The Battle for Afghanistan: Isolation defines fight in the deadly east

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The Battle for Afghanistan: Isolation defines fight in the deadly east
By Michael Gisick, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, October 27, 2008

(Second in a two-part series.)

KUNAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan — No U.S. troops had ventured into that particular middle of nowhere before, and as the patrol hiked into one of the more distant of eastern Afghanistan’s multitude of lonely villages, the soldiers had limited expectations.

Getting shot at was a decent possibility, although they hoped for a more restrained round of introductions. At the least, they figured the Afghans would know who they were.

Instead, soldiers say, the villagers believed the Americans were the Soviets.

"That was kind of a weird one," said Lt. Col. James Markert, whose cavalry squadron patrols along Afghanistan’s northeastern border with Pakistan. "The Russians left here a minute or two ago."

The scene, which might have been the beginning of a decent Monty Python skit, was hardly typical — the majority of Afghans know exactly which country American troops are from, and that the Soviets left two decades ago. But the episode was still a fair indication of the isolation in many parts of the eastern mountains, where soldiers raised on video games operate in what can often seem like the pages of an anthropology textbook.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=58415