Most days, weather permitting, a couple of US Black Hawk helicopters take off from Bagram airbase and do the rounds of Nato bases in Afghanistan's eastern provinces. They serve as taxis, couriers and delivery vans. They hop from one fortified lilypad to the next, crossing huge tracts of rocky, dusty, hostile terrain over which the alliance and the government it supports have no control, and probably never will.
This is what most senior officers and diplomats get to witness of Afghanistan. The non-government aid agencies and the Kabul-based journalists see the bits in between, which may explain why they generally take a less rosy view of the facts on the ground. Along with a handful of other European journalists, I have been taken by the US mission to Nato on a bespoke Black Hawk tour to give us the diplomat's view of Afghanistan. We have been to see a few American garrisons, the French mountain infantry, and now it is the Poles, who since last October have been running military operations in Ghazni province, south-west of Kabul.
The Poles have been in Afghanistan for several years, but were previously scattered among other commands. Last year, the politicians back in Warsaw decided it was time Poland took responsibility for a province. Whether that was an act of national ambition or mere hubris will probably become clear by the summer when the fighting season really gets going.
Seeing the various national contingents in Afghanistan provides a good illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of the military effort here. It shows the broad nature of the coalition, but also highlights the divisions. Each national taskforce tends to run its own province like an independent fiefdom, with completely different approaches to the central and provincial government, and to the insurgency.
Most of the Nato nations here have "caveats" on the use of the force, limiting the conditions in which they can be deployed. The Germans in the north, to cite the most ridiculous example, will not go out at night and will not go anywhere without an ambulance, which of course precludes foot patrols.
Whichever base you happen to be in, however, the food is always the same: American. That's because it's provided by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), the former subsidiary of Dick Cheney's mega-firm, Halliburton. In every base it puts on a staggering buffet spread for the troops, of which most hotels would be proud. There is a choice of half a dozen desserts including ice cream at every meal, and every last scrap of food is imported. No wonder it costs so much to keep the International Stabilisation and Assistance Force (Isaf) in the field. It is an enormous logistical effort just to keep it treading water.
The Poles are missing their pierogi, but otherwise morale seems high. They have been here for four months and so far have not lost a man. They claim not to have killed any civilians, which for a rough province like Ghazni, with several "contacts" with the enemy each week, is a good record. The commander of the Polish taskforce is an energetic colonel called Rajmund Andrzejczak, who seems to have taken on board the emerging new orthodoxy on counter-insurgency.
"For me the critical thing is to be non-kinetic," he said, employing Nato-speak for not shooting.
"After a couple of operations, we realised the less aggressive we were the more effective we were. I recommend not so many troops knocking down doors every night, but instead to sit down and drink tea, discuss what the people need, and bring them closer to the coalition," he said.
The reference to knocking down doors at night is clear to anyone who has spent more than a couple of days here. It is a dig at US special forces, who have a reputation for raiding Afghan houses in the middle of the night, on the basis of intelligence that can be accurate or inaccurate, causing a disproportionate number of civilian casualties.
"The special forces are playing a damaging and negative role. They operate outside the chain of command, going in and doing raids without any co-ordination," a senior western aid official told me. Nothing is eroding support for foreign forces faster. A UN report last month said the number of civilian casualties in 2008 was up 40% on the previous year at 2,118. A little more than half were killed by the Taliban and other insurgents, mostly with roadside and suicide bombs.
The difference is that the Taliban are actually trying to kill civilians. Isaf appears to be killing almost as many by accident – some in special-forces raids, but 64% as a result of air strikes. Some of those strikes are assassination attempts against "high-value" insurgent leaders, but others are in support of troops on the ground engaged in battle. That is relatively uncontroversial when ground forces find themselves outnumbered or surrounded and are trying to save their own lives.
More troubling is the practice of calling in a strike on an Afghan "qala" (the high-walled mud-brick houses that look like mini-forts which are the norm here), from where western forces suspect they are taking fire but are reluctant to storm for fear of taking casualties.
Andrzejczak is adamant he does not use such tactics: "Sometimes if we are not sure who is in a house, we just cancel the operation, even knowing some of the targets will leave the area. You cannot kill all the terrorists in six months, but you can create good relations with the locals. The biggest power here is not the Taliban, it's the people of Ghazni. They are the power we should fight for."
Everyone subscribes to this view of counter-insurgency in theory, but the Americans, and to some extent the British, are loth to walk away from an engagement, and more likely to call in an air strike.
Ghazni's governor, Mohamed Osman Osmani, is pleased with the Poles. When Osmani first heard they were coming, he had feared a bunch of Warsaw pact headbangers, who would use their artillery and Soviet-model Hind gunships on everything that moved. So he is now pleasantly surprised. He says his province is more peaceful under the lighter-touch Poles than the more aggressive Americans before them.
"Security for us is like oxygen. Without it nothing can breathe, nothing can happen. And the Poles really have brought security," Osmani said. He told me this in Kabul, on the way to Warsaw, his first trip abroad. From there he called Andrzejczak's mobile several times a day, checking what was happening at home and reporting back on his first impressions of Europe.
However, by the time we arrived in Ghazni, something had happened to threaten this image of harmony. On 27 February, Polish troops were called to a house in a village called Dhi Khodaidad, a few miles south-west of Ghazni city, where they were told there was a Taliban cell recruiting locals.
What happened next is subject to furious debate, but there is no argument that any Taliban there had got away. The Poles said they were called in by the Afghan police, and did not open fire, using only a flash grenade on what looked like an ordinary building. The local press said the Poles had stormed a mosque guns blazing, damaging the building and destroying a Qur'an. Riots followed soon in Ghazni city, threatening to undo all the Poles' careful "hearts and minds" work.
"People were saying that the Poles had improved security here, but now with this problem with the mosque they are beginning to wonder, and ask what the Poles are really trying to do here," said Mirwais Pashtun, the director of a local radio station.
To make matters worse, the local police – who like most provincial forces have a reputation for corruption – quickly disowned the whole operation. General Mohamad Nowruz, a top police intelligence officer, told me within earshot of the irritated Poles: "It was one of their informants who told the coalition there was Taliban in this place. Well, there was one Talib, and he left before the forces arrived. There were no police involved. As for who entered the mosque, I cannot say."
Here was a fine example of how fragile Afghan tolerance of foreign troops has worn. The once strong majority support for Isaf has withered with every year that passes without rural development or a decisive victory over the Taliban. No one was more aware of that than Andrzejczak, who spent two solid days in talks with local leaders to get his side of the story across, and reassure them of the Poles' respect for local culture.
The emergency PR campaign was treated as a major counter-insurgency operation, which of course it was.
"It's a war of perception," the colonel said. "The mosque could be a critical [tipping] point, and we have to win this battle."