Lieutenant Asadullah Khan and his small unit were expecting tough fighting with the Taliban when they were ordered to pack for an operation in the southern province of Ghazni. Just before their deployment, violence had peaked in the province with bombings, attacks on district centres and almost daily gun battles.
But once the unit hit the ground in early June, they found few rebels. "I and my men haven't encountered any Taliban since we arrived here," Khan told AFP a few weeks later, sitting cross-legged in the heat of a Ghazni desert shaded by military camouflage nets.
"I would be glad to meet them," he laughed, pointing to an AK-47 rifle on his lap. His unit, among 1,200 Afghan and Nato soldiers in the operation called Maiwand, was however quickly one man down. A soldier was killed in a mine blast in the first days of the deployment. Khan insisted the bomb was an old device. Captain Mohammad Kamal, another Afghan army commander in the operation -- the first major Afghan-led campaign against the Taliban, has the same experience.
"Where are the Taliban?" the captain asked from his own command post in the back of a military truck. "They're scared to come up and fight us," answered one of his 40 infantrymen.
The rebels may have been out of sight in Ghazni but that doesn't mean they are not there and fighting, military commanders said. Instead, they said, the rebels melted into the villages and towns of the mountainous province -- a tactic security forces says is resulting in civilians being killed in military operations.
"The Taliban had a large presence in this region," said General Abdul Fatah Frough, police chief for Afghanistan's eastern provinces and one in the command-chain of Operation Maiwand.
"Before we arrived, you could not drive down the road. The Taliban were everywhere and incidents occurred on every corner, truck drivers were killed right on the road and Taliban were able to attack our district centres." "But now, look, there's no Taliban," the general said at his post on the edge of the blue Band-i-Sardai lake.
Citing intelligence, Frough said Taliban, including foreign fighters, had left the area and their foot soldiers were hiding among the villagers. "When there is a force deployment, they run away or hide. And when you leave, they just come back," said an Afghan army colonel under condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to media.
Nato's International Security Assistance Force is hoping however they won't be back, saying the operation secured 86 villages and brought locals into plans for longer-term stability with more police stations and patrols.
-- BATTLE OF IDEAS - The Taliban, removed from government in a US-led offensive late 2001, are waging an insurgency they call a "jihad" or a holy war against foreign troops they say invaded Afghanistan.
Their ideology has gained them some support amongst ordinary people, especially in the conservative east and the south -- from where the Taliban rose to take power in 1996.
Those who do not follow the extremists sometimes abide them and not always by choice. "We don't think they necessarily support the Taliban. We just think they tolerate them and they turn a blind eye so they're not harmed," US Army Major David Pierce told AFP.
It is on these villagers that military strategists, both from the Western-trained Afghan security forces and armed-to-teeth international troops, want to concentrate to win the fight. "This insurgency is a battle of ideas," said US Colonel Martin P. Schweitzer, who led the Nato troops involved in Operation Maiwand.
"If it was a battle of bullets, it would've been over," he said in his office in a bullet-pocked building he shares with noisy birds at the lake. The colonel, who has fought eight battles across the world and is on his third mission to Afghanistan, said the fighting would be over when the government gained support of the war-weary people in the villages.
"What we are thinking we are finding and identifying is that the operation needs to be population-focused," he said. "We're going to provide the populace an alternative vision of what the Taliban is providing," he said.
"The strongest message, I believe in my heart, is the Afghan government is offering its people a better way of life -- medical, economic, development -- versus what the Taliban are providing: oppression, threats, burning district centres and killing them." In this vein, the operation trained doctors, dentists and veterinarians and gave medical care to 1,800 people.
The strategy is to "separate the enemy from the population" including by pushing through a reconstruction drive in villages where conditions are little better than the Middle Ages. But no one doubts it will take a long time to defeat the bloody campaign of Iraq-style suicide explosions and other terror tactics.
"Like any guerrilla war, this insurgency we're fighting will take time," said a high-ranking Afghan defence ministry official who asked not to be identified. "I would say we would need five to 10 years to defeat it."
This is because it is "hard to control invisible enemies laying a mine on a road or coming up and detonating a suicide bombing" -- and not because the Taliban are effective.
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