ZABUL, AFGHANISTAN     It was the last mission on the last day in the field of our month-long stay in Afghanistan.    For cameraman Mal James and I, it had been a long, exhaustive time.

One in which we got as good a look as anyone into the state of the Afghan War effort…from all sides.

To be frank, we weren’t too optimistic.

We had listened in Kabul, with Afghans, to President Hamid Karzai’s inaugural speech, with all those strong words AGAINST corruption and FOR the Afghans standing up.

But he’s already been in office for five years-plus.   What was really was going to change?

Then we embedded with the U.S. Army in the eastern province of Khost.

Our time at Combat Outpost Garbuz was interesting. The young commander there, Captain Pritchard, was doing all the right things.  Having his men work and live alongside Afghan soldiers.

But we still got the impression the Afghans were nowhere near taking the lead.

And besides, I was in Khost five years ago, and it felt a whole lot safer then.

We went to Kandahar Airfield to listen with the troops to President Obama’s speech on future Afghan war strategy and hear, in person, from top US General in the region, Stanley McChrystal.

Both were remarkably positive about the way forward in Afghanistan.  And while we thought what they said all made perfect sense, we still were left with the feeling that all of this was coming a bit too late.  Six or seven years too late.

Our final phase was a rare and exclusive week with Special Forces in Zabul province, a place most people don’t know about, but which is a key transit point, up against the southeastern border with Pakistan, for the Taliban.

The commander we were with (no names possible) again made perfect sense about the approach.    A mostly counter-insurgency strategy of keeping the enemy off-balance while getting the locals “on-side.”

Except the one operation we went on against a Taliban kingpin in a mountain village came up empty.

As did an elaborate two-day method of interdicting suspicious vehicles via a fleet of helicopters.

Then, we made it to that last mission.   Really just a few- hour visit to a remote “Firebase” manned by a 12-person A-Team of Green Berets.

It was in a village at the upper end of the Arghandab river valley.  That name is now hauntingly etched in all US military minds.

The conventional Army Stryker force operating in the lower Arghandab valley near Kandahar has been hit mercilessly and with deadly precision by Taliban-planted IED’s.

The Special Force “Captain,” we spent time with told us, remarkably, he felt like he was the “luckiest” SF team leader in the country.

Because while his area of operation was one of the most active regarding contact with the Taliban, he claimed he was also having the most success.

He said security had gone up “100 per cent” just in the last couple of months there.

In part, because of, aggressive missions against local and foreign Taliban by his team.

Also because of a good working cooperation with his unit of Afghan soldiers.

And, maybe, most importantly, a good relationship with the locals.

When we were there, four SF medics manned a clinic for people in the area.

In this almost completely illiterate region, a multi-room school was packed to overflowing.

A shop in a bazaar was brimming with wares.

And a bridge over the Arghandab river existed where none had before.

All with the help of Special Forces.

As the Captain explained it to me, what they were trying to do was offer an alternative to the secure, but harsh world, the Taliban was offering to the locals.

And it had another purpose.

A grateful father of a child helped in the clinic had come up with a lead for the SF against the Taliban.

The new, secure public areas in the village, were a good place to get a feel for what the locals were thinking and feeling.

“I wasn’t a big one for civil affairs,” the “Captain” confided to me, “Until I saw what we could get out of it.”

As for the IED’s,  the Captain told me (while knocking any wood that he could find), with the help of their Afghan colleagues, they’d been able to spot and defuse 13 of them on their patrols, with no casualties.

“I feel for the Stryker guys,” he remarked, “I wish I could get them up here and show them how it’s done.”

After that, both cameraman James and I had the feeling that this is indeed how it should be done…and how the war could be won.

But we also fully understood that this was just one vignette. For the whole thing to work, it would have to be repeated hundreds and hundreds of times over.     And made permanent.  A huge task.

When we were back at the Kabul Fox bureau wrapping up our coverage, something happened to remind us how real the war remains.

A suicide bomb went off three blocks away.  Our windows rattled.  Dozens were killed and injured at the scene.

The battle, as top brass in recent weeks has reminded us, will get worse before it gets better.

The “get better” part all depends on that grizzly SF Captain in the middle of Zabul nowhere…and a whole lot of others like him.