Afghan Troops Hold Their Ground at High Cost The Americans could be spotted waiting for the Chinooks in the 2 a.m. darkness only by the shape of their night-vision goggles, as they shared a cigarette with glowing embers in quick drags among the kneeling assaulters in the chilled dark. They would be on the first two helicopters to drop into the villages of the Khogyani district in the shadows of the Tora Bora mountains, kicking off a four-day operation against the Taliban by roughly 175 Americans and 1,250 Afghan troops, in a teeth-clenching test of U.S. mentoring and training. The Afghans were lined up behind the Americans, leaning back on their 130-pound backpacks, saving their strength to carry the packs onto the Chinooks for their first air assault - and without the Americans' high-tech goggles, letting their eyes adjust to the dark for the assault to come. They didn't talk much. A Predator drone feed showed the groups landing in the darkened district - dark spots trudging slowly up hills and sometimes falling into ditches - U.S. and Afghan alike. They set up a post to oversee the insurgent-ridden villages they would be guarding for the next four days, as Afghan police cleared them out house by house. Intelligence intercepts showed most of the insurgents had already fled to the farthest village just beneath Tora Bora, where Osama bin Laden escaped his American pursuers, after watching the Afghan troops and police mass the day before. The Afghans and their American security advisers from the U.S. Army's 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, were less interested in pursuing them than in making sure they could not return, making way for the Afghan local police who would take their place. In the daylight, village elders were invited to meet with the Afghan general who led the attack, and they said they welcomed the troops - because they were Afghans, not foreigners. The U.S. brigade's commander, Col. Joseph "J.P." McGee, sat quietly in a corner, making the briefest of comments. This was an Afghan-to-Afghan conversation. Overall in the operation, there were tactical missteps that Americans pointed out privately to the Afghan commanders, tactfully out of earshot of their subordinates. There were shortfalls in supplies, and requests were sometimes denied for U.S. air support for nighttime bombing runs or medical assistance. But in The Associated Press' visits to Khogyani district and some of the country's most contested southern and eastern provinces - Helmand, Nuristan, Kunar and Nangarhar - multiple operations were led or carried out mostly by Afghans, with their officers doing the bulk of the planning and execution, responding without U.S. aid to large-scale Taliban attacks or choosing targets the Americans sometimes disagreed with, if the U.S. advisers were consulted at all. The uneven but steady progress is encouraging for the U.S. commanders trying to hand off responsibility ahead of the December 2014 drawdown of most U.S. forces, from roughly 66,000 Americans at the start of this year, to an as-yet-undetermined residual force of NATO troops that have been estimated will be around 8,000 to 10,000 troops. The Afghans are paying heavily for that lead role, with casualty figures rising steadily, more than doubling from 550 Afghan soldiers and police killed in 2011 to more than 1,200 last year, according to data compiled by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.