PANJSHIR IN THE PINK:

Sparsely populated valley a haven of Afghan prosperity (John Ward Anderson, 10/14/07, Washington Post)

Slashed across the side of a rugged mountain like the sign of Zorro, the Z Road started as a simple $59,000 US project to put a radio tower atop a small peak in the Hindu Kush, so people in the remote Panjshir Valley could for the first time pick up commercial radio from Kabul, about 60 miles away.

After road crews conquered the mountain's 270-foot face last November, other forces took over. By the new year, private companies had extended the road to the next hilltop, two-thirds of a mile away and 640 feet higher, for a bank of cellphone towers.

Then came another half-mile extension to the next peak for a television tower, then plans for a wind farm, and, last month, a series of switchbacks down the far side of the range to give villages in the next valley their first road to the outside.

This is the way reconstruction in Afghanistan was supposed to be. A little bit of US pump priming, combined with profit motive and human need, would be harnessed by a grateful, liberated population to transform their lives and country. In the process, the people would become loyal allies in the fight against terror.

It hasn't always worked that way. Afghanistan is besieged by a growing insurgency that is shifting US money and manpower from reconstruction to security, undermining vital road, electricity, school, and other projects that are designed to extend the authority of the national government and win hearts and minds.

But in Afghanistan's famed Panjshir Valley - a remote, sparsely populated mountain region that is almost entirely ethnic Tajik - an unprecedented synergy among the local government, the people, and US soldiers has helped spark a development boom that is modernizing and transforming the valley, which became Afghanistan's 34th province three years ago. Underpinning it all is an unusual sense of calm that has come with the people's success in keeping the Taliban at bay.

MORE:
Tangling With the Taliban: More American soldiers are pushing into high-threat areas. (MATTHEW KAMINSKI, October 14, 2007, Opinion Journal)

[T]his is a frustrating game of hide-and-seek where the enemy is hard to spot--is that goat herder also an al Qaeda lookout?--and the insurgency leadership a jumble of names and allegiances. Southeast of Kabul, seasoned Arab, Uzbek and Chechen foreigners command Afghans, referring to them sometimes as "sheep," according to Command Sgt. Maj. Richard Weik. Further north, men loyal to Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful jihadist who joined up with the Taliban, are in the lead, brazenly kidnapping and harassing villagers and manning roadblocks not far from Kabul.

Gen. Craddock separates the Taliban--estimated between 5,000 and 20,000 strong--into "day fighters," who take up arms for money, and "a hard-core extremist leadership [that] will never change." What fuels the rising violence in Afghanistan may be as much indigence and tribal feuding as al Qaeda ideology. Hamid Karzai's government pushes economic development and reaches out to so-called Taliban moderates--with little to show for it. And the supply of fighters, foreign and Afghan, won't dry up as long as western Pakistan provides the kind of safe haven that America pledged to destroy after 9/11.