ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan — Setting out on one of their final patrols in Afghanistan, the U.S. Army and Afghan soldiers waded through waist-deep streams, scampered over crumbling 9-foot-tall mud walls and were closing in on a suspected bomb-making factory when their mission came to an unexpected halt.
Fifty yards short of their target, an Afghan soldier had been stung in the head by a bee. Now he wanted to abort the mission and head back to base.
American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division rolled their eyes as they told the pained Afghan fighter that scrapping their mission wasn’t an option. “He’s like a little girl,” one of the U.S. soldiers said with disdain as a medic persuaded
the glaring Afghan to press on.
After months of deadly and often demoralizing fighting alongside mediocre
Afghan forces in one of the Taliban’s most intractable
strongholds outside Kandahar city, the Americans in this Army
company are asking themselves if it had been worth it.
“I’m ready to get out of here,” said Sgt. Joshua Middlebrook, 25,
of Sanford, N.C., as the patrol made its way back to base after
coming up dry in the search. “I’m tired of picking up body parts.
American forces have been dying in record numbers this summer. The
death toll in June was the highest in nearly nine years of war —
until July, when U.S. deaths in Afghanistan reached a new
monthly record of 66.
Many of the killings occurred here in Kandahar province, where
President Barack Obama is gambling that an unfolding military
campaign can dislodge Taliban fighters from their spiritual
homeland and allow the U.S.-led military coalition to gain the
upper hand.
Amid growing U.S. concerns about the war in Afghanistan, no one is
feeling the pressure to demonstrate progress more than the Americans working on the rustic, isolated bases in southern Afghanistan.
In the sweltering Arghandab valley, U.S. soldiers have fumed in
silence as Afghan fighters got high on drugs before setting off
on military operations. They’ve questioned Afghan police
commanders suspected of cutting private protection deals with Taliban insurgents. Problems with the Afghan police in Arghandab probably reached their nadir this summer when a teenage police officer accused an older officer of sexually abusing him on a U.S.- Afghan base. The accused officer was expelled. And U.S. soldiers said they cracked down on Afghan police officers who’d kept a boy captive on a U.S. base and abused him sexually.
Though American military strategists said they are making slow headway, some U.S. soldiers aren’t confident it will be good enough to assuage skeptical Americans back home and to convince wary Afghans to back the anemic Kabul government led by President Hamid Karzai. “Some days I feel like we’ve made a difference,” Middlebrook
said. “Other days, not so much. Maybe it won’t last and the
Taliban will move back in. I don’t know.”
Over the past year, Charlie Company — of the 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team with the 82nd Airborne Division — has been hit especially hard.
Charlie Company squad leaders said that four of their soldiers were killed and 15 more seriously wounded as they battled Taliban fighters and grappled with an endless supply of well-hidden roadside bombs, said soldiers with the 82nd Airborne, based in Fort Bragg, N.C.
The company’s deaths accounted for more than a fifth of the 27 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division killed this year in Afghanistan, according to the
iCasualties website.
Charlie Company spent much of this year in a part of Arghandab that
some soldiers call the “Westside ghetto,” a chain of desolate villages and dense orchards running along the west side of the river that’s provided often impenetrable shelter for fighters over the centuries.
Like the Soviets before them, American forces have found the Arghandab
River valley to be an especially punishing battlefield. Progress
has been halting. Many village elders from Taliban-controlled
areas long ago sought refuge in nearby Kandahar city, and with
Taliban insurgents routinely killing Afghans who work with U.S. forces, some village leaders are wary of American assurances that they’ll be safe if they come back. That’s made it difficult for counterinsurgency strategists to make much headway in creating a network of trustworthy local leaders or hiring local Afghans to work on signature development projects.
“The local population knows who they’re afraid of — and it ain’t us,” said Staff Sgt. Chris Gerhart, an outspoken 22-year-old Charlie Company squad leader from Jacksonville, Fla.
With Americans increasingly questioning the war and U.S. generals
pressing for swift results, military commanders in Afghanistan
are anxious to demonstrate success. When U.S. forces made
significant headway in pushing Taliban fighters out of the southern stretches of the Arghandab valley, the insurgents retreated north.
“We had a greater flow of insurgents than I originally anticipated,” said Lt. Col. Guy Jones, the commander of the 82nd Airborne forces in Arghandab.
The intensified fighting soured some of the soldiers on the
fundamental tenets of a U.S. counterinsurgency strategy — also
known as COIN — that relies as much on wooing the population
with political and economic progress as it does on routing enemy forces.
“I’m not saying you can’t win a COIN fight, but it’s not going to
work in Afghanistan, and it’s not going to work during the
fighting season,” said one Charlie Company soldier who asked not
to be identified to avoid being disciplined for his candor.
“It’s hard to go to hugs and kisses when you still close your
eyes at night and see your friends’ body parts.”
The frustrations within Charlie Company were compounded this summer
by a challenging transfer of control to 101st Airborne Division
artillery forces who had little of the infantry experience
needed for the grueling fighting in Arghandab. In their first
few weeks in Arghandab, the 101st Airborne took extensive
casualties. At least four soldiers were killed and two dozen
more were seriously injured, according to soldiers in Arghandab.
“They weren’t prepared physically, mentally and tactically,”
Gerhart said.
Some Charlie Company soldiers blamed the 101st Airborne Division’s
inexperience for the death of Sgt. Edwardo Loredo of Houston,
who was killed by a roadside bomb one day before his 35th
birthday in late June. The problems came to a head in mid-July
as the 82nd Airborne was preparing to cede control to the 101st
and the joint forces got pinned down in a battle that some
Charlie Company soldiers called the Arghandab Alamo.
The forces set out to fight the Taliban at one of the most contested canals in an area dubbed the “devil’s playground.” The Taliban met the American forces with a well-planned strike that quickly ravaged the American forces, said soldiers who took part in the fight.
“If it wasn’t for the 82nd guys, we’d be dead by now,” said Private George Miller, a 19-year-old Redlands, Calif., native who’s now in Arghandab with the 101st Airborne.
The influx of new forces dispatched by Obama has given the 101st Airborne, based in Fort Campbell, Ky., more power to hold onto areas that the 82nd Airborne never could fully control.
Lt. Col. David
Flynn, the head of the 101st Airborne in Arghandab, took it as a
kind of personal mission to seize the “devil’s playground” and
set up a new military base to throw the Taliban off-balance.
“I told the guys I would not let Sgt. Loredo die in vain,” Flynn said.
At significant cost, the new soldiers fought to establish Combat Outpost Stout, named after Sgt. Kyle Stout, of Texarkana, Texas, who was one of the first soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to be killed in Arghandab
this summer.
“They don’t need to be the best infantry, they just need to be
better than the Taliban,” Flynn said of his soldiers. “And they are.”
In the past five months, 38 soldiers with the 101st Airborne
Division have been killed in Afghanistan, according to iCasualties.
Five of them were killed in Kandahar province last month as the soldiers struggled to get their bearings.
Although the Afghan forces sent to fight alongside American soldiers in Arghandab are supposed to be among the best the country has to offer, U.S. officers gave them mixed reviews.
Drug use among Afghan fighters remains pervasive. One Afghan commander turned up on a recent military operation in Arghandab with bloodshot eyes, suggesting that he was high. U.S. soldiers at one Arghandab
base refer to a particular guard tower as “the Hash Tower”
because that’s where they say the Afghan soldiers go to get
high. “I trust them only as far as I can throw them,” Specialist
Clayton Taylor, a 25-year-old Charlie Company soldier from Lake
Wales, Fla., said while on patrol with the Afghan Army. “They’re
lazy. They don’t care. And half of them are crooked.”
The Afghan police are an even bigger problem. Charlie Company
soldiers said they long suspected that the Afghan police commander in their area had cut a deal with the Taliban to ensure that he wouldn’t be attacked.
“You could tell he was playing both sides,” said Private Larry Nichols, a 21-year-old
from St. Mary’s, Md. “He was doing what he did to stay alive.”
On a recent evening, Gerhart and his squad sat outside their tent
as they counted down the days to their departure and released months of pent-up frustrations while talking to a reporter.
“Has the war been worth it?” Gerhart asked while pacing back and
forth in the dimming light. “I don’t know, because it’s not over yet.”
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