US forces continue to press forward in the Marjah region of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, put are said to be struggling mightily with home-made bombs and sniper fire, and were able to advance only 500 yards yesterday.

Despite the pretense that the battle is going “according to plans,” the promises of a quick victory with overwhelming force in Marjah has turned out to be overly optimistic, with some officials now saying the offensive could take upwards of a month.

Still, the optimism isn’t entirely lost, and some US commanders remain convinced, to quote Colonel Scott Hartsell, that “pretty soon, they are going to run out of gas.”

The US has been pledging the invasion for over a month, aimed at installing a Karzai appointee as governor of Marjah. The troops began the invasion on Friday, with Taliban forces pledging to “wait out” the raid.

In a scenario which has played out all too regularly in the nation in recent weeks, NATO forces say they called in an air strike against what they assumed to be “persons planting an IED explosive device” in the Kandahar Province, but were later revealed to be innocent civilians.

The strike left at least five of the civilians dead and two others wounded. NATO expressed “regrets” for the killings, and promised to offer the families of the slain financial compensation for the loss of their loved ones.

Officials were unclear about what the civilians were actually doing instead of planting IEDs, but the incident had shades of a previous air strike in Kandahar, in August. In that case, US troops saw people “loading munitions into a van,” ordering an air attack against them. The “munitions” turned out to be cucumbers, and the militants were farmers.

This is the second major incident of NATO forces killing civilians in the past 24 hours in Afghanistan, as yesterday a US rocket attack in the Helmand Province missed its intended target, killing 12 civilians in a house.

WASHINGTON — Winter weather failed to deter insurgents from stepping up roadside bomb attacks in Afghanistan, as both blasts and casualties among U.S. and allied troops in January more than doubled from a year earlier, Pentagon data show.

Coalition troops found 727 bombs in January compared with 276 in the same month of 2009. Blasts killed 32 U.S. and allied troops and wounded 137 others, compared with 14 deaths and 64 injuries in January 2009, according to the data. These bombs are the top killer of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

In previous years, winter was a slow season for Taliban and insurgent attacks in Afghanistan.

Over the weekend, U.S.-led forces launched the largest offensive in the eight-year war to oust the Taliban from their southern stronghold of Marjah. Coalition and Afghan troops encountered only sporadic resistance from insurgents Sunday. The biggest threat to them: hundreds of mines and roadside bombs planted by the Taliban before the offensive.

British Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Messenger said Sunday that coalition troops had found a number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and local residents had provided tips on where others were buried.

"It appears that the Taliban have been forced into relative inactivity, although in the next few days they could get their breath back," he said. "There is also the residual IED threat."

Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, said in an interview that combating IEDs may be a "tougher nut to crack" in Afghanistan than in Iraq because Afghan insurgents who plant the devices are motivated more by allegiance to local power brokers than by money, as is the case in Iraq.

"The workforce is loyal to its boss," he said.

The current fighting is taking place in an area that has few roads, so troops often must leave their vehicles to patrol villages. Insurgents target those troops with bombs that detonate when stepped on.

The coalition command said one U.S. soldier and another from Britain had died in the offensive so far. Oates said the insurgents' tactics will likely result in more casualties in the "mid-term." After security is better established, residents will be more likely to provide tips on bombmakers and device locations, he said. In the meantime, Oates said troops will rely on bomb-sniffing dogs, metal detectors and surveillance of problem areas by aircraft to avoid blasts.

Charlie Wilson died last week, an event that has not gone unnoticed in Afghanistan.

I saw a Dari language newspaper clip the other day that called Wilson “a friend and strong supporter of our Mujehadeen brothers.”

It was Wilson who almost singlehandedly channeled $5 billion US taxpayer dollars to the Afghan insurgency against the Soviets, orchestrating a covert deal with Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to get Stinger missiles to Afghan freedom fighters who had previously been fighting Soviet helicopters with with little more than mules and old rifles.

And of course there was his legendary womanizing and partying, the pinnacle of which was an episode involving cocaine, Playboy models and a hot tub in a Vegas suite.

After the movie about his life came out (based on this fabulous book) with Tom Hanks playing Wilson, his reputation as an American hero seemed to be cemented.

But recently, another narrative of Wilson’s life has emerged.

Melissa Roddy over at HuffPo has a fascinating read about Joanne Herring (played by Julia Roberts in the movie) and her ties to Pakistan oil interests. If I’m reading Roddy’s piece correctly, she says that Herring used Wilson–who purchased substantial interests in Pakistani oil around the time he advocated funding for the Muj–to keep Afghanistan at war so that Pakistan could lay claim to vasts swaths of eastern Afghanistan that have long been part of the disputed Durand Line.

Roddy has plenty of evidence to back up her claim and though the writing is a bit dense, she makes some very, very compelling arguments. The upshot is that Wilson got rich off the whole thing, even becoming a lobbyist for Pakistan at $300,000 a year.

But I take issue with her last ‘graph, where she says that “Afghan people see [Herring and Wilson] in a different [negative] light.”

Forgetting the fact that it is dangerous (and disingenuous) to claim to know what all “Afghan people” think, the Afghans that I know who have heard of Wilson seem to like and admire him. The fact is, whatever his motives, his actions helped end the Soviet presence here. The war was going on before Charlie Wilson got involved and if he hadn’t done what he did, it would have likely gone on much longer (though probably ended the same way.)

Though lobbying for the Pakistani’s in the mid-90’s (a time when they were using US money to fund a secret nuclear program they would later sell to Iran) was scummy, from an Afghan perspective, Wilson did alright by the Mujehadeen.

I’d bet that if you asked former Mujehadeen fighters if Wilson getting rich off of their victory was worth them getting stinger missiles to shoot Russian helicopters out of the sky, they’d answer in the affirmative.