U.S. Role in Afghanistan Shifting

KABUL, Afghanistan —  When the Bush administration conceived the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban regime a year ago, it envisioned the American forces as frontier lawmen rooting out Al Qaeda and preventing terrorist cells from re-forming.

What the administration didn’t want, officials repeatedly said, was for U.S. troops to become involved in nation-building in this shattered country.

But amid persistent violence here in the capital and in the countryside, the U.S. military is now planning to redeploy large numbers of soldiers to help rebuild Afghanistan.

The new program reflects what Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, described here over the weekend as the U.S. military’s “evolving” role in Afghanistan. That role apparently will shift from mainly combating terror to a greater responsibility for undertaking and safeguarding reconstruction in a land devastated by decades of war.

Reconstruction is crucial to Afghanistan’s recovery and to an end of violence, because the jobs it generates will give Afghans an economic alternative to fighting. But the process, officials here acknowledge, has been jeopardized by ongoing insecurity and the chilling effect that is having on public aid projects as well as private investment.

Still, the realization has sunk in here that the U.S. military presence is likely to last years and that the “creation of economy,” to use one official’s phrase, is the best way to shorten it. Such creation depends on the reconstruction of Afghanistan’s infrastructure and political institutions and on an influx of private investment, both domestic and foreign.

The new program, sources said, probably will not entail an increase in the U.S. uniformed personnel here -- now roughly 8,000 troops.

Although details of the new role are scarce, sources said it will be an expanded version of an existing program in which small teams of fewer than a dozen civil assistance troops, typically reservists, are building bridges, schools and hospitals and dispensing medical aid in 11 Afghan locales under the protection of a few U.S. combat troops.

A pilot program has been launched in the eastern city of Gardez, with about 70 civil affairs soldiers doing reconstruction work, sources said. The number of teams to be deployed in the expanding program is still unknown.

Depending on the locations involved, the new mission carries risks. Until now, the bulk of U.S. troops have kept a low profile, partly to minimize friction with Afghans who are ambivalent about the presence of foreign military forces on their soil.

The economic rebirth of Afghanistan depends on security, something conspicuously lacking here. The U.S. military’s violent encounters with remnants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban have increased in recent months, as have conflicts between rival regional militia commanders.

Two incidents Monday night in the unsettled eastern part of the country typified what U.S. troops are up against. In the first, Special Forces troops narrowly thwarted a rocket attack on a base at Lwara, scattering five people who were preparing to fire five rockets at the base near the Pakistani border, U.S. military officials said. One of the five was detained.

In the second incident, a Special Forces unit came under automatic-weapons fire from 10 fighters while on patrol near the city of Jalalabad, military officials said. No U.S. casualties were reported.

Warlords are fighting it out in three regions of Afghanistan, with a weekend confrontation near the western city of Herat, the most violent to date, having claimed at least 12 lives, according to news reports.

On Sunday, a patrol of U.S. Special Forces troops came under fire from one of the warring parties in western Afghanistan, prompting the soldiers to call for air support from a B-52 patrolling the region. It dropped eight laser-guided, one-ton bombs on the militia elements, the first such B-52 raid in months.

“While things seem to be OK for Afghanistan ... we still see a lot of problems,” Franks told reporters Saturday. “The truth of it is that while a lot has been done, this is Afghanistan. We’re going to have to stay with it for as long as it takes to be sure to not permit terrorism to retake Afghanistan.”

Times staff writer David Zucchino in Herat contributed to this report.