The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan

West, Bing

ISBN 10: 1400068738 / ISBN 13: 9781400068739

Edité par Random House, 2011

N° de réf. du vendeur 1400068738-3-34128913

Synopsis :

Physical description; xxii, 307 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., maps, ports. ; 25 cm. Subject; Afghan War.

Extrait: Chapter 1. Sisyphus: Pacifying the Capillary Valleys
 
According to Greek mythology, the gods punished prideful King Sisyphus by forcing him to endlessly push a boulder to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll back each time. When the American Army encountered the towering mountains of northeast Afghanistan, they came to appreciate the Sisyphean task. When American soldiers trekked up the mountains, the insurgents fled, returning after the Americans left.  Like ocean waves, the Americans rolled in, and out, and in again.
 
The Korengal Valley became the symbol of that frustration, if not the metaphor for the war. Although abandoned in mid-2010, the American outpost in the Korengal was not a memorial to a clueless military. Far from it – and far more sobering – the Korengal was key to a diligent, thoughtful strategy. The notion that “true counterinsurgency” began with President Obama’s surge strategy in 2010 was incorrect. Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan began four years earlier, with decidedly mixed results.
 
***
 
The Terrain
 
From the capital of Kabul, a wide valley stretches 30 miles eastward to the Khyber Pass, the main crossing point into Pakistan. North of the Khyber, the high mountain passes are snowbound during winter. The four provinces northeast of Kabul are of little commercial value, inhabited by insular tribes resentful of outsiders. Beginning in 2002, Special Forces teams and Army and Marine battalions pursued the terrorist bands hiding in Nuristan, Nangarhar, Konar and Laghman, or N2KL.
 
Konar consists of bundles of forested mountains sliced by capillary valleys and riverbeds. In the center of the province, the Konar River runs from the snow-capped crags of the Hindu Kush to the north through a wide farming valley and onto the plain extending to the Khyber Pass to the south. (Pic 1)The Durand Line, a ridge that marked the Pakistan border, ran along the east side of the Konar; on the west side of the river plain lay the Pech River and a thick tangle of mountains and tiny valleys, including the Korengal. (Map 2.)

In 2005, the Safi tribe in the flat, flourishing farmlands along the major rivers was friendly and curious about the Americans.
 
“With hundreds of isolated villages,” LtCol Chip Bierman, the battalion commander at that time, said, “there was no way my sixteen platoons could provide real security. The Taliban crossed from Pakistan and popped up around the Korengal whenever they pleased. It wasn’t heavy fighting. The average Marine saw only three or four enemy in his entire tour.”
 
The more impoverished tribes in the mountains exhibited mixed sentiments. Some were friendly and others standoffish. Within minutes, a sharp interpreter could gauge the loyalties of a village consisting of twenty to a hundred stone and wood square houses.  
 
Konar Province leapt into the American consciousness in April of 2005 when a four-man SEAL commando team was ambushed high on a mountain overlooking the Korengal Valley by a small enemy band, including “six to twelve well-trained foreign fighters with experience.”[i] Other Special Operations troops leaped into a rescue helicopter that tried to land without covering fire and was shot down. Nineteen of America’s best-trained troops were killed, the highest loss in a single battle in the war.
 
The victorious Taliban posted a vivid video of the fight and of American bodies on YouTube, and the enemy commander, Ahmed Shah, gave an interview to CBS Television. The ambush and killing of 19 Special Operations Forces provided a powerful morale lift to the Taliban. Suddenly the Americans were not ten feet tall; they could be beaten.
 
Marine battalion 1-3 was assigned to Konar Province, and spent a year launching raids from three bases spread across 70 miles. Through sources and radio intercepts, the Marines had fair knowledge of when groups of fighters had passed through a valley. Because the intelligence was normally vague and late, the Marines ran hundreds of patrols in fruitless pursuit. The book, “Victory Point”, is a first-hand account of the confused tactics that resulted in the loss of the 19 American commandos. A platoon leader called it “a saga of combat governed by stream of consciousness.”[ii]
 
After ambushing the SEALs, Shah slipped across the border into Pakistan, where the tribes and Taliban gangs greeted him as a hero. But months slipped into years, and he couldn’t return to the Korengal. The Americans had posted a reward of $70,000 – one hundred times larger than a year’s wages - and Shah knew someone would betray him. Out of cash and fame by 2008, he tried to kidnap a wealthy Pakistani and was killed by the local police. 
 
In April of 2006, the 3rd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division replaced the Marines. The commander, Col John ‘Mick” Nicholson, decided against the raid approach. Instead, he ordered his battalion commanders to spread out and settle down, aiming to bring continuous security across a wide swath of farmlands and nearby capillary valleys. The brigade gradually established 42 Combat Outposts, or COPs manned by a platoon (40 soldiers) or a company (130 soldiers at most). 
 
LtCol Chris Cavoli, commanding Battalion 1-32, was given responsibility for a wide swath, including Asadabad, Konar’s capital city, and the surrounding districts. “A-bad” sat a the juncture of the Y where the Pech River to the west flowed into the large Konar River that ran roughly north to south. The Marines had one outpost at A-Bad and another at Camp Blessing, 30 kilometers northwest up the Pech. The dirt track leading to Blessing was called IED Alley because it was simple work to dig in an explosive, mark it with a few rocks to warn the locals and wait for a humvee to explode.
 
***
 
The Mission and the People
 
From A-Bad, the Konar River flowed south 60 kilometers to Jalalabad, where Cavoli had his headquarters. It took between nine and 16 hours to drive from Jalalabad through A-Bad and up to Blessing. The standard counterinsurgency ration of security forces to population is 50-to-one; in the brigade’s area of operations, it was 2,000-to-one.
 
At the beginning of their tour, Nicholson and Cavoli decided to institute counterinsurgency based on three principles: “Clear, hold and build”. First, “clear” by separating the people from the insurgents by stationing American soldiers near or among the people. Second, “hold” by providing money and materials to the people in order to buy their loyalty. Third, “build” by insuring that local officials acted honestly and were connected to the central government.
 
The three tasks together required nation-building, because the American soldiers were doing the fighting, organizing the shuras, setting up the projects and services, and overseeing the start-up activities of the newly-appointed district governor. In Vietnam in the ‘60s, the central government had well-established connecting files to the province and district level. In Iraq after 2003, although the US military had to prop up district and provincial appointees for several years, thousands of educated and qualified Iraqis competed for the posts. Such pre-existing conditions for central governance were absent in Afghanistan. Every American battalion commander soon found himself enmeshed in political and economic issues.
 
Underlying the details was an unquestioned assumption that the Pashtun people wanted the protection, projects and ties to the Kabul government that the Americans stitched together. Cavoli later ruefully wrote, “Our generals talked about everything... But not one word about what the people wanted. Their support was assumed.”[iii]
 
Based on months of climbing the mountains and patrolling the valley floors, Marine Colonel Chip Bierman had concluded that the Korengal was the lair for the resistance inside Konar. The Korengalis were a tribe of five thousand who spoke their own language. In the ‘20s, the Safi tribe in the river farmlands had permitted the Korengalis to settle in the 20-kilometer narrow, rock-strewn valley that looked like a vertical gash separating two mountains. The insular Korengalis scraped out thin terraces for wheat, rice and corn, drove their skinny cattle into the high pastures during the summer and systematically harvested the majestic Himalayan cedars, strong, light, aromatic and much in demand in nearby Pakistan. Every government to take power in Kabul opposed the destruction of Afghanistan’s beauty, but no government forces dared to enter the Korengal’s long box canyon. The only English word Korengalis knew was “chainsaw”.
 
In the ‘80s, when the mujahideen infiltrated from Pakistan to harass the Soviet garrison at A-Bad, they operated from the inaccessible Korengal. The Korengalis accepted the outside fighters, the money they brought from the Gulf Sates and their fundamentalist mullahs. After they were driven back into Pakistan in 2001, the Taliban gradually reactivated those nascent networks. The key enabler was Haji Matin, a cedar exporter and fiery advocate of fundamentalism whose family house in the Korengal was bombed and several relatives killed in 2003. Rumors circulated that a rival had unjustly fingered Matin. Whatever the truth, after the bombing Matin crossed into Pakistan and organized the growing Taliban rebellion inside the Korengal.
 
Actually, it is a distortion to use the word Taliban as synonymous with the insurgency. There are splinter groups of rebels, like the treacherous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his few thousand loyalists called the HIG and Sirajuddin Haqqani, who are as dangerous in the northern provinces as is ...

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way ...
Éditeur : Random House
Date d'édition : 2011
Reliure : hardcover
Etat : Good