Registan.net

Ever since Tim Hetherington won the World Press Award for Best Photo (part of an excellent report by Sebastian Junger in Vanity Fair), of an exhausted American soldier taking a break from a gun fight in the Korengal Valley of Kunar province, Afghanistan, it seems like Korengal is in the news all over the place.

More impressive than a two-pager in US News and World Report, however, is this piece in The New York Times Magazine:

The insurgents specialize in ambushes, harassing fire and hit-and-run attacks. NATO’s military advantage in such a war is air power. The soldiers don’t hesitate to call in Big Daddy (who, in today’s military, often flies in with the voice of a female pilot). But while these flying war machines are saviors to the soldiers, they cannot distinguish between insurgents and civilians.

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?

It is simply impossible to excerpt meaningfully beyond that. But it is most definitely worth reading in full (especially the part where Capt. Dan Kearney orders his men not to shoot back when they couldn’t identify the exact location of a shooter—which is exactly what the infamous Captain Zakharov did in the 1980’s). The many mistakes we’ve made so far, and the difficulty of the challenges that lie ahead, are laid out in frankly stunning clarity. It is so sad to see these men essentially thrown to the wolves, under-supplied and for all intents and purposes cut off from the rest of the campaign in Afghanistan, all on extended tours and stop-lossed thanks to the waste of Iraq. But their resilience and valor are nothing short of breathtaking. They were literally given the toughest job in the Army today… and they’re doing the best anyone could imagine them doing.

More on the Korengal valley here.

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