McClatchy’s Jonathan S. Landay definitely earned his paycheck yesterday. And we almost lost one of our very best reporters in an Afghanistan ambush that left four U.S. Marines and several Afghan forces dead. The whole thing went down in a remote mountain village about six miles from the Pakistan border. As battle reporting goes, Landay’s article is riveting. He’s definitely lucky to be alive and unwounded. Apparently, their little platoon had to wait an hour for aircover because of skittishness about creating civilian casualties. I don’t know when the Marines got killed. It could have been in the initial fusillade. But, the delay in dispatching helicopters definitely didn’t help. It sounds like we need to make sure these patrols are equipped with smoke artillery, too, because calling down Willy Pete (White Phosphorus) rounds for cover seems less than ideal.
This was supposed to be a weapons sweep and an effort to bring the village under the control of the national and local government. It’s unclear precisely what went wrong.
A full moon was drenching the mountains in ghostly light as some 60 Afghan soldiers, 20 border police officers, 13 Marine and U.S. Army trainers and I set out for Ganjgal at 3 a.m. from the U.S. base in the Shakani District.
The operation, proposed by the Afghan army and refined by the U.S. trainers, called for the Afghans to search Ganjgal for weapons and hold a meeting with the elders to discuss the establishment of police patrols. The elders had insisted that Afghans perform the sweep. The Americans were there to give advice and call for air and artillery support if required.
Whether or not Americans are part of this effort, establishing control of this area of Afghanistan appears to be next to impossible. Yet, without air cover, the whole force would probably have been wiped out. We really need to set our expectations and goals pretty low. We’re spending a lot of money and losing quite a few soldiers, and I think we need to avoid doing this for unrealistic purposes.
I’ll be very interested to watch the congressional hearings on Afghanistan that are coming up. I want to see something resembling sanity in our strategy.
