Letter response

Question from a reporter after I returned:

"I've heard from some troops who served there, as well as think tankers and other folks, that the US presence there was an "irritant" to the local population, and that they only joined the insurgency to get the US troops out of there.

I'm wondering if you've seen the same kind of insularity and isolation elsewhere in Kunar. Did you ever get the sense that the locals don't want you there, and could live fine alone, without US or ANA presence?"

My response:

True, the ETT job is not an easy one, but was by far the most rewarding thing I've done, and I think many ETTs would agree with me.

I do not want to denigrate the observations made by the individuals you talked to with experience in the Korengal, but I'm going to try to give you a bit of additional context on the Korengal before I move on to your questions. I think it's a bit of a simplification to say that Korengalis joined the insurgency to get us out of there. On the one hand, it's true that the folks out in Korengal do not like outsiders typically and will fight whoever shows up in their domain. They do want to be left alone. However, we have to keep in mind that not all the fighters in the Korengal were Korengalis. We heard a lot of voices over the radio that were from Pakistan or speaking Arabic. I think the fact was, that in the Korengal we never had sufficient combat capability (either in number or in the capability of the troops that were there) in order to provide a level of security to keep those outsiders out. So while we might say they fought us so that they'd be left alone, we could equally say they were forced to fight us by outside influence, including people that killed the local leaders when they cooperated with us. I don't believe the Korengalis wanted those outside insurgents in their valley either. The fact of the matter is we simply did not do a good enough job out there to win anyone to our side.

We can also equally argue that the locals' position on our presence was irrelevant. Part of the idea in having forces in the Korengal was to fight the insurgents there, rather than in the more populated areas. Those valleys in Kunar do eventually feed in towards Kabul, and the position at one time was to fight in the hinterlands as a way of taking pressure off the cities, specifically Kabul. Now that we've ceded that territory, it reverts to becoming a lawless region where things happen that we don't like - a safe haven if you will. We went into Afghanistan in the first place so that the Taliban would not have a place to hide unmolested to plot, plan, and train. The fact is, now that we're gone, the Korengal will not be simply a peaceful valley full of folks living a peaceful pastoral existence doing their own thing with no impact on the outside world. It will, and probably already has, become an area our enemies will use to their advantage. If the Korengalis could or would keep out foreigners and live peacefully, then we'd have no issue. But that will not be the case.

As for other areas of Kunar, my experience is with the Pech Valley, which has several large valleys branching off from it, including the Korengal, the Wama, the Watapor, the ChapaDara, and another whose name eludes me where the famous battle of Wanat took place. Go far enough into any of those valleys and we have little influence and no control. The people in the region are certainly not homogeneous, but they do share a lot of characteristics. I think it's fair to say that most do not want to be ruled by what they perceive as a corrupt regime in Kabul, and are probably tired of the US presence. I also think it's fair to say that they don't want to be ruled by the Taliban. They do want economic opportunity. They do want their daughters to go to school. They do want to live in peace. While some share an extremist ideology (and probably more so in the Korengal than other places in Kunar) with the Taliban that they picked up during their time as refugees in Pakistan during the Soviet conflict, certainly not all or most feel that way. Many of those people understand why our forces are there and what we're doing.

Odyssey

Only when working for the government would you travel 21 time zones west to get to a point 3 times zones to your east. Our diplomats really need to get to work on China so we can fly over that country. If we could have overflown China, we'd have gotten home a day and a half earlier and felt much better on arrival. Instead, we flew from Afghanistan to Kyrgyzstan, spent a night there and then continued to Germany, Alaska and Okinawa. Upon arrival in Okinawa we dropped off some of our sister teams, spent a few hours at a reception and then resumed our journey. From Okinawa it was still nearly a day's trip to get back to Hawaii, stopping in Tokyo. On the plus side, it is always nice to intermingle with the Japanese, however superficial our interaction with them may have been on our short stay. And fortunately the plane was mostly empty so plenty of room to move about, although this fact is part of why we had to fly so far (We didn't have enough of our own pax to charter a flight to go exactly where we wanted in the fastest possible way.).

In all, we spent nearly 40 hours in the air between Afghanistan and Hawaii and traveled across 26 time zones.

Endex

"If you teach a man anything he will never know." - Bernard Shaw

Well, it’s all over now, except the good times and celebrating together when we get home. From the very beginning it was easy to see we had a stellar group of young men in this unit, top to bottom far superior to other units I’ve been in. Today, I feel more proud than ever to have been a part of what we did. And I’m ecstatic to say we’re taking everyone back home with us. We were not without some close calls – the 21 members of our team were involved in over 300 separate troops in contact incidents (TICs...these incidents can range from a round of indirect fire landing on the base to firefights lasting hours) in our 270+ days in Afghanistan, which if averaging more than one TIC a day sounds like a lot, well, it is…but we did provide a lot of targets out there since we manned seven different bases over a wide area. We will collectively receive quite a few awards, including six purple hearts, but none of those injuries were serious enough to remove anyone from duty for more than a couple weeks. Our ANA battalion likewise received a number of injuries, but no deaths during our time with them.

It’ll be good to get back to a place where things happen normally. Things in America just make sense. In the States, people act and do things that make sense to me. Perhaps I feel that way because America is my culture, or perhaps it’s this fact that makes America so great. Put a bunch of hard-working people together who make decisions rationally without letting superstition get in their way and you can get great results. In Afghanistan, and especially so when working with the ANA, plenty of friction exists to get much of anything accomplished. The mountains, weather, language barrier, education level, the enemy, and above all the culture have a way of conspiring against you to prevent you from getting things done the way you think they should get done. While at my first duty station I can remember often thinking during my lunch break that what took me four hours to do in the morning should have only taken me two hours. Working with the ANA, what should take two hours is liable to take all week, if it gets done at all.

What we achieved other than our own survival is much tougher to measure. I’d be lying if I said the security situation in our area was much different when we left from how it was when we got there. But then, given limited resources, perhaps holding a stalemate in Kunar Province is really all anyone can hope for at this time. We could change a few things on the tactical level (like not being so ridiculously predictable) that might help and wouldn’t involve an increase in resources, but realistically we’re not going to change the way we fight in any significant way. To kill more enemy would involve more risk to our own troops, which would in turn produce more casualties, leading to more negative public opinion, which I fear would in time end the war given our leadership at the very top. Not that I don’t want to see the war end…but I’d like to see it end for the right reasons.

With no changes coming in the tactical fight, to turn it around in Kunar we’d either need more troops…or the right troops. Some of those valleys we were in have been insurgent havens for many years. A part of me says we should just get out of there and leave the local people to their own devices. Another part of me says we should double the manpower (and preferably bring the Marine battalions back to Kunar) and just clean house, even if really taking the fight to the enemy would increase our casualties in the short term. Given the eight years we have invested in Afghanistan, I don’t think we should pack up and quit without giving it a really good push, something like a surge…what an original thought, right? The surge in Iraq showed the people we were serious about winning. The low turnout at the election can be taken as pretty strong evidence that the Afghan people are losing hope on this idea of democracy. And they’re losing hope because we’re eight years now in their country and we haven’t vanquished the Taliban yet, nor have we made their lives significantly better. I hold the Afghan people more responsible for this unfortunate reality than I do my fellow Americans and NATO allies, but regardless of who’s to blame for the lack of security in the south and east, the fact is an elected government in Afghanistan is in our national interest. Now, is establishing a stable, elected government worth the mountains of money we’re spending here…? or would the money and resources be better spent in other ways closer to home? After nine months here, my gut tells me we’re better off investing in ways to protect ourselves that don’t involve creating democracies in impoverished, war-torn, ethnically-divided nations on the other side of the planet. But after all we’ve done here already, I’d hate to see us give up without a really putting our best efforts into it for at least a couple years, keeping in mind we’ve never had anywhere near the numbers of troops here that were in Iraq at that war’s height.

As for the ANA, we need to give them their own battlespace and make them accountable for it. They have the ability to fight the enemy on their own now. Partnering in one area with regular line units like they’re doing now only enables them. If the ANA were operating on their own without a Coalition unit sharing the area, they’d still need ETTs for some things like calling for fire support and medevacs and of course, all that sage advice we give them, but the absence of other regular units in the area would force them to develop or get defeated. I’m confident the ANA can rise to that challenge, but they’ll only rise to it when forced to – initiative is not a strong suit with Afghan soldiers.

As for the ETTs…well, we’re hearing rumors that the embedded training concept is going away. I’m not sure if this means the ANA are going to partner directly with the adjacent Coalition unit in the area without the benefit of an ETT to facilitate, or if this means the ANA is just going to operate independently. Either way, I’d hate to see the concept go away as I’m certain ETTs are huge force multipliers.

And lastly, for my part being an ETT was by far the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m incredibly thankful to have been given this opportunity. This was the hardest I’d worked, with the most responsibility, and most accomplished of anything so far for me. I have no doubt that I’ll always look back on what we did out here with great pride. Hopefully, 20 years from now I’ll be able to return to the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan with a walking stick and a backpack and not have to worry about getting my throat slit.

Time will tell.

Leaving

"Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." - attributed to Einstein

Eventually everyone's time to go home comes and ours finally did. At last, we're on our way out...but it's tough to get too excited about it when the process is going to take up to two weeks. We turned things over to the new team, and they'll begin going through all the things we went through. With the ANA you have to wonder if they purposely hit the rewind button when a new team arrives. By that I mean, the suspicion exists that the ANA play down their abilities for new ETTs in the hopes that the new guys will coddle them and not demand as much of them as they are capable of giving; let the new guys think you're incapable and maybe they won't ask much of you; show how pathetic and helpless you are and maybe they'll buy and give you more stuff. I won't personally say I saw much of that type of behavior, but I did hear of it from others and it would fit right in with what I know about the ANA.

At any rate, the new team will do just fine. They'll find their own way, which will be different from ours in some respects. As for the ANA, I'll miss some of them, no question. They do have some very good people. I'll miss my terps more though. It was hard not to feel like we were abandoning the terps as we said our goodbyes. Afghanistan is their country though, so can't feel too sorry for them that they have to stay. Afghanistan needs bright young men like our interpreters (who tend to see things more our way than the ANA ever did) to help reshape the country.

For now, we'll sit at Bagram and wait for a flight. The time waiting will be primarily spent sleeping, eating, weightlifting, and card-playing. We've already been here several days and we've no firm word on when we'll actually leave. Hopefully we'll be back in Hawaii in a week or so.

Election redux

Our part on election day consisted of checking on the polling sites with our ANA. Unfortunately, we didn’t see as many people out and about as we would have liked, but we did see a fair number of men with purple fingers, indicating they’d voted. Since we didn’t have enough ETTs to accompany the ANA on all the missions they were doing, the ANA actually did a fair number of movements and security on their own, which was a nice culmination to our time here. The ANA proved they can operate without us and hold their own, as they were shot at from afar a number of times throughout the day. Violence in the area was much higher than normal, as was to be expected. Our main base was attacked sporadically with mortars, rockets, and even some direct small arms fire, which was something we hadn’t seen before.

After the polls closed, we went with the ANA to several different polling sites to pick up the ballots. As I watched the ANA throw the plastic crates full (or not so full) of ballots onto the back of their trucks, all the while hoping we wouldn’t start taking rounds, I thought to myself, “so this is how it (democracy and voting) happens”. Unfortunately, many of the cartons for the completed ballots were empty, but we did end up picking up some 14,000 ballots in an area that did not include any real population centers other than small villages. You’d be surprised how many Afghans can fit into those small villages though.

We almost managed to get back to the district center with the ballots without receiving any enemy contact, but…then it wouldn’t be a day in Kunar Province without someone shooting at you from up in the mountains. Normally, we’d stop the convoy and return fire, but on election day we were more concerned with getting the ballots secured in the district center, so despite the burst of machine gun fire and RPG shot our way from about 1000 meters out (much too far for an RPG, which probably why it landed 200 meters short of our truck), we just pushed onward rather than stay and fight. Running away from enemy contact felt like a bit of an ignominious way to end our tour since that was to be our last convoy, but I couldn’t disagree with the decision. Having an RPG rip through the back of one of those pickup trucks full of ballots would not have been good.

It appears the turnout for the election as a whole was low, but in any event we survived it with only a couple of ANA lightly wounded. And now we turn our full attention toward getting out of here as our replacements have arrived and are ready to take over.