Oruzgan, a province of more than 300,000 residents, had 14 recruits all of last year.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of recruits come from provinces in the north and northeast, where the insurgency is weaker. While the overall representation of Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, in the army is equitable — they make up about 42 percent of the population and roughly the same percentage of the army — the vast majority come from a few northeastern provinces. More than a third come from Nangarhar Province alone.

Trying to lure more southern Pashtuns, Ministry of Defense officials have made it easier for them to qualify for officer candidate school and have assigned two southern Pashtun generals to the region to focus on recruiting.

“Their job is to reach out to their communities and explain why it’s not only honorable, but it’s the right thing to do to join the army and to send your sons to join the army,” said Maj. Gen. D. Michael Day, the Canadian Army officer in charge of military training for NATO. “Because unless the elders, unless some recognized authority figure says this is what we should be doing, it doesn’t get done.”

An assassination campaign in the south has hampered those efforts. In the past two years, suicide bombers and armed men on motorcycles have struck down dozens of tribal elders sympathetic to the government, high-level officials and even civil servants.

“People are afraid,” said Abdul Ghani, deputy director of the Kandahar army recruiting center. “When we have assassinations and bombings every day like we have now, it really affects recruiting.”

The center, operating out of a lonely cinder-block compound guarded by a machine-gun tower, sends teams of recruiters into the city and outlying districts every day armed with leaflets and posters. The increase in American troops has made it easier for the teams to expand into more villages. Still, about half of the province’s 16 districts remain cut off, Mr. Ghani said.

The recruiters themselves live under constant threat. Last year a group of men beat a recruiter after he spoke to a group of young people in a city bazaar. So far, though, most have been lucky. They have not had the kind of attack like the suicide bombing in March that killed 36 people at recruiting center in Kunduz.