Over Capt. Mohammed Raza's walkie-talkie came an intruder's voice: Faqir Talha, a Taliban fighter telling a comrade, "Everyone is with us. We will have a village meeting. It will be at 3 p.m. and everyone should come."

The plains of Logar Province are vast, but the distance between army and enemy can be small. The village of sun-dried mud huts where Raza suspects the insurgents' meeting is to take place lies barely a kilometer (less than a mile) from Chinari outpost and its complement of 20 Afghan National Army troops,

It's not of much use to the soldiers, however. They have no way of pinpointing where the insurgents are gathering, and even if they did, they lack the firepower to mount an attack.

Two months previously a police post was destroyed by the Taliban, so the army set up a base on a hilltop where the men of the 4th Battalion of 203 Thunder Corps live in two 6-meter (20-foot)-long containers behind bags of rocks and rolls of barbed wire.