I have two things that I'm going to throw at you on this. There are two things I've noticed.
Remember, in a counter-insurgency war we're dealing with how we're going to get people to side with us, essentially, and there are two things in parts of the rural south that interfere with our ability to gain allegiance from the population. One of them is poppy eradication, and the second is gender equality being pushed on them in the rural areas. They resent both--again, this is from people I've talked to--but the eradication issue in particular is very sensitive.
There's a schizophrenic split. The U.S. State Department, and to a lesser extent the British, have been pushing poppy eradication for a variety of reasons. When I talk to military commanders on the ground, they view this as counterproductive to trying to deal with the people, because we're taking away their livelihood. The alternative livelihood programs are mixed in terms of effect, and it's unclear as to what the best strategy is to deal with this problem, particularly in Helmand province, where the Brits ran into a lot of problems this summer. You wind up with a nexus between the insurgency and poppies. And then you have poppy people who are not part of the insurgency, but will go with whoever is in charge, etc. So you have different variations on the poppy side.
So when we're dealing with the population in the rural areas, if we show up and start doing things and tampering too much, they get annoyed, and then the Taliban show up say, “See, we told you they would do this.”