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the insurgency had become almost entirely homegrown and self-sustaining and was no longer dependent on Pakistan for safe haven, recruits, and supplies.
    In the spring of 2008, these guerrillas came down from the hills and overran one district after another against feeble resistance from the few poorly trained and equipped Afghan National Police units in Wardak. By the time the fighting season came to an end in November, the Afghan government had lost control of the province. The Taliban not only controlled most of six of the province’s eight districts, but they had also established their own provincial “shadow government” to administer the territory that they controlled, complete with their own governor, military commander, court system, and religious leaders.
    In January 2009, the U.S. Army was forced to divert the 3,500-strong 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division to Wardak and neighboring Logar Province to try to stem the tide. The brigade was almost completely unprepared for the rigors of Afghanistan. It was supposed to have been deployed to Iraq, but because of the deteriorating security situation the brigade was diverted at the last moment to Afghanistan. In the haste to get them to the battlefield, the brigade’s troops were given virtually no cultural or language training about Afghanistan prior to deployment. One of the brigade’s company commanders admitted that there was no time to teach his soldiers even the rudiments of the Pashtun dialect, except for the phrase that all GI’s in Afghanistan eventually learn, “ Dresh! Ka na daz kawam! ” which means “Halt! Or I will shoot!”
    Upon arrival in Afghanistan, the brigade’s commander, Colonel David Haight, was told that he had to make do with whatever resources he had brought with him from the U.S. There were no reserves available, and the 31,000 American and Afghan forces in eastern Afghanistan were stretched to the breaking point just trying to hold on to 43,000 square miles of mostly mountainous terrain that they were responsible for, which was equal in size to the states of Georgia and South Carolina combined, including 450 miles of border with Pakistan. Wardak was but one of fourteen provinces that the U.S. Army was responsible for, and the security situation in many of the other provinces was far worse than was the case in Wardak.
    Just as in Vietnam forty years before, there were no clearly defined front lines separating the U.S. forces from the Taliban. The plastic-covered situation maps on the walls of the Tactical Operations Center at the 3rd Brigade’s headquarters at Forward Operating Base Airborne outside the provincial capital of Maydan Shar reflected the tenuous and complicated nature of the Afghan battlefield. The U.S. Army held Maydan Shar and all of the district seats, which appeared on the situation map as blue “inkblots”; these were surrounded by a sea of red, which was the area the Taliban controlled or contested. There were hundreds of villages spread across the province. Some rated as “friendly” by the brigade’s intelligence staff; some were classified as “sitting on the fence.” Others were overtly hostile and made no secret of their loyalty to the Taliban.
    The friendliest villages in Wardak were those inhabited by the Hazara people, an ancient tribe of Shiites who speak a version of Farsi (the national language of Iran), not the Pashto dialect of their Pashtun neighbors. The Hazaras, who comprise 30 percent of the province’s population, have traditionally been the sworn enemies of the Taliban. Because they are Shiites, they were labeled “infidels” by Mullah Omar’s Taliban regime and treated brutally. Because of their natural antipathy for the Taliban, the Hazaras have probably done more than anyone else to help the U.S. Army hold Wardak Province over the past three years. They have also been a continual gold mine for the