There are 788 stairs to the top of the Santa Marta neighbourhood, a 55-storey climb that takes you along a mad succession of crumbling Dr. Seuss staircases, past hidden shrines and cliff-face bars and piles of waste and a thousand wood and tin houses cantilevered over the cliffs.
Along the way, you may wonder what connection there could possibly be between this Rio de Janeiro favela and an Afghan village. After all, this is a place, a few blocks from Copacabana beach, that is verdant, noisy, colourful, full of impiety and sweaty rhythm, known for its around-the-clock funk parties.
Yet it is in the midst of a radical Afghanization, an assault and occupation modelled after the counterinsurgency techniques that are guiding Canadian and U.S. soldiers in Kandahar.
For Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Santa Marta is a laboratory for the shock-and-awe transformation of neighbourhoods that have decayed into violence and isolation for generations.
The reasons for the Afghan approach become apparent when I encounter 12-year-old Devanil de Souza near the top of the steps, waiting on a platform to take a funicular tram car to the bottom.
Until the tram was built late last year, he feared the long climb down to collect his family's groceries. The final stretch was the "crack line," a narrow gauntlet lined on either side with teenage boys, not much older than him, carrying Uzi and Glock weapons, guarding tables laden with bricks of cocaine for sale to lost-looking dealers and addicts. His father had been among that crowd, until he wound up in prison.
Devanil was slated to join them: Their gang, the Red Command, controlled the entire economy, guarded all the favela 's entrances with pistol-toting teenage guards, and provided the only reliable source of male employment. For a fatherless young man like him, it was almost mandatory to join, and to kill.
The Red Command was the only form of government, of commerce: If you wanted a cylinder of propane for your stove, you bought it from the gang for $40; try to save $10 by buying from a shop, you'd be marked for punishment. But through its monopoly, it also maintained a degree of peace, stability and order.
Back at the bottom, I encounter the sharp end of this project, and the source of its greatest risk.
Sergeant Silva, 24, is carrying an assault rifle almost larger than him. Clothed head to toe in body armour, he stands in a row with four other officers.
"Before, when we went up the favela , we would run up the street with our rifles firing, a hundred of us, shooting everything we saw," he says. It's no exaggeration: Every two years, they would invade in the evening like an infantry brigade, kill a dozen people, clear out the dealers, and then leave.
Shortly before last Christmas, they invaded Santa Marta again. This time, though, they didn't go away. They moved in, and set up shop in several large buildings. They got to know everyone.
With them came hundreds of government workers. They did a census, gave people birth certificates and social-insurance cards so they could work in legal jobs, gave the streets names so they could receive cheques and bills, began issuing title deeds on mud-and-wood properties that had housed squatters for 60 years, put in street lights for the first time, installed indoor plumbing and Wi-Fi, constructed the favela 's first public space, an elaborate lighted soccer field at the top of the mountain, and started to build a job-training college and community centre at the bottom of the hill.
"We don't want police any more who enter from time to time without knowing who is good and who is bad, treating everyone as if they were the enemy," President Lula explained as he outlined the strategy.
The combination of intensive, community-based policing, social work, statistical organization of the population and sustained, long-term presence as a governing force in the community was taken directly from the U.S. counterinsurgency manual, written by General David Petraeus, the central commander responsible for Afghanistan. (The Canadian version, published this year and widely used in Kandahar, is based on it.) "Once we removed trafficking, we removed the whole economy and left an empty space," says Vera Lucia Nascimento, the project's chief social worker. "We've had to come in very quickly, with a lot of resources, to fill in that space. People had only ever worked informally, selling whatever they could on the streets and throwing their garbage out the window. We've had to come in and give them ways to be real, formal citizens and organize their lives."
When she started in January, she could walk up into the heart of the favela only with two heavily armed bodyguards. Now, she says, people trust her enough to drag her to their homes to settle marital disputes.
Yet, to make this transition work, the police are a constant occupying force, their rifles poking through windows and doors everywhere. "We didn't fear the drug gangs so much because they were our brothers and cousins, but these guys, we live in fear that they'll come in and shut us down," says Paolo Cesar Sauza, 55, who owns a small bar near the top of the hill.
Counterinsurgency is based on the building of trust, but it requires a long, expensive, heavy occupation that can make a community dependent and wary. Canada's manual hints that a decade or more may be necessary - and, as our soldiers are discovering, things can get deadlier before they get better, if they ever do.
The problem in Brazil, as it is in Afghanistan, is that the helpers will always be seen as occupiers (even if they're fellow countrymen), and the mission may succeed only as long as the riflemen stick around and the government money keeps flowing.
Grinning with pride, Devanil, the 12-year-old, boasts that his mother now has "a job with the project." She cleans the floors of the building, but, given his experience, that's a big improvement. The question his mother asks, out of his earshot, is whether it can be made to last.
Doug Saunders