KANDAHAR - It has long been Canada's problem child in Kandahar.
The Panjwaii district has vexed the military brain trust for years. It is the cradle of the Taliban movement, the insurgency's spiritual heartland. Many Taliban fighters hail from the district's dominant Noorzai tribe, so the sympathies of villagers do not always lie with foreign forces.
It is one of the last three districts of Kandahar still under Canada's watch. The other districts, Dand and Daman, are relatively stable by comparison -- 'relatively' being the operative word.
So with seven months left on Canada's combat clock, time is running out to pacify the Panjwaii.
Canadian troops are in the midst of a massive effort to do just that.
Soldiers have recently stepped up their searches for hidden caches of enemy weapons. Crews are building a major road through the district. Troops are fanning out across Panjwaii. They are holding ground where they haven't before. Afghan and Canadian forces are striking villages, scattershot, to keep the insurgents off-kilter.
The strategy is meant to keep the Taliban at bay long enough for Afghan security forces to gain a solid footing, the commander of Canada's last battle group in Kandahar said in an interview.
"I want to keep the insurgents off-balance," said Lt.-Col. Michel-Henri St-Louis, who is in charge of the 1st Battalion, Royal 22e Regiment combat team, based at CFB Valcartier.
"I want to keep them guessing."
Sweeps for stashed weapons yielded a big haul last month. St-Louis said his soldiers found as many weapons in December as they did in June, during the height of the fighting season.
"If we keep this up for two, three, four months," he said, "by the time spring comes, and the fighters come back, and they go looking for these caches to get the materials they need to be up to no good, maybe some of them will not be there."
Winning over the locals won't be easy. They've seen all this before. Canadian soldiers roll into town to rout the Taliban. They stay for a while, then move on. And the insurgents return.
Partly, it was a numbers game. Before tens of thousands of American troops showed up in southern Afghanistan last year, there simply weren't enough Canadian soldiers to hold every hill conquered. They were spread too thin.
That's changed. The decision by U.S. President Barack Obama to deploy another 30,000 troops to southern Afghanistan has allowed the Canadian military to concentrate on Panjwaii, Dand and Daman.
The Canadian military's focus is primarily on two parts of Panjwaii. One is the so-call Horn of Panjwaii at the district's westernmost tip. The other is known as the Taliban Triangle, an area between three villages where the insurgents once moved freely.
It is in these areas where the Canadians have also stepped up their use of psychological warfare. Radio ads, billboards and leaflets urge locals to point out improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. So-called PsyOps teams venture into the villages, hoping to win local trust and support.
Maj. Benoit Mainville, the head of the Canadian military's psychological operations team, said if there's a focus on Panjwaii, it's because the local governments and security are more stable in the other districts.
"I focus my assets where there are more insurgents, there's more instability, there's less trust," Mainville said.
He wouldn't say how many of his five-member teams are working in Panjwaii. But Mainville said their efforts are mainly aimed at the Taliban Triangle and the Horn of Panjwaii.
Getting the right people in positions of power is also part of the plan.
There's a simmering power struggle underway in Panjwaii between the current district governor, Haji Baran, and an influential tribal leader named Haji Fazluddin Agha, one of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's most important political allies in Kandahar.
Privately, Canadian civilian and military officials grumble about the mercurial and illiterate Baran. Some simply see him as ineffectual, while others have accused him of corruption and sympathizing with the Taliban.
So while the Canadian military leadership does not publicly take a stance in Afghan politics, this new player's bid to usurp Baran seems to come as a welcome development.
Clearly, Panjwaii is a puzzle with many pieces. St-Louis said he knows it won't be solved by the time Canadian troops pull out this summer. But he'll be satisfied if the current Panjwaii push keeps violence from flaring this spring.
"If we can maybe diminish that spike in violence -- even, in a perfect world, just keep it level and not have that spike of violence -- we can say that we changed something here."
