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NURISTAN Province, Afghanistan (NY Times) – Nothing in the documents made public offers as vivid a miniature of the Afghan war so far — from hope to heartbreak — as the field reports from one lonely base: Combat Outpost Keating.
The outpost was opened in 2006 in the Kamdesh district of Nuristan Province, an area of mountain escarpments, thick forests and deep canyons with a population suspicious of outsiders. The outpost’s troops were charged with finding allies among local residents and connecting them to the central government in Kabul, stopping illegal cross-border movement and deterring the insurgency.
But the outpost’s fate, chronicled in unusually detailed glimpses of a base over nearly three years, illustrates many of the frustrations of the allied effort: low troop levels, unreliable Afghan partners and an insurgency that has grown in skill, determination and its ability to menace.
Some early reports from the area were upbeat. Although it was obvious from the outset that there were so few troops that the outpost, like others of its kind, could barely defend its bunkers and patrol at the same time, much less disrupt a growing insurgency, the dispatches carried notes of cheerful confidence when they described the campaign for local hearts and minds.
Before long the optimistic reports about handouts of milk and soccer balls and the good will of the local residents gave way to a realization that insurgents controlled almost everything up to the outpost’s gates.
“These people are hated by God,” the letter said, according to a translation in the intelligence summary. “Soon we will start our operations.”
OBAMA’S WAR – SUMMER 2009
In the summer of 2009, as President Obama explored options for continuing the war, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then his new commander in Kabul, revisited the idea of dividing the limited available forces and distributing them in remote outposts. New thinking took hold: forces were to be concentrated where they could have the greatest effect.
Combat Outpost Keating, along with several other tiny firebases in eastern Afghanistan, was ordered to shut down. By fall, the United States was quietly withdrawing from part of its archipelago of little posts. But before Combat Outpost Keating could be closed, the insurgents struck.
Early on Oct. 3, they massed for a coordinated attack, pounding the little outpost with mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades and raking it from above with heavy machine-gun fire.
A FRANTIC CALL FOR HELP
Forty minutes into the fighting, he reported that the observation post was about to detonate its Claymore mines — a sign that the attackers were almost at its walls. “They are that close to the wire,” the soldier typed.
Eight minutes later he reported that the attackers were breaching Keating’s last defensive ring. The post was at risk of falling, and having the fighting go hand-to-hand.
“Enemy in the wire at keating,” he typed. “ENEMUY IN THE WIRE ENEMY IN THE WIRE!!!”
Insurgents entered the outpost.
… The outpost had held on, but barely. Eight soldiers were dead. Almost two dozen others had been wounded. Several Afghan soldiers and guards were killed or wounded, too.
The Americans evacuated their casualties. Over the next days they declared the outpost closed and departed — so quickly that they did not carry out all of their stored ammunition.
The outpost’s depot was promptly looted by the insurgents and bombed by American planes in an effort to destroy the lethal munitions left behind.
U.S. troops pulled out of Kunar province early April 2010, abdicating control of the Taliban supply route from Pakistan through the Koralgan Valley of Death. The Obama administration must have stopped the search for Osama Bin Laden, holed up in this extended mountainous region on the AfPak border.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
