Part two of a two-part series.

LAGHMAN, Afghanistan – Coalition forces here have been hit hard in the past year. Bombings and gun battles have killed more than a dozen U.S. troops and wounded around 100 from Task Force Thunderbird, built around the Oklahoma National Guard's 45th Infantry Brigade.

But arguably the biggest battle took place not in the hills of this rugged province east of Kabul, but in a courtroom in the provincial capital of Mehtar Lam. The dramatic events leading up to the January trial – and those that followed – are a window into a vitally important but largely unreported facet of the decade-long Afghanistan War.

Behind the scenes across the embattled country, a special breed of U.S. soldier is working closely with a new style of Afghan police to enforce law and order in Afghanistan's lawless countryside. They're trying to defeat the insurgency by treating it like a criminal problem rather than a military one. And they're planned to be at it even after the International Security Assistance Force's conventional troops leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

In that sense, the trial was a possible preview of the Afghanistan War, post-2014. If the Laghman case is any indication, the conflict will be increasingly characterized by risky police raids, delicate legal action and small numbers of highly trained U.S. troops quietly applying pressure at key moments to ensure the rule of law triumphs over chaos.

>Impoverished, deeply corrupt, poorly governed and historically dominated by strongmen and warlords, Afghan's legal system is, in a word, awful.

Two men from Laghman's Qarghah'i district, Shah Qand and Daw Lat, had been arrested for allegedly trafficking ammonium nitrate, the major ingredient in many of Afghanistan's deadliest improvised explosive devices. On Jan. 9, the Afghan Supreme Court met at the governor's compound to consider the evidence and issue a verdict.

The National Directorate of Security prosecutor wanted 10 years in prison for the suspects. Sources say the average life expectancy in Afghan federal prison is just two years.

More than 60 spectators crowded the room. Qand and Lat, both wearing white, sat in wooden chairs beside an Afghan National Police officer wearing the service's powder-blue uniform and clutching a radio. The judges, each sporting a white turban and black-, green- and gold-striped robes, sat with their elbows on a long table.

The state's arguments boiled down to this: Qand, whose name means "King Sugar," had been arrested with more than a ton of ammonium nitrate in his possession. Once popular as a fertilizer, the highly-explosive substance has been illegal in Afghanistan since 2010.

Lat was known to be Qand's driver. He insisted that he was just an errand boy, never privy to the content and purposes of Qand's shipments. Prosecutors said otherwise.

As the judges prepared to announce their decision, there was more at stake than the fates of two men. The Qand trial was a test case for a more comprehensive Afghan legal process. Impoverished, deeply corrupt, poorly governed and historically dominated by strongmen and warlords, Afghan's legal system is, in a word, awful.

Before, most trials of suspected insurgents had been haphazard affairs, or never occurred at all because the suspects were never formally arrested. If they weren't killed by Afghan or coalition forces, the suspected insurgents often disappeared into the Afghan countryside.

Qand's case was one of the first in which Afghan authorities drafted a formal warrant, Afghan police served that warrant and the trial was based on firm evidence carefully gathered by police and prosecutors. Before this, Afghans didn't even have a word for "warrant." They settled on using the English term or, alternately, the Pashto word for "deed."

The judges spoke. Qand was sentenced to six years in prison. Lat ... was acquitted on all charges. Welcome to the future of Afghan justice.

Square One ———-

There was uproar. The prosecutor vowed to appeal in order to get the maximum sentence for Qand. Others protested Lat's acquittal.

Some distance away, at a compound adjacent to the 45th Infantry Brigade's main base, "Tom," a 37-year-old U.S. Army Special Forces officer, was satisfied. His roughly 18-man team, made up of U.S. and Romanian commandos, had spent months painstakingly training a force of around 100 Afghan special policemen – a so-called "Provincial Response Company" – for cases just like Qand's.

Tom's cops were the ones who served Qand's and Lat's warrants, arrested the suspects, gathered the evidence and helped bring together the prosecutors and judges to hear the case. In their training and duties, the police braved bombs, gunfire and the chronic mismanagement of the Afghan government. In the end, they prevailed. Sort of. Yet, Lat was acquitted. But Afghanistan had one of its first fully lawful convictions of a major insurgent. For Tom, it was good enough.

>The Afghan major was weak, so they conned him out of his job.

Tom – tall, lean, bald-headed, born in London, but raised in upstate New York – assumed responsibility for his then-20-strong Provincial Response Company in August. His first move: totally revamp the company, everything from its leadership and uniforms to the training syllabus the Afghan Ministry of Interior had provided them.

In reforming the Laghman special police all on their own, Tom and his fellow commandos might have broken a few rules. That's not unusual. Special Forces are selected for their intelligence and initiative. Their bosses expect to abide by the spirit of the regulations rather than the letter. "I am given the autonomy to attack the problem as I see fit," Tom says.

A 26-year-old Romanian officer attached to Tom's team – let's call him "Abel" – had spent several years teaching at the Romanian military academy before deploying to Afghanistan. One look at the Interior Ministry's leadership curriculum, and Abel, a slight man with dark hair and a boyish face, knew he had to start from scratch with new lessons. The Interior Ministry stuff "didn't look professional," Abel says. The cops' typical approach to solving problems: wing it, and hope for the best.

If the PRC were going to be able to execute warrants, gather evidence and help guide prosecutions, they needed to be capable of long-range planning. Abel started by charting out basic decision-making processes and writing lesson plans teaching each step.

Looking beyond the curriculum, Abel says he saw other leadership problems. For one, the Afghan officer the Ministry of Interior had assigned to command the PRC wasn't capable of doing the job. Maj. Mohamed Karzem – a short, reedy, gray-haired man – was "very weak," according to Tom.

Part of the problem was Karzem's age: 47 – pretty damned old in a country where the average life expectancy for a man is just 44. Tom says Karzem was the kind of officer who liked to end his workday before dinner. The Soviet-trained Karzem was a patriot and a good orator, but Tom says he wanted someone younger and more aggressive – someone who could "do the ass-kicking we need."

But Karzem was popular among the province's senior leaders, making him hard to fire. Abel says he inadvertently strengthened Karzem's position when he taught the Afghan how to use Power Point. After Karzem gave an impressive, Power Point-enhanced briefing at a meeting of police chiefs, the commandos realized they could not simply hand him a pink slip.

Putting their heads together with Gen. Sarjang, Laghman's provincial police chief and a friend of the PRC, Tom and Abel came up with a plan. Sarjang decided to promote Karzem up and out of the PRC, leaving the major's position open for a candidate more to Tom and Abel's liking.

Karzem had no idea of the moves against him. Abel recalls the Afghan officer pulling him aside one day to express his worries about his career development. Karzem wanted a better position but was worried that one might not be available. "Don't worry," Abel says he told Karzem, suppressing the irony in his voice.

"Red" is Tom's team sergeant and hails from the same Upstate New York town as Tom. He's a grizzled veteran in his late 30s, stocky and gregarious. He was there on the PRC's first patrol in September. They promptly came under fire from a force of at least 20 insurgents armed with rockets and AK-47s. Red, Tom and their cops were lucky: they killed three insurgents at no cost to themselves. But half the cops ran. And some of the ones who stood and fought sprayed their bullets so wildly, they came close to killing their compatriots.

Following the September patrol, Red had the kinds of concerns only a senior sergeant could appreciate. He sensed that the cops and their foreign advisers lacked the emotional ties that help units maintain cohesion during combat. He traced the problem back to the structure of the PRC's advisory team. There were just too many Afghan trainees for every American or Romanian trainer. "It didn't allow for the bonding we wanted," Red says.

So he went through the team's organizational chart and identified every administrative position they could do without. In an instant, he doubled the number of trainers. Before, there were 10 Afghans for every trainer. Now, there were just five Afghans per trainer.

While in their initial training, the PRC wore the standard powder-blue uniforms of Afghan National Police. To underline their extra training and the particular importance of their mission, Red wanted his cops to have special duds. He did some poking around and discovered a stash of old U.S. Army desert-style uniforms moldering in storage. The commandos requisitioned the old uniforms and also ordered up some unique unit patches as accessories. The effect was "status-giving," Tom says.

With a better curriculum, more trainers, new uniforms and, soon, a new leader, the Laghman PRC was positioned for success. Four hours a day, five days a week, Tom and his team instructed the fledgling cops in shooting, maneuvering, hand-to-hand combat and procedures for serving warrants and gathering evidence.

In the afternoons, in their spare time, the trainees were expected to study reading and writing and English. "We run 'em pretty hard," says Tom's weapons sergeant, who passed up a chance at law school in order to re-enlist and deploy to Laghman.

Tom was optimistic about his cops' prospects. "I don't see any corruption in my PRC," Tom says, "I don't see any drug use." Their training, plus the "unifying experience" of September's firefight, had forged them into an effective unit. Tom claims his police company has the highest morale of any of the 20 PRCs scattered across Afghanistan.

Success bred success. More recruits joined the unit, swelling its ranks to more than 100. Tom, Abel, Red and the other Special Forces organized graduation events to mark milestones in the PRC's training. But it was Shah "King Sugar" Qand and his errand boy Daw Lat that would give the cops the first real chance to prove they were ready.

The Windows 95 launch was the iPhone launch of its day. On Aug. 24, 1995, crowds lined up to purchase what Microsoft promised was the biggest transformation yet in desktop computing. Where did they line up? At stores, which were still at the time really the only way outside of mail-order that the average consumer could buy software. The hype surrounding the release of a new desktop operating system — an operating system! — probably looks a little mystifying to anyone born after 1990. But today's teens have little memory of a time when Apple was a struggling also-ran computer maker, Microsoft was an unstoppable force of innovation, and cellphones were luxury items the size of bricks. Windows 95 wasn't even a radical departure from what had come before. It still relied on file folders and, well, windows as its prevailing visual and organizational metaphors. But it also introduced Internet Explorer, which while reviled by web developers was until this year the leading way the world browsed the web. While Microsoft is reportedly pouring $1.5 billion into the marketing of Windows 8, its launch Friday just doesn't have cultural significance of its forerunner's release 17 years ago. This is in part because of when it arrives in the history of personal computing (late) and in the arc of Microsoft as a business (late). The launch of Windows 95 in a sense was the close of a chapter rather than an opening: It was the last time Microsoft owned the conversation. Above: Bill Gates and the Start Button —————————————- In 1995, Microsoft was Bill Gates' company. Just shy of 40 when Windows 95 launched, Gates was a CEO still deeply engaged with the evolution of Microsoft's software, and he did not hesitate to make himself the public face of the Windows 95 launch. Pictured here the night of the launch at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Gates ushered in the iconic Start button. While nested lists of hierarchical menus hardly seems like a design revelation today, the Start button has come to define Windows so much that its absence has dominated the headlines of Windows 8 reviews.

Busted ——

Improvised Explosive Devices are the biggest killers of coalition troops in Afghanistan. Most IEDs are made from ammonium nitrate, Red says. So when an Afghan investigative unit alerted Tom and his team to the presence of a major ammonium nitrate distributor in Mehtar Lam, they paid very close attention. Shah Qand was reportedly getting his stuff direct from Pakistan.

In the past, ISAF troops – possibly even Special Forces – might have immediately detained the suspected explosives dealer. Or, given adequate evidence, they might have simply killed him. On several occasions the 45th Infantry Brigade had launched offensives into the Laghman countryside hoping to round up IED-makers.

But for Tom and the PRC, there was more at stake than a single insurgent, however dangerous that insurgent might be. "To build Afghan capacity for the rule of law – that's our goal," Tom says.

>There was 2,200 pounds of explosive material, enough for 'half an Oklahoma City.'

So with Tom and his teammates shepherding the process, the PRC sought a warrant based on information from intelligence sources. The Afghan Ministry of Justice signed off on the warrant. "We conducted mission planning and coordination to arrest him at the moment he took delivery of the ammonium nitrate." Qand was known to operate out of a general store in Mehtar Lam.

They had just 30 minutes’ warning that the shipment was coming. "Which is quick," Tom points out. It was Nov. 3. Tom led his PRC, along with an American Explosive Ordnance Disposal team, to the general store. They caught Qand red-handed, so to speak, accepting the explosives from Rashid Ahmad Arshad, a known member of the Al Haqqani extremist group, based in Pakistan.

The ammonium nitrate was contained in paint cans and covered by cement. There was 2,200 pounds of the stuff, in all – enough for 50 IEDs or "half an Oklahoma City," Tom says, referring to the 1995 bombing of a federal building by American-born terrorist Timothy McVeigh, in which 168 people died.

Back in Mehtar Lam, the Special Forces and their police trainees had every reason to celebrate. They'd apprehended two big-time suspected insurgents – and they'd done it the legal way, with paperwork, evidence and everything. "All in all, it was relatively calm mission," Tom says. "The PRC held their blocking positions and conducted the operation with a surprising degree of professionalism, relative to their education and training."

But an arrest was one thing. A successful conviction was another.

Not long after the arrest, Tom got disturbing news from his sources. As frequently occurs in Afghanistan, the prosecutor in charge of Qand and Lat's case was hinting he might let the suspects go before their trial. If that happened, there was basically zero chance of catching them again.

Tom knew he had to act. But what he was about to do skirted the boundaries of acceptable behavior. He prepared a powerful bluff – and hoped that the Afghan jailer didn't call him on it.

Tom "armed" himself with a letter signed by U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Huber, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 435, the coalition's rule-of-law task force. "It said that ISAF formally requested the Afghans hand over Shah Qand and Daw Lat because ISAF had evidence that they participated in activities that led to the death of coalition forces," Tom says.

In truth, Tom admits he didn't want the Afghans to hand over Lat and Qand. He wanted them to stand trial. He hoped that his strong-arm tactic would cause Afghan authorities to get defensive – as in, "How dare you interfere in our legal system? We'll be holding onto our suspects, thank you very much." Moreover, the letter implied that ISAF might detain or kill Qand and Lat if the Afghans released them – so the Afghans might as well continue with the trial.

On Nov. 29, Tom borrowed a platoon of scouts from the 45th's Task Force Thunderbird and visited each of the four jails where the suspects might be held. Tom pointedly did not take his PRC. For one, they were out on a mission. And even if they had been available, "I did not want the PRC involved in this as I felt it would taint their credibility and legitimacy in Afghan eyes."

Tom found Qand and Lat at the fourth and last jail. He showed the jailer the letter. The jailer excused himself to go make some calls. Tom held his breath. The jailer returned. He assured Tom he would not release the prisoners. The next day, the prosecutor decided to continue with the trial.

That left one last task. "I had to fly down to Jalalabad shortly thereafter to get the last paint can of ammonium nitrate from EOD," Tom says, "because the Afghan government had blown up 1000-plus kilograms of the explosive on national TV and had not saved any for the evidentiary process."

A little over a month later, the court handed Qand his six-year sentence.

Afghan police take target practice. Photo: David Axe

'Our Hearts Aren't in It' ————————-

Qand's conviction marked a major step forward for the PRC and for Afghan rule of law. But what's one conviction in a war involving thousands of insurgents conducting tens of thousands of attacks every year?

It's a start, that's what. A start to what Tom says is a "multi-year thing." In its final three years as a major force on the ground, ISAF is determined to prepare Afghan troops to fully take over security from the departing international forces. That Tom and other Special Forces still do so much of the heavy lifting for their trainees is a foreboding sign – and at best points to a commando presence for years after conventional troops withdraw.

"I'm not naive," Tom admits. "If we left now it would deteriorate."

>'If they really wanted to win here, they'd keep us here indefinitely."

Abel points out that Afghans are starting with a much more rudimentary sense of law and policing than what most Westerners possess. "We know more about the rule of law from watching TV" than most Afghans will ever know, Abel says.

That said, Tom isn't aiming to develop Afghanistan, or even his PRC, to U.S. or European standards. "My intention is not to replicate a Western-style judicial system." Rather, he says he wants to encourage an Afghan legal system that works within existing institutions, such as the *shura *– an informal tribal meeting – and the jirga, which is like a shura except has the power to make decisions.

He says he's not yet sure exactly what that means. "How will the PRC integrate with the shura and the jirga? I don't know."

And he won't be around to find out. His six-month deployment ends shortly. After 20 years in the Army – at least half of them in Special Forces – Tom is getting ready to submit his retirement papers. What he'll do next, he's not sure. He has a job offer with an aviation company. He says he's interested in going back to school, maybe.

But he says he would stay in Laghman with his proud little police outfit, if the Army and the American people would let him. "If they really wanted to win here, they'd keep us here indefinitely," Tom says.

That's not in the cards. Special Forces will likely remain for years after 2014, but probably not indefinitely.

"Our [the public's] hearts aren't in it," Tom says.