On the road with "Dog Company"

U.S. troops patrol through an area where marijuana is dried in Senjaray, which is located in Kandahar province, in southern Afghanistan. (Ben Gilbert/GlobalPost)

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COMBAT OUTPOST SENJARAY, Afghanistan — It’s not every day that U.S. Army Staff Sgt. John Sanchez of the 1-12 Infantry Battalion's "Dog Company" finds good cilantro in Afghanistan.

But on a recent patrol through the southern Afghan village of Senjaray, a local grocer had a variety that met the sergeant’s requirements for homemade salsa. He intended to make the dish as a garnish for that night’s taco dinner back at the unit’s combat outpost.

Outfitted in body armor and with automatic rifle at the ready, Sanchez picked up a delicate green cilantro sprig and sampled it as if he were in a gourmet kitchen and not a combat zone.

“This one looks the best,” he said to a fellow soldier as he handed over faded Afghan currency to the shopkeeper in exchange for a plastic bag full of green leaves. “Who would have thought you could find cilantro in Afghanistan?”

Sanchez and his fellow soldiers are the only unit from their battalion of the U.S. military’s 4th Infantry Division who buy produce from the local market. They make it part of their daily patrols in this village of 10,000 people that lies west of Kandahar City. The goal is to show the local population in the once violent and still Taliban-infested town of Senjaray that American troops are here to secure the area, and the population.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. John Sanchez buys cilantro in a market in Senjaray, Afghanistan. (Ben Gilbert/GlobalPost)

Securing and protecting the population is a key element in the new counterinsurgency strategy that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the U.S.-led international coalition in Afghanistan, has said will now be used to win the war here. He said that success should not be measured by how many enemy were killed, but how well the coalition separated the Afghan people from the Taliban and other insurgents.

But accomplishing that task is easier said than done, especially in an army that has trained its troops in conventional warfare during the last 60 years. Now, every day in Afghanistan, the noncommissioned and commissioned officers on the ground, and the enlisted men under their command, are trying to turn strategy into reality. It’s not easy.

“We are foreigners and we don’t know who the good guys are or who the bad guys are,” Lt. Reed Peeples, one of Dog — derived from "D" — Company’s young platoon leaders, told five turbaned and bearded Afghan men at a street corner through an interpreter. “So, in order for us to provide security to you guys, we need your help and we need the help of the people to let us know what your concerns are so we can work with the police and the army to fix them.”

The men nodded. They said security was good. They weren’t especially engaging — but they weren’t rude either.

Peeples has a good sense for counterinsurgency operations; he volunteered for two years in the Peace Corps in nearby Kyrgyzstan, giving him valuable cultural and linguistic experience not often found in the U.S. military.

But Peebles says Dog Company’s soldiers are a different story, and have a hard time dealing with the low-level conflict they are currently involved in. The soldiers in the 120-man company expected some serious combat when they first heard they were destined for this violent Taliban stronghold west of Kandahar, called Zari. The smaller Canadian units based here over the last three years took heavy casualties. Now, with a more robust American presence, the Taliban lays low, frustrating U.S. infantryman whose job the U.S. Army says is to “capture, destroy and repel enemy ground forces during combat.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/091216/afghanistan-war-taliban