PASHMUL, Afghanistan — NATO forces scored one of their biggest victories here in ferocious fighting in September, flushing out an area of southern Afghanistan that had been swarming with Taliban insurgents. But almost immediately a new and more difficult battle began — for support of the local people.
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Villagers trickling back to their homes broke into an argument over who was to blame for the heavy destruction, NATO or the Taliban.
“My house was bombarded and my grape store destroyed,” said Hajji Bilal Jan, 48, a farmer from the upper part of Pashmul. “The coalition forces are cruel, without reason. There were no Taliban in our house. Why did they bombard the house?”
Another man, Neamatullah, 45, who like many Afghans uses only one name, stopped to listen and then countered: “Why did you let the Taliban come to your village? You brought them to your village.”
The battle here, the biggest for the American-led forces in the country since March 2002, was a long-awaited success for NATO forces in a year in which the Taliban have revived with surprising strength.
But it also showed that fighting the insurgency was not just about winning the battle, but securing the peace. Pushing out the Taliban is one thing, NATO and Afghan commanders emphasize, and keeping them out another.
NATO officials estimate that the Taliban lost 500 fighters over all and say 136 have been captured, mostly as they tried to escape. Five Canadian soldiers died in the operation. But just afterward, four more were killed in a suicide bombing.
To help enlist the support of local villagers, military commanders and the governor of Kandahar Province have started handing out half a million dollars in humanitarian aid and have promised families more help with repairing the war’s damage.
“If the people cooperate with us, the Taliban can do nothing,” said Capt. Majid Khan, commander of a unit of the Afghan Army that took part in the fighting and is now based in Pashmul.
Most villagers here, who grow grapes and pomegranates in the rich soil along the Arghandab River valley, said they opposed the Taliban but had been powerless to stop the groups of armed men who moved into the area over recent months.
But among them were those who fed and sheltered the Taliban and possibly fought alongside them. The villagers said the leader of the Taliban group in this area, Abdul Khaleeq, was from Pashmul, and he had fighters from surrounding villages as well as outsiders.
“Most of the people are with the government,” Mr. Neamatullah said. “Just a few people get special benefits from the Taliban.”
“He knows everything about the Taliban,” he added, pointing out the man he had argued with, Mr. Jan.
“It was very good, the bombing,” Mr. Neamatullah said. “I am happy, because the Taliban must be finished off.”
The Taliban first moved into two densely populated farming districts in this area, Panjwai and Zhare, west of Kandahar, in May just as NATO forces, led by Brig. Gen. David Fraser of Canada, were taking over command from United States forces in the southern region of the country.
“The whole place was full of Taliban,” said Faizullah, 26, a farmer who was later wounded in the bombing of the nearby village of Zehdanan. “They did not stay more than two nights in one place. They were telling people to leave.”
In July and August the Taliban began building up their forces there in a clear bid to set up an area of control and threaten the city of Kandahar, the provincial capital, General Fraser said in an interview in his headquarters at the Kandahar air base.
“They put a lot of resources into this area, a lot of intellectual capital and psychological commitment,” he said. “This was a fight unlike the fight I’ve had with the Taliban for the last eight months.”
One of the Taliban leaders, Hajji Mullah Abdul Rauf, a former provincial governor, taunted the American military in an interview with Al Jazeera television in the Panjwai area in late August. “Where has the American power gone?” he said. “Why could they not capture the Taliban and mujahedeen in their caves?”
“It is Afghans who are helping us,” he said. “They give food, they give help and they have come out against this government. They do not want this government.”
But Mr. Neamatullah said he had challenged some of the Taliban fighters he came across. He met a group sitting under a mulberry tree, not far from his village, Char Kutsa, also near Pashmul, where women were washing clothes in a stream.
He said he had asked the men: “Why do you come here? Do you want the women to get bombed?” He said he did the same with another group the next day in the mosque of a neighboring village. “The Taliban’s special answer was always that ‘somebody ordered us to come here’ to this village,” he said.