Feb. 27, 2007 | KAMDESH, Afghanistan -- At 9 p.m. on my first night at the U.S. Army base in Kamdesh, I was shaken awake by a 105 mm howitzer round. Then a symphony of incoming and outgoing fire sounded. BO-OM! BO-OM! BO-OM! Tat! Tat! Tat! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! From the pine- and cedar-lined mountain slope that loomed over the base, several insurgents were firing down on us with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s. The line of Humvees ringing the base spotted the insurgents and began shooting back. For 10 minutes U.S. forces blanketed the ridgeline above with machine-gun and rifle fire and RPGs. A soldier manning a thermal-imaging device (LRAS) spotted the silhouette of Afghans and began pulling the trigger of his machine gun.

After the first round of fighting, the soldier yelled that he had confirmed at least one death. "I saw that motherfucker through the LRAS!" he screamed, breathing heavily, his adrenaline high. "I saw him explode into a bunch of pieces! Parts were everywhere!" He smiled.

As the volleys began to subside, Sgt. Matthew Netzel guessed aloud that roughly five insurgents had been killed. "I think there are more up there, but we're not certain yet, 'cause we don't know how many there were to begin with," he said. As they fired, U.S. forces launched slow-falling flares that lit up the wooded area they were firing upon, hoping to illuminate the insurgents' positions. But there were no more insurgents to be seen. The echo of automatic-weapons fire stopped bouncing through the valley and most of the soldiers went back to sleep. It was just another night in Kamdesh. The base averages three attacks per week.

The next morning, a group climbed up the mountainside to look for casualties but found none. "They usually clean their bodies up before we can get to them," Lt. Benjamin Keating, a 27-year-old from Maine, told me. "They will pull the bodies, scrub bloodstains, and sometimes they pick the shells up too. We never know how many we killed or who they were. They're like ghosts." The inability to know how many and who was killed has made it hard for U.S. forces to identify whom they are fighting -- Arabs, Afghans or other groups. When they can, a confirmed kill requires a digital photo of the dead man's face. But those are few and far between.

In November, I traveled with the Army's 10th Mountain Division to Afghanistan's Kunar and Nuristan provinces, the region where Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have been sighted over the past three years, to see how American forces were fighting the "other" war. What I learned is that the war in Afghanistan is going badly. Three years after U.S. forces secured much of the country and helped 10 million Afghans vote in a presidential election, the country has slid back into a dangerous power vacuum, with the Taliban again competing for control of significant sections of the country. Last November, a CIA analysis of the Karzai government found it was losing control, and American ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann warned then that the U.S. would "fail" if the plan for action didn't include "multiple years and multiple billions." Our gains, once held firmly, have been lost and the coming year may portend Afghanistan's future, with ominous rumors floating down from the mountains about a spring offensive by insurgents.

Tuesday morning, a suicide bomber killed and wounded Afghans and Americans at the gate to the main U.S. base in the country -- in Bagram -- while Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting the base. Cheney was unhurt, but the incident was a clear sign of the growing strength of the Taliban and other insurgents. Earlier this month, concerns about the U.S. effort in Afghanistan were finally acknowledged in Washington. President Bush announced he would request $10.6 billion in extra aid for Afghanistan and increase the number of troops, especially along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. "We face a thinking enemy," said Bush. "And we face a tough enemy -- they watch our actions, they adjust their tactics. And in 2006, this enemy struck back with a vengeance." Bush's announcement came after repeated calls from U.S. generals for more boots on the ground and repeated predictions of a spring offensive, pleas for help the military had been making since last summer.

After spending a month along Afghanistan's northeast border with Pakistan, it is clear to me that the help is needed. The region is one of the most wild and ungoverned areas of Afghanistan. The Americans pushed north last summer, part of Operation Mountain Fury, trying to seal off the Pakistan border and find al-Qaida's Arab forces. The border's invisible line, soldiers say, allows high-value targets, like bin Laden, to find sanctuary and a base of operations. What I saw was a skilled but unprepared U.S. force battling literally uphill against an unidentified enemy. 2006 was the deadliest year for coalition forces since the war began, with 191 dead. For the roughly 20,000 U.S. troops in the country, Afghanistan is only slightly less deadly per soldier than Iraq. But while a lack of troops may help the undermanned U.S. effort in the short term, it does not address a larger problem. American forces don't have an adequate understanding of the culture, the many languages or the formidable terrain.

The Kamdesh base is the northernmost American outpost in Afghanistan, in an area of Nuristan so remote that local villagers asked American troops in August, when they arrived, if they were Russian. The base itself is not more than a quarter-mile wide, on a valley floor, next to a clear, trout-filled river. Three-thousand-foot mountains rise above the base on both sides of the river. A row of Humvees, all mounted with grenade-filled Mark-19 machine guns, face the closest mountain, which nearly hangs over the front of the base. When I was there the soldiers hadn't yet named the base, and had made up their own name, Warheight, for the imposing peak. From Kamdesh, a small outpost near the Pakistani border, to Naray, a larger base 25 miles south, to another border outpost called Camp Lybert, the 10th Mountain Division's 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry -- the so-called 3-71 -- was supposed to control a 220-square-mile triangle of territory.

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