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Obama Wars Title: U.S. Pulling Back in Afghan Valley It Called Vital to War KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of fighting for control of a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the United States military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The withdrawal from the Pech Valley, a remote region in Kunar Province, formally began on Feb. 15. The military projects that it will last about two months, part of a shift of Western forces to the province’s more populated areas. Afghan units will remain in the valley, a test of their military readiness. While American officials say the withdrawal matches the latest counterinsurgency doctrine’s emphasis on protecting Afghan civilians, Afghan officials worry that the shift of troops amounts to an abandonment of territory where multiple insurgent groups are well established, an area that Afghans fear they may not be ready to defend on their own. And it is an emotional issue for American troops, who fear that their service and sacrifices could be squandered. At least 103 American soldiers have died in or near the valley’s maze of steep gullies and soaring peaks, according to a count by The New York Times, and many times more have been wounded, often severely. Military officials say they are sensitive to those perceptions. “People say, ‘You are coming out of the Pech’; I prefer to look at it as realigning to provide better security for the Afghan people,” said Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander for eastern Afghanistan. “I don’t want the impression we’re abandoning the Pech.” The reorganization, which follows the complete Afghan and American withdrawals from isolated outposts in nearby Nuristan Province and the Korangal Valley, runs the risk of providing the Taliban with an opportunity to claim success and raises questions about the latest strategy guiding the war. American officials say their logic is simple and compelling: the valley consumed resources disproportionate with its importance; those forces could be deployed in other areas; and there are not enough troops to win decisively in the Pech Valley in any case. “If you continue to stay with the status quo, where will you be a year from now?” General Campbell said. “I would tell you that there are places where we’ll continue to build up security and it leads to development and better governance, but there are some areas that are not ready for that, and I’ve got to use the forces where they can do the most good.” President Obama’s Afghan troop buildup is now fully in place, and the United States military has its largest-ever contingent in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama’s reinforced campaign has switched focus to operations in Afghanistan’s south, and to building up Afghan security forces. The previous strategy emphasized denying sanctuaries to insurgents, blocking infiltration routes from Pakistan and trying to fight away from populated areas, where NATO’s superior firepower could be massed, in theory, with less risk to civilians. The Pech Valley effort was once a cornerstone of this thinking. The new plan stands as a clear, if unstated, repudiation of earlier decisions. When Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former NATO commander, overhauled the Afghan strategy two years ago, his staff designated 80 “key terrain districts” to concentrate on. The Pech Valley was not one of them. Ultimately, the decision to withdraw reflected a stark — and controversial — internal assessment by the military that it would have been better served by not having entered the high valley in the first place. “What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone,” said one American military official familiar with the decision. “Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.” Gen. Mohammed Zaman Mamozai, a former commander of the region’s Afghan Border Police, agreed with some of this assessment. He said that residents of the Pech Valley bristled at the American presence but might tolerate Afghan units. “Many times they promised us that if we could tell the Americans to pull out of the area, they wouldn’t fight the Afghan forces,” he said. It is impossible to know whether such pledges will hold. Some veterans worry that the withdrawal will create an ideal sanctuary for insurgent activity — an area under titular government influence where fighters or terrorists will shelter or prepare attacks elsewhere. While it is possible that the insurgents will concentrate in the mountain valleys, General Campbell said his goal was to arrange forces to keep insurgents from Kabul, the country’s capital. “There are thousands of isolated mountainous valleys throughout Afghanistan, and we cannot be in all of them,” he said. The American military plans to withdraw from most of the four principal American positions in the valley. For security reasons, General Campbell declined to discuss which might retain an American presence, and exactly how the Americans would operate with Afghans in the area in the future. As the pullback begins, the switch in thinking has fueled worries among those who say the United States is ceding some of Afghanistan’s most difficult terrain to the insurgency and putting residents who have supported the government at risk of retaliation. “There is no house in the area that does not have a government employee in it,” said Col. Gul Rahman, the Afghan police chief in the Manogai District, where the Americans’ largest base in the valley, Forward Operating Base Blessing, is located. “Some work with the Afghan National Army, some work with the Afghan National Police, or they are a teacher or governmental employee. I think it is not wise to ignore and leave behind all these people, with the danger posed to their lives.” Some Afghan military officials have also expressed pointed misgivings about the prospects for Afghan units left behind. “According to my experience in the military and knowledge of the area, it’s absolutely impractical for the Afghan National Army to protect the area without the Americans,” said Major Turab, the former second-in-command of an Afghan battalion in the valley, who like many Afghans uses only one name. “It will be a suicidal mission.” The pullback has international implications as well. Senior Pakistani commanders have complained since last summer that as American troops withdraw from Kunar Province, fighters and some commanders from the Haqqani network and other militant groups have crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistan to create a “reverse safe haven” from which to carry out attacks against Pakistani troops in the tribal areas. The Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups are all but certain to label the withdrawal a victory in the Pech Valley, where they could point to the Soviet Army’s withdrawal from the same area in 1988. Many Afghans remember that withdrawal as a symbolic moment when the Kremlin’s military campaign began to visibly fall apart. Within six months, the Soviet-backed Afghan Army of the time ceded the territory to mujahedeen groups, according to Afghan military officials. The unease, both with the historical precedent and with the price paid in American blood in the valley, has ignited a sometimes painful debate among Americans veterans and active-duty troops. The Pech Valley had long been a hub of American military operations in Kunar and Nuristan Provinces. American forces first came to the valley in force in 2003, following the trail of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hezb-i-Islami group, who, like other prominent insurgent leaders, has been said at different times to hide in Kunar. They did not find him, though Hezb-i-Islami is active in the valley. Since then, one American infantry battalion after another has fought there, trying to establish security in villages while weathering roadside bombs and often vicious fights. Along with other slotlike canyons that the United States has already largely abandoned — including the Korangal Valley, the Waygal Valley (where the battle of Wanat was fought in 2008), the Shuryak Valley and the Nuristan River corridor (where Combat Outpost Keating was nearly overrun in 2009) — the Pech Valley was a region rivaled only by Helmand Province as the deadliest Afghan acreage for American troops. On one operation alone in 2005, 19 service members, including 11 members of the Navy Seals, died. As the years passed and the toll rose, the area assumed for many soldiers a status as hallowed ground. “I can think of very few places over the past 10 years with as high and as sustained a level of violence,” said Col. James W. Bierman, who commanded a Marine battalion in the area in 2006 and helped establish the American presence in the Korangal Valley. In the months after American units left the Korangal last year, insurgent attacks from that valley into the Pech Valley increased sharply, prompting the current American battalion in the area, First Battalion, 327th Infantry, and Special Operations units to carry out raids into places that American troops once patrolled regularly. Last August, an infantry company raided the village of Omar, which the American military said had become a base for attacks into the Pech Valley, but which earlier units had viewed as mostly calm. Another American operation last November, in the nearby Watapor Valley, led to fighting that left seven American soldiers dead.
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
When the government first went into Afghanistan I said that this thing can't be won and that we needed to deal with al Queda in another way. The neo-cons on the forums that I was on at the time (LibertyForum and Lucianne.com) called me every name in the book from Traitor to "Surrender Monkey" and even "anti-Semite" (even though I rarely get into any discussions about Israel). Of course they couldn't debate the merits of the policy. All they could do is pound their chests and call me names. Calling someone an "anti- Semite" is 100% designed to shut down debate. Here we are 10 years later and the war is basically lost. It's even worse than that. Our debacle in Afghanistan has threated Pakistan. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. When I decided to created a blog in 2007, one of my first posts was on Pakistan. Here it is: The tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto seems to have given neo-con pundits a collective sigh of relief. They view this as another vindication of their belief that the U.S. government must do whatever it takes to fight "Islamo-fascism", including continuing to prop up ruthless dictators like Pervez Musharraf. Unfortunately for the neo-cons, Benazir Bhutto had a different view. In November, Parade Magazine asked her what she would like to tell President Bush. She replied: "Your policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country. I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years." The most troubling thing about the people who pass for "conservatives" nowadays is their stubborn refusal to understand Bhutto's point -- that U.S. government policy in the Middle East is a key cause of the troubles we face with terrorism today. During the Cold War, the Soviets and the U.S. government propped up opposing dictatorships around the world. The Soviets had people like Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega. We countered with people like Augusto Pinochet and the Shah of Iran. I don't have any axe to grind whatsoever with what the U.S. government did during the Cold War. We were fighting an organized, ideological enemy, with a huge military capability that enslaved half the people in the world. We had to do whatever it took to win. A funny thing happened when the Cold War ended. The U.S. government stopped propping up dictators in Latin America and Asia. However, it continued to do so in the Middle East. Billions of U.S. dollars continued to flow into the hands of some very nasty tyrants. That helped radicalize their populations against us. The U.S. government has given over $50 billion to Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak has ruled Egypt under a state of emergency since 1981. Every 6 years, he stages a rigged election. Reports of the torture of political prisoners in Egypt are frequent, credible and widespread. The lead suicide pilot on 9/11 was Mohamed Atta, who was born in Egypt. The Saudi Royal family has been a reliable ally for the U.S. government for 5 decades. They also run the most brutal regime in the world. Osama bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia, as were 15 of the 19 hijackers. The U.S. government has also given Musharraf over $10 billion and violent opposition to his dictatorship has only gotten worse. Why is it so hard for neo-con pundits and politicians to understand that there might be some relationship between U.S. government support of tyrants in the Middle East and the suicide terrorists? The CIA knows there is. They call it "blowback". I actually think there are a lot of neo-cons who really do understand. They just won't admit it because they are scared. No, they aren't afraid of the terrorists. They are worried that the only thing keeping the old Reagan coalition together is the so-called war on terror. After all, given the last 7 years no one honestly believes that the GOP stands for small government and fiscal responsibility any longer. Fighting communism was the one banner that the entire diverse Reagan coalition could rally behind. After the Cold War ended, some conservatives, most notably Pat Buchanan, started questioning the need for the U.S. to maintain troops in 130 countries. This potential crack in the coalition alarmed the neo-cons, so they went looking for a new villain. For a while it looked like that villain might be China and the neo-cons beat the war drums against them for 10 years. Then came 9/11 and they were handed their new focus of evil in the world, except that al-Qaeda isn't a state, with a huge army, and tons of nuclear weapons. Rather, it's nothing more than a tiny band of criminals who managed to pull off 9/11 largely due to the incompetence of the FBI. The neo-cons are alarmed again today by Ron Paul because he is the only candidate brave enough to question whether U.S. government policy in the Middle East might have something to do with the terrorist threat we face today. The neo-cons are demonizing Ron Paul every bit as much as they demonized Buchanan. Anyway, the quote from Benazir Bhutto will appear in Parade magazine on January 8th. That will be too late for the Iowa caucuses, but maybe it will start to wake enough people up before Super Tuesday to make a positive difference to our future.
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