Afghanistan: The Other War- what is going wrong and why

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As President Bush pledges another $10 billion to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan, and a spring offensive is expected against a resurgent Taliban, FRONTLINE/World correspondent Sam Kiley reports from the frontlines of the conflict, where dual battles are being fought to win the trust of the Afghan people and combat the extremists living among them. In the film, Kiley and his crew are granted unprecedented access to the outgoing British NATO commander David Richards who led 37,000 troops from 37 countries. Kiley also travels with a battle-hardened Canadian unit stationed in Taliban territory in the south near the city of Kandahar. Their task is to provide humanitarian aid to local villages. Rather than showing the usual ground flashes of aerial bombings or chaos in city streets following a car bomb attack, Kiley's film is an unfiltered and often painstaking look at the other realities of war: solitary mortar fire into a barren mountainside at a seemingly faceless enemy; winning the trust of the Afghan people one mud-brick village at a time; and the futility and frustrations that often come with these encounters. And at a higher level, he shows how NATO is responding to criticism from the Afghan and international media about its perceived slow progress in stabilizing a country that has known nothing but conflict for the past 30 years. http://tinyurl.com/2betzv