Troops prepare for transition in Afghanistan

MIZAN, AFGHANISTAN ? Last year, Taliban threats and buried roadside bombs kept local farmers from selling their fruits at marketplaces outside this small community. Similar intimidation kept residents from sending their children to school or attending their own bazaar.

Change has come slowly, but the road is now open and ready for harvest traffic this fall. So is the Mizan bazaar. Children, including girls, are learning to read at a mosque while the district governor negotiates a deal to open five schools here.

?Mizan is open for business,? said Command Sgt. Maj. James Coroy, the top enlisted officer in the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment of Fort Wainwright, Alaska.

Coroy and hundreds of other Alaska soldiers are now leaving Mizan in Zabul province. They?re handing this piece of southern Afghanistan to the 1st Squadron, 14th Infantry Regiment of Joint Base Lewis-McChord before it?s handed over to the Afghans later this year.

The clock is ticking. These Stryker soldiers from the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division are aware of calls to hasten the American withdrawal. Many expect the transition will take place well before President Obama?s announced drawdown target of 2014.

Their challenges include bomb-making Taliban cells in nearby villages and ancestral ties that keep some families looking to neighboring Pakistan to settle their disputes instead of their own government.

Their assets are a well-regarded governor and capable Afghan forces that are planning their own missions to disrupt the Taliban. Afghan troops man five checkpoints along the road from Mizan to Qalat; they are keeping the two-lane highway open for commerce.

?The (Afghan Army) will stay and fight,? said Maj. Dave Polizzotti, 36, the cavalry squadron?s executive officer. ?These guys have a sense of duty, a sense of purpose.?

REGAINING TRUST

Lewis-McChord cavalry soldiers are settling into a small combat outpost that juts up against separate compounds for the Mizan governor, the Afghan army and the Afghan national police. Some barbed wire divides them, but little else.

Insurgents attacked the post a handful of times last summer. In July, a drone aircraft captured images of 16 armed insurgents moving in a valley on the other side of a nearby mountain. American air support destroyed them before they could enter the Mizan valley.

One of the most trying times for the Alaska soldiers here took place in January when a man wearing an Afghan uniform shot and killed Pfc. Dustin Napier of London, Ky., on another American base in Zabul province. Napier belonged to the same company as the soldiers here.

The shooting, as with dozens of other ?green-on-blue? killings over the past few years, seemed to strike at the heart of the NATO-Afghan cooperation that?s essential to ending the war on a positive note.

But the American officer who commanded the combat outpost for the past year didn?t overreact.

?We didn?t change anything after that,? said Capt. Greg Benjamin, 26, of Boise.

He asked his soldiers to remember they were here to partner with Afghan forces. He said the shooting did not weaken the bonds he forged with the Afghan army company attached to this outpost.

The captain has strived to retain the Afghans? trust in their U.S. counterparts. Benjamin diffused some unrest about the Feb. 20 accidental burnings of Qurans at Bagram Air Field in northern Afghanistan. He explained to Mizan elders that the soldiers who improperly disposed of the holy books were not a part of Benjamin?s platoon, and their actions did not represent the intentions of the U.S. Army here.

He said he hasn?t heard about the Quran burnings since then. Closer to home, news of the March 11 killings of 17 Afghan civilians allegedly at the hands of Lewis-McChord Staff Sgt. Robert Bales in Kandahar province has not caused a ripple of protest here, Benjamin said.

?WE CAN?T ASSUME ANYTHING?

Combat Outpost Mizan looks over a farming community next to the Arghandab River where pomegranates flourish and locals grow flowering trees simply because they enjoy their scent.

The outpost was packed last week as the Alaska soldiers end their deployments and the Lewis-McChord troops lay the groundwork for a new high-level Army security advising team that?s moving in to coach the Afghan police.

This will mark the last phase of NATO?s transition to Afghan control.

Lt. Jason Oberoi is the new platoon leader from the cavalry squadron. He soaked up information about his Afghan counterparts and the culture around his outpost while his noncommissioned officers scanned surrounding hills and made new security plans.

?It can look all peaceful out here, but we can?t assume anything. Our enemy might have moved back and forth in the area and we wouldn?t know,? said Staff Sgt. Warren Scheel, 38, of Battle Ground, Wash. ?That?s the nature of an insurgency.?

Benjamin moved into Mizan a year ago with big plans to accelerate NATO?s progress in a secure but not necessarily stable Afghan district. He was proud to help open the roads and the Mizan bazaar, but he?s still waiting to see Afghans make full use of those projects.

About five shops are open in the main bazaar, up from none when the Alaska troops arrived. But it?s well below the estimated 50 shops that were in business five years ago before security deteriorated, a Mizan elder said.

?Things move more slowly here,? Benjamin said.

HELPING NEW LEADERS GAIN CREDIBILITY

Benjamin and battalion commander Lt. Col. Jeff Stewart last week stressed that they made their social and security gains by stepping back and listening to what Mizan governor Mohammed Zarif wanted to accomplish.

They aimed to build Zarif?s credibility as a governor by acting on his plans, and by steering all requests for assistance through him.

?Everything we did was something the district governor said was important and the elders would protect,? Stewart said.

They passed out small radios and changed the programming from Kabul-centric NATO messages to ones governor Zarif wanted. That made the communication tools instantly more popular in this rural community, which feels as remote from the Afghanistan capital as Yakima, Wash., does from Washington, D.C.

Stewart said the battalion spent less than $100,000 on community assistance projects over the past year, mostly on small efforts to spur commerce in the bazaar or to help Afghans build irrigation networks.

The only failures they saw were NATO efforts that foisted American concepts on Afghan people, such as a large, concrete dam that collapsed and an agricultural cooperative that did not fit in with the Afghan style of farming.

Benjamin favored projects that Zarif could accomplish once the Americans leave.

?We?re looking for projects that are sustainable,? Benjamin said.

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