time on flight duty, requiring 13 hours of rest before they can fly again.

"The bad news is we're stuck here,'' he tells the crew. "If there is good news, it's that I ran into a guy who can get us beds with actual sheets.''

Waiting to see if the wind abates, the crew dozes in their parked C-130, which rocks gently in the gusts. Dust drifts in through the open cargo bay ramp. A tattered Stars & Stripes newspaper is passed around. Suddenly, Keenan bounds up the ramp. "We're going,'' he says, and minutes later ISAF 44 is airborne ("Clear left!'' the navigator calls as the plane slides past a rocky peak). It's been 16 hours since the crew gathered for the flight.

But the cargo was delivered and the crew did its part to get reinforcements and supplies to the ground troops, and that's all that matters.

"You know, apart from being with my wife,'' says Newton, who is normally given to caustic gallows humor, "there is absolutely nothing I'd rather be doing than this.''

FORWARD OPERATING BASE SALERNO, Afghanistan -- Jouncing along a dusty road the other day in one of the huge armored trucks called MRAPs, built to protect troops from bomb blast, I had a sudden vision of Ted Kennedy's intense blue eyes boring into mine.

The senator was furious - luckily, not at me. It was January 2007, and he was holding a copy of an article I'd written a few days earlier from Iraq, which reflected the growing concerns of Marines in Anbar Province about IEDs. Some of the Marines I'd talked with had mentioned bomb-resistant vehicles, and they wanted some - lots of them, actually. The Marines were sure that having those machines would save American lives.

Kennedy had summoned me to the Capitol to learn more. Who made MRAPs, and where? How could he get some out to the Marines? How fast? Why didn't they have them already? This was no play for publicity. Kennedy was angry. And determined.

It was a side of the senator I had neither expected nor previously seen. He had made his reputation on social issues. Decades earlier his opposition to the Vietnam War matured into a lifelong obsession with resettling refugees. His drive for universal health care is legendary. Many conservatives reviled him as the quintessential tax 'n' spend liberal. More to the point, he had argued vociferously in opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and voted against the Senate resolution that authorized it.

But he also had a passion for protecting troops sent into battle. Young Massachusetts men had been killed because they'd been sent out in vehicles with insufficient (or no) armor. Quietly, Kennedy applied that fervor and his genius for legislative action to acquiring MRAPs. Few realized he was a major force behind it.

It wasn't long before the Pentagon was snapping to. Suppliers were found, contracts were awarded. Congress found the money. Critics were sidelined. Soon MRAPs were rolling off production lines and into the sands of Iraq. And now, Afghanistan.

Roadside bombs continued to be the insurgents' weapon of choice. IEDs continued to kill even as more and more MRAPs were deployed. But the battlefield data showed a definite trend: insurgents were planting more and more IEDs; yet the number of casualties has stayed about level. There are many reasons for this. Soldiers are better trained to spot IEDs before they detonate. Special teams are tracking down insurgents' IED networks.

And more soldiers and Marines are surviving IED blasts because they are riding in MRAPs. Smiling as I remembered Kennedy's determination to get these things into the battlefield, I glanced around at the soldiers I was riding with. A medic, 24 years old. Two specialists, both 20. A sergeant, 23. Up in the turret behind his .50-cal machine gun, a PFC, 19.

I considered telling them about Kennedy and his role in getting MRAPs out to the troops. But it was noisy, and they were preoccupied with the mission. And besides, I thought, Kennedy never wanted nor claimed credit, so I let it rest. But it is worth noting, as I learned of Sen. Edward Kennedy's death, that there are young Americans sent into harm's way out here, who are alive because of his good work.

On all their behalf: Thanks, Ted, and may God keep your soul.

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan -- This war's wounded are collected from outposts around Afghanistan by C-130 aeromedical flights. The planes land here with the broken and lacerated bodies of young Americans, lying comatose in casts and bandages among their intravenous tubes and their blood monitors and respirator masks, stacked in racks of litters quietly attended by nurses wearing careworn faces and blue surgical gloves.

The wounded are rushed on gurneys into the big American military hospital to have their wounds washed and dressed, and often to undergo more surgery to stabilize them before being flown to Germany and home. This incoming flight was different, for one of the litters held the huddled figure of a little girl with one leg fractured, the other leg and her buttocks needled painfully with metal shards of shrapnel. She may have been 7 years old. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Her name is Roqua.

She had been brought to the British hospital at Camp Bastion in Kandahar Province, the scene of heavy fighting. The details were unclear, but the word passed along by the medical staff was that her family had been killed - all but one, her older brother. That would be Abdul Khaliq, the solemn young boy standing beside the litter, gripping her small hand.

The U.S. military's medical policy is that combatants wounded in battle - Americans, Afghans and insurgents - are given first-priority medical attention (and they receive the same emergency medical care.) Next come Afghan civilians wounded in the fighting. Much is made about innocent Afghans killed amid the callousness of battle. Little is heard of the wounded civilians who are rushed away for world-class U.S. medical treatment.

Roqua fit that category, although no one knew whether she had been wounded and her family killed by insurgents or whether she was an innocent casualty of errant American fire. "It doesn't really matter, does it?'' a nurse said to me.

At Camp Bastion, Roqua's litter had been loaded gently aboard the C-130 along with the other battlefield wounded. Her brother was there, too, allowed on board as a family escort. A seat was found for him in the noisy, windowless cargo bay of the plane, and there he sat, clutching an air-sick bag, while the plane took off for Bagram.

When the C-130 flight crew learned of the young Afghan boy on board for his first airplane ride, they sent word back to bring him to the flight deck. Up he came, and soon was standing behind the pilot and co-pilot, grinning broadly, earphones on head and bubble gum in mouth.

Lt. Col. David Kolterman, a pilot and commander of the 77th Expeditionary Airlift Wing, snapped a photo of him there. When I saw them several days later in the hospital, Roqua had had her surgeries and was dozing while an Air Force nurse softly stroked her forehead. And Abdul Khaliq? He sat in a chair nearby, glued to a TV screen filled with bikinis and sports cars, the movie "Charlies' Angels: Full Throttle."

He was polite and respectful when I got him aside during a break, and he shook my hand with a small but firm grip. But I didn't learn much. His airplane ride was "very good,'' according to the interpreter. He thought he might be 12 years old. He did not attend school. He did not know who was responsible for casualties in his family. "There was just a lot of fighting,'' the interpreter relayed.

But whatever had happened, Abdul Khaliq and his sister were now safe.

He had bathed and put on clean (donated) clothes. Roqua was on the mend and well cared for. It is difficult to say what the future holds for them. Roqua will be moved to the Korean or Egyptian hospital here for long-term care. Eventually sister and brother will be taken home and absorbed back into rural village life and their extended family.

Perhaps their astonishing experience with America's humanitarian values may eventually lead them toward a larger horizon. That is not the point, of course: their rescue and care come without a price tag. For the medics and flight nurses, pilots and surgeons and orderlies, the opportunity to help ensure that the two young Afghans are healthy and safe is its own reward.

A final note: The Heathe N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital here, where the wounded are collected and prepared for medevac flights to Germany, is always looking for donations from home. Especially valued: get-well cards; homemade quilts and soft blankets to tuck in around the patients as they leave; toiletries; and T-shirts and sweatpants, because their uniforms are usually cut away by surgeons. If you're so inclined, send to: The Heathe N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital, Task Force MED-EAST - Afghanistan, APO AE, 09354