NYT Magazine contributing writer Elizabeth Rubin spent some time with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the Korengal Valley, located in Afghanistan's Kunar province. She found a place where -- from my reading -- a My Lai-like situation could be just one more ambush away.
This is a must read.
For openers, here's some maps to set the scene:
Here's the original UN map of Afghanistan.
Here's the original AIMS map of Kunar.
And here's a photo of the Korengal Valley:
The view from a gun position at Firebase Phoenix overlooking the Korengal Valley. Paratroopers from Company B, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne), 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, occupy several small firebases along the valley in one of the most hard-fought areas in Afghanistan's Regional Command –East area of responsibility. (U.S. Army photo)
See this American Forces Press Service article for a hi-res version of the photo.
Residents of the upper Korengal Valley adhere to the Wahhabi school of Islam, a more austere form than what most Afghans follow. There are lots of foreign fighters (Chechens, Uzbeks, Pakistanis) in the area, although as you can see from the above maps, it doesn't sit right on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
You might also want to see this post: Afghanistan, frame by frame. Photojournalist Tim Hetherington won a 2007 World Press Photo Association award for his coverage of some of the vicious combat there.
The region is about 450 to 500 kilometres northeast of Kandahar province, where Canada's troops are operating.
I went to Afghanistan last fall with a question: Why, with all our technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes? As of September of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, NATO was causing alarmingly high numbers of civilian deaths — 350 by the coalition, compared with 438 by the insurgents. The sheer tonnage of metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds between January and September of 2007, compared with half a million in all of 2006.
After a few days, the first question sparked more: Was there a deeper problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? More than 100 American soldiers were killed last year, the highest rate since the invasion. Why were so many more American troops being killed? To find out, I spent much of the fall in the Korengal Valley and elsewhere in Kunar province alongside soldiers who were making life-and-death decisions almost every day — decisions that led to the deaths of soldiers and of civilians. ...
She describes the job of Capt. Dan Kearney this way:
So what exactly was his job out here? To subdue the valley. It’s a task the Marines had tried, and then the soldiers of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division — a task so bloody it seemed to drive the 10th Mountain’s soldiers to a kind of madness. Kearney’s soldiers told me they’d been spooked by the weird behavior of their predecessors last May: near the end of their tour, many would sit alone on the fire base talking to themselves. Privates disobeyed their sergeants, and squad leaders refused to step outside the wire to show the new boys the terrain. No one wanted to be shot in the last days of his tour.
Insurgents would often shoot at Kearney and his men from inside homes. Here's what happened on July 10, during one such incident:
When Kearney’s moment of decision came, two of 2nd Platoon’s sergeants, Kevin Rice and Tanner Stichter, had been shot, and the fight was still going on. Kearney could see a woman and child in the house. “We saw people moving weapons around,” Kearney told me. “I tried everything. I fired mortars to the back side to get the kids to run out the front. I shot to the left, to the right. The Apache” — an attack helicopter — “got shot at and left. I kept asking for a bomb drop, but no one wanted to sign off on the collateral damage of dropping a bomb on a house.” Finally, he said, “We shot a javelin and a tow” — both armor-piercing missiles. “I didn’t get shot at from there for two months,” Kearney said. “I ended up killing that woman and that kid.” ...
Here's more on the psychological toll:
LAST AUTUMN, after five months of grueling foot patrols up and down the mountains, after fruitless encounters with elders who smiled in the morning and were host to insurgents in the evening and after losing friends to enemy fire, Captain Kearney’s men could relate to the sullen, jittery rage of their predecessors in the 10th Mountain Division. Many wondered what they were doing out there at all.
One full-moon night I was sitting outside a sandbag-reinforced hut with Kearney when a young sergeant stepped out hauling the garbage. He looked around at the illuminated mountains, the dust, the rocks, the garbage bin. The monkeys were screeching. “I hate this country!” he shouted. Then he smiled and walked back into the hut. “He’s on medication,” Kearney said quietly to me.
Then another soldier walked by and shouted, “Hey, I’m with you, sir!” and Kearney said to me, “Prozac. Serious P.T.S.D. from last tour.” Another one popped out of the HQ cursing and muttering. “Medicated,” Kearney said. “Last tour, if you didn’t give him information, he’d burn down your house. He killed so many people. He’s checked out.” ...
At the end of the summer, Kearney told his dad, “My boys are gonna go crazy out here.” The army sent a shrink, and Kearney got a wake-up call about his own leadership. He discovered that half his men thought he was playing Russian roulette with their lives and the other half thought he stuck too closely to the rules of engagement. “The moral compass of the army is the P.L. and the C.O.” — the platoon leader and the commanding officer, Kearney told me. “I told every one of my P.L.’s that they have to set that moral standard, that once you slip to the left, you can’t pull your guys back in.”
Here's one soldier's reaction after a vicious ambush and firefight that saw two of his comrades die:
(Sgt. Roberto) Sandifer was questioning why they were sticking it out in the Korengal when the people so clearly hated them. He was haunted by (platoon medic Hugo) Mendoza’s voice calling to him: “I’m bleeding out. I’m dying.” He worried that the Korengal was going to push them off the deep end. In his imagination it had already happened. One day an Afghan visited their fire base, Sandifer told me. “I was staring at him, on the verge of picking up my weapon to shoot him,” he said. “I know right from wrong, but even if I did shoot him everyone at the fire base would have been O.K. We’re all to the point of ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ” And they still had 10 months to go in the Korengal.
I get the impression that Rubin was there in October, but I haven't come across reports of a major bug-out from the soldiers in the piece, so I'm assuming it hasn't happened -- at least not yet. :(
One can't generalize the Korengal situation to Afghanistan as a whole, but FWIW, Kunar province as a whole is a Pashtun-dominated area. What isn't clear to me is whether the rest of the province is as Wild West a place as the Korengal Valley, or if the insurgency is more subdued. And how about the other Pashtun provinces, which run roughly from Nuristan (just north of Kunar) down to Nimroz in the southwest?
Those remain the most troublesome areas for ISAF and U.S. forces. When does ISAF and the U.S. think the Afghan security forces will have enough control over that ground to keep it from domestic and foreign militants?
Finally, if the insurgents are willing to sacrifice their women and children to drive the Americans out, I find it difficult to believe that the U.S. will eventually triumph in that contest of wills.
And the ongoing loss of civilians as part of the violence will make winning hearts and minds as difficult as climbing the hills or navigating the myriad number of caves of the Korengal Valley itself.
I leave you with this snippet of dialogue from Apocalypse Now Redux, the screenplay written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola.
In this scene, towards the very end of the movie, Col.Walter E. Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) is holding forth in his compound in Cambodia, with Capt. Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) his captive audience -- and I mean that literally. They are live Montagnards and dead bodies everywhere:
I've seen the horrors. The horrors that you've seen.
But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have the right to kill me. You have a right to do that. But you have no right to judge me.
It's impossible for words to describe what is ... necessary, to those who do not know what "horror" means.
Horror.
Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror.
Horror and moral terror are your friends. It they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We'd left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio. And this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't say. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. They they were, in a pile. A pile of ... little arms. And, I remember, I, I cried, I wept like some ... grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget it.
And then I realized, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond -- a diamond bullet right through my forehead.
And I thought, My God, the genius of that! The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized, that they were stronger than we. Because they could stand it.
These were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled with love ... that they had the strength, the strength ... to do that.
If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral, and at the same time, who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion. Without judgment. Without Judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.
Here's a YouTube clip of that scene: