Battle Company Is Out There

[Cypress]

This is probably the best article I've ever read on the Afghanistan War. This is real journalism. It's not stenography. This reporter went to the Korengal Valley, where an American Brigade is fighting the counter insurgency. It's gripping stuff. To me anyway. And the depth and scope of the reporting is something I've never seen anywhere in the media on Afghanistan. It really touches on some profound questions that go way beyond the simplistic punditry of D.C. armchair warriors, or the horrendous stenography of the news wire services. It goes way beyond the two dimensional world of the evil doers and the Coalition. And if you don't think that occupying a nation for years on end, and killing thousands of civilians doesn't matter, as long as you aren't "targeting" them, think again. That's not how human beings function, or rationalize things. Its a really long article, but this is a taste of it.

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.

By now, seven years of air strikes and civilian casualties, humiliating house searches and arbitrary detentions have pushed many families and tribes to revenge. The Americans then see every Afghan in those pockets of recalcitrance as an enemy. If you peel back the layers, however, there’s always a local political story at the root of the killing and dying. That original misunderstanding and grievance fertilizes the land for the Islamists. Whom do you want to side with: your brothers in God’s world or the infidel thieves?

snip

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/m...tml?_r=2&ref=magazine&oref=slogin&oref=slogin