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Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Washington Post Associate Editor Rajiv Chandrasekan on the mood in Afghanistan as election officials scramble to set up the November 7 presidential run-off election. The first round of voting in August was marred by widespread fraud.

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Election officials began delivering ballots across Afghanistan today. They don’t have a lot of time.  The ballots are for the presidential run-off election scheduled for November 7th.  The first round of voting, in August, was marred by widespread fraud.  In the run-off President Hamid Karzai will face his main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.  The southern province of Helmand forms the backbone of President Karzai’s support.  It’s also a Taliban stronghold.  Washington Post associate editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran has just returned from Afghanistan.  In today’s Post, he writes about a town in Helmand called Nawa.  Just a few months ago, the Taliban ran the small farming community.  They had set up checkpoints, seeded the road with bombs, and scared off thousands of residents.  Not anymore, so Rajiv Chandrasekaran, tell us what happened.

RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN:  Well, what happened was three months ago, a battalion of US Marines descended on this town and the surrounding areas.  A battalion of Marines is about 1,100 of them, and they were joined by about 300 Afghan soldiers.  Prior to the Marine arrival, there were only something like about 100 British soldiers in the area.  And almost immediately after the Marines arrived, interesting things started to happen.  The Taliban, which had sort of swaggered through the area with impunity, pretty much packed up and left.  And so there’s been this sort of fundamental transformation, and what Marine officials say is, this is because we have the right level of force here.  In fact, when you add up the number of Marines in this area, it’s almost identical, the ratio of troops to population, as what is called for in the military’s counter-insurgency guidelines.

WERMAN:  Is that all it takes though, is just getting the right number of Marines, this 1:50 ratio, one marine to 50 residents that General Stanley McChrystal is recommending?  Are they actually doing stuff there?

CHANDRASEKARAN:  I think a big part of it does have to do with having enough troops on the ground, but it’s also how you’re using those troops.  But one should note that what has occurred here may not be easily copied in other parts of Afghanistan.  First off, to have similar troop ratios in other places would require tens of thousands of more troops, even more than what General McChrystal’s asking the White House to give him.

WERMAN:  Now the Taliban fighters left this area, left this town of Nawa.  Where did they go, and are they just exporting their troubles to another part of Helmand?

CHANDRASEKARAN:  Well, for the moment, they’ve beat a retreat to a community about 10 to 15 miles to the northwest, amid a network of irrigation canals that were built in the desert back in the 1950s by the United States government, to help spur development in Afghanistan back then.  Right now, that area is sort of a haven for opium growers and drug smugglers, and the Taliban have sort of hunkered down in there.

WERMAN:  It does seem like 1,100 troops for one district, the fear instilled in the locals and the bloodshed by the locals and the troops, it seems like a pretty high cost just to get the Taliban 10 miles down the road, and maybe they’ll come back at some point.

CHANDRASEKARAN:  It certainly does, and that’s what a lot of critics of this would say, that yes, if you throw in a lot of troops in a small area, yeah, you can see improvements.  But does this really represent what you can do more broadly?  And US military officials acknowledge that there is an element of an artificial quality, what’s going on there, but they also wonder whether there are some lessons that they can try to apply more broadly, particularly in the way the troops are going about engaging with people and also just in terms of ways that they can try to spark a degree of reconstruction, and engagement with local officials to promote better governance and fight corruption.  And so they’re looking to unique aspects of what is transpiring here, as opposed to saying, “This is a sort of just add water and reconstitute in other parts of the country” approach.

WERMAN:  Rajiv Chandrasekaran, associate editor for the Washington Post, thank you very much for you time.

CHANDRASEKARAN:  A pleasure to talk to you today.

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