Jobs, Water Key to Winning Afghan Villages
A Taliban suicide bomber in Afghanistan blew himself up today in the middle of a crowd that was leaving a mosque near Kabul, Twenty-four people were killed, including the country's deputy intelligence chief, an ally of President Hamid Karzai.
Meanwhile, U.S. forces are locked in a town-by-town battle with the Taliban. But in Afghanistan, bulldozers may be more important than bullets, as CBS news correspondent David Martin reports from Yargul Kala, in Logar Province.
The Afghans call this spectacular mountain bowl the bogeyman because it's infested with hardcore Taliban.
When Captain Jose Vasquez and the 90 soldiers of Cherokee Troop got here last spring, they were attacked every day.
"The enemy realized we were really disrupting their support zones and they felt a need to try and attempt to take it back," Vasquez said.
Vasquez has beaten back the Taliban without losing a single soldier. In a conventional war, you would call that winning. But not in Afghanistan.
"I would say it's definitely a tie because right now we have several towns that are just on the edge," he said.
So he is meeting with village elders - offering help to people who live in dirt houses and pump their water by hand as well as "the repair of some roads and then maybe building a soccer field for some kids."
The elders tell him the men of the village need work. Vasquez's reply: "We're going to talk about more jobs."
Some 27,000 people live in this region and, like the backpacks Vasquez brought for the children, there are not enough troops to go around. Whether it's troops or backpacks, when they run short it can get rough.
To give an idea of how thinly spread American troops are, counterinsurgency doctrine calls for one soldier to protect every 50 inhabitants. Here it's only one American soldier for every 270.
The under-trained and under-equipped Afghan army and police will eventually have to take over in the region, but not any time soon.
"If we left today," Vasquez says, "what we've accomplished so far would just fall apart."
Vasquez promised the elders two new jobs today and to him that means two men earning money instead of shooting at his soldiers.
