The sun is harsh and hot in Afghanistan’s Musahy Valley and it’s barely nine in the morning. Up here at about 7,000 feet, the thinner atmosphere doesn’t scatter the solar energy like it does at sea level; the natural coolness of this higher altitude is counterbalanced by rays more direct and searing. Underneath my Kevlar vest and ill-fitting helmet I have already sweated through my shirt which sticks to me now, front and back.

The Musahy looks and feels a lot like some of the mountain valleys in Colorado where I grew up. Back home, places like South Park feature a wide and lush valley floor walled in by incredibly rugged peaks. So it is here in Afghanistan, except that Colorado’s mountains shoulder a fine garment of greenery right up to timberline– spruce, fir and pine. These Afghan ranges seem devoid of anything but rock.

I’m tramping a dirt road with a small unit of Italian Alpine troops sent here under NATO auspices as part of ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force. The Italians’ Forward Operating Base is relatively new to this valley. They arrived in December, a handful of men to keep an eye on 62 villages scattered across 125 square miles. Estimated population: about 60,000. Among that population: an unknown number of Taliban or at least Taliban sympathizers. That’s part of the reason we are out this day on foot patrol. You might say we’re looking for trouble… and hoping we don’t find any.

We pass a school where some 500 boys are enrolled just in grades 8-through-12. The place is bursting at the seams; there’s no room for that many children in the meager classrooms now standing. Colonel Michele (pronounced mi-KAY-lay) Risi, commander of this Italian force, tells me that to handle the overcrowding the school is constantly running a kind of double-shift; half the boys are in classes while the other half are outdoors enjoying what you can only call ‘recess.’

I see a teacher dressed all in white carrying a switch of willow half an inch thick and close to five feet long. He’s shouting. Whatever is going on among the kids outside the school, he doesn’t like it. He chases the boys, wildly swinging the switch and yelling commands. They seem to have seen this drill before and manage to stay just beyond his reach. I’m glad I don’t see him connect—the weapon he’s using would raise a serious welt, maybe even break the skin. “The teachers,” Col. Risi tells me, “are judged not by how well they teach, but by how well they handle the switch.”

This school is just one of the myriad of projects on which the Italian troops are working. They’ve set up large temporary tents so more classes can meet, protected from the blazing sun. They’ve hired local men to build new permanent classrooms, and a wall around what passes for the ‘playground’ where children are now engaged in a mad scramble for a soccer ball. They’ve built two other schools, including a school for girls elsewhere in the valley.

In this culture, educating girls has long been condemned. But NATO has learned that some men are willing to break with tradition. Generally, the men who support educating women are the men who’ve been educated themselves. Because Afghans marry when young and tend to have children almost immediately, the hope is that—if enough boys can receive significant schooling here—the taboo against educating girls might be largely wiped out within a generation, and a quick one at that.

The soldiers’ list of public works goes on: they’ve drilled literally hundreds of water wells—including one in front of the school—so that valley residents can have reasonably pure water to drink. (Even though small streams course across the valley floor, Col. Risi tells me they’re polluted and not drinkable). Three medical clinics are up and running. Local police are now working with the NATO force, learning how to establish checkpoints to keep interlopers out of the valley.

You might have heard the concept of “winning the peace.” That’s what’s happening here. Col. Risi says until now this valley has been virtually ungoverned. There’s been no influence—and no help–from the provincial or national governments, ever. It’s been a kind of no-man’s land where the local clans ruled. The Taliban didn’t take over the government here; it simply inserted itself into the longtime political machine already up and running in the valley. Important to note, the colonel tells me, that the Taliban were and are not outsiders. They are the friends, cousins, uncles of the people trying to scratch out a living in this desolate place. His troops cannot defeat them simply with bullets and bombs.

The NATO forces must first bring stability and safety to the Musahy valley; in the days since the U.S.-led invasion, that has been largely accomplished. With the security component in place local people have to learn that they can trust these outsiders to improve their lives, which is after all a primary function of any government. Hence, the building of schools, the wells, the medical care for residents and veterinary care for their treasured livestock. NATO must prove that it can do more for them than the Taliban can.

It seems like a peaceful enough place and I feel odd at times, walking around surrounded by men with a small arsenal. It seems especially incongruous to pass the local children in their native dress as I’m decked out in body armor. But I have to remind myself that if the bullets should start to fly, the locals are not going to be the targets.

The bucolic scene—kids, babbling creeks, grazing livestock—is also a bit of a mirage. I ask Col. Risi if we can climb a perhaps twenty feet up a mountainside to get a high-angle shot looking down on our patrol. “I cannot recommend it,” he says. “We have found some of the land mines, but certainly not all of them.”

Worse—he tells me that just six days earlier in a pass a couple of miles from here, an insurgent used remote control to trigger a roadside bomb just as one of the Italians’ mounted patrols drove by. The vehicle was shredded; one of the colonel’s men, badly injured. He’s already lost one foot and is fighting now to keep the other. The war against the Taliban, the insurgents, chaos—it is just a few miles and a handful of days removed from where I’m standing.

Col. Risi is an optimist. He believes the battle to stabilize Afghanistan can be won, but he warns it will not be quick. A poorly-educated population, a lack of industrialization and a shortage of capital do not allow for a quick leap forward. The colonel estimates it will take years to get this nation on its feet, to effect enough positive changes that the insurgents are defeated once and for all and a sustained pace of progress and self-government takes hold. He hopes the Italians, the Americans and all the other NATO countries have the patience to see it through.

Otherwise, the Taliban is still here… waiting and watching and willing to drag the impoverished people of Afghanistan back into the eighth century.

–Jon Scott