LESTER HOLT, anchor:
There is a massive
military operation
going on right now in
Kandahar
. Driving the
Taliban
out is key to the
Obama
administration's plan to turn the tide in the war this year. Win that city and -- the idea goes -- the rest of the country will follow, but the approach is different than you might expect, as
NBC
's chief foreign correspondent
Richard Engel
reports.
RICHARD ENGEL reporting:
Dusty, hard line and poor,
Kandahar
is a
Taliban
city. Car bombings, assassinations and organized crime are the norm here. But almost no one informs on the
Taliban
.
Brigadier General BEN HODGES (United States Army):
The government's not really in charge. That's -- I think that's what we're going to be dealing with.
ENGEL:
To secure
Kandahar
, the
US military
is using a two-pronged approach: an iron fist in the city's rural outskirts like
Argandab
, where we saw the
82nd Airborne
in action last weekend.
Unidentified Man #1:
Get some ammo!
ENGEL:
But in downtown
Kandahar
, a very different tactic. The military won't even use the word "offensive" to describe the mission here.
Brig. Gen. HODGES:
Makes people think about artillery, barbed wire, night raids, kicking in doors, that sort of thing. And that's not what we're wanting to do.
ENGEL:
Instead, soldiers like 23-year-old
Lisa Earnst
patrol
Kandahar
, armed with a rifle, a smile and a clipboard. Her job this week: polling Afghans on what they want the government to do.
Ms. LISA EARNST:
Who does he think can solve their problems for the security?
Unidentified Man #2:
ENGEL:
The responses were cold. At a bakery, men tell
Earnst
security was better when the
Taliban
were in power. In an antique shop next door, men said they want the
Afghan government
to end the lawlessness here, but claim it's corrupt.
Earnst
isn't discouraged. Winning over Afghans, she says, will take time.
Ms. EARNST:
If we show the people, you know, of
Afghanistan
that we're actually here to help them and we're not like trying to take over their country, then they're able to cooperate better with us.
ENGEL:
But will the soft tactic deter the
Taliban
? As
Earnst
and her soldiers collect opinions, a bomb explodes a few hundred yards away.
Earnst
and soldiers arrive on the scene. This appears to have been an assassination, a car bomb used to kill a
local government
official. The victim was the district chief of
Argandab
, one of
Kandahar
's most violent suburbs. The official was killed by the
Taliban
because he cooperated with
American forces
. Soldiers tell us they've seen it before.
Sergeant BRADLEY SWOPE (United States Army):
I think they can -- try to use it as a scare tactic because if you can't keep the high-ranking personnel safe, and it kind of makes the people think, `How did the -- how are they going to protect us?'
ENGEL:
The people of
Kandahar
have yet to decide whether to support the
US military
and the
Afghan government
or the
Taliban
.
Richard Engel
,
NBC News
,
“ ”