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发帖数: 4825 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/world/asia/25afghanistan.html
This article is by C. J. Chivers, Alissa J. Rubin and Wesley Morgan.
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David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
American soldiers fired on insurgents from outposts in Kunar Province in
2009. Now, the military is largely pulling out of the area.
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KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of fighting for control of a prominent
valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the United States
military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once
insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The withdrawal from the Pech Valley, a remote region in Kunar Province,
formally began on Feb. 15. The military projects that it will last about two
months, part of a shift of Western forces to the province’s more populated
areas. Afghan units will remain in the valley, a test of their military
readiness.
While American officials say the withdrawal matches the latest
counterinsurgency doctrine’s emphasis on protecting Afghan civilians,
Afghan officials worry that the shift of troops amounts to an abandonment of
territory where multiple insurgent groups are well established, an area
that Afghans fear they may not be ready to defend on their own.
And it is an emotional issue for American troops, who fear that their
service and sacrifices could be squandered. At least 103 American soldiers
have died in or near the valley’s maze of steep gullies and soaring peaks,
according to a count by The New York Times, and many times more have been
wounded, often severely.
Military officials say they are sensitive to those perceptions. “People say
, ‘You are coming out of the Pech’; I prefer to look at it as realigning
to provide better security for the Afghan people,” said Maj. Gen. John F.
Campbell, the commander for eastern Afghanistan. “I don’t want the
impression we’re abandoning the Pech.”
The reorganization, which follows the complete Afghan and American
withdrawals from isolated outposts in nearby Nuristan Province and the
Korangal Valley, runs the risk of providing the Taliban with an opportunity
to claim success and raises questions about the latest strategy guiding the
war.
American officials say their logic is simple and compelling: the valley
consumed resources disproportionate with its importance; those forces could
be deployed in other areas; and there are not enough troops to win
decisively in the Pech Valley in any case.
“If you continue to stay with the status quo, where will you be a year from
now?” General Campbell said. “I would tell you that there are places
where we’ll continue to build up security and it leads to development and
better governance, but there are some areas that are not ready for that, and
I’ve got to use the forces where they can do the most good.”
President Obama’s Afghan troop buildup is now fully in place, and the
United States military has its largest-ever contingent in Afghanistan. Mr.
Obama’s reinforced campaign has switched focus to operations in Afghanistan
’s south, and to building up Afghan security forces.
The previous strategy emphasized denying sanctuaries to insurgents, blocking
infiltration routes from Pakistan and trying to fight away from populated
areas, where NATO’s superior firepower could be massed, in theory, with
less risk to civilians. The Pech Valley effort was once a cornerstone of
this thinking.
The new plan stands as a clear, if unstated, repudiation of earlier
decisions. When Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former NATO commander,
overhauled the Afghan strategy two years ago, his staff designated 80 “key
terrain districts” to concentrate on. The Pech Valley was not one of them.
Ultimately, the decision to withdraw reflected a stark — and controversial
— internal assessment by the military that it would have been better served
by not having entered the high valley in the first place.
“What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or
anti-anything; they just want to be left alone,” said one American
military official familiar with the decision. “Our presence is what’s
destabilizing this area.”
Gen. Mohammed Zaman Mamozai, a former commander of the region’s Afghan
Border Police, agreed with some of this assessment. He said that residents
of the Pech Valley bristled at the American presence but might tolerate
Afghan units. “Many times they promised us that if we could tell the
Americans to pull out of the area, they wouldn’t fight the Afghan forces,”
he said.
It is impossible to know whether such pledges will hold. Some veterans worry
that the withdrawal will create an ideal sanctuary for insurgent activity
— an area under titular government influence where fighters or terrorists
will shelter or prepare attacks elsewhere.
While it is possible that the insurgents will concentrate in the mountain
valleys, General Campbell said his goal was to arrange forces to keep
insurgents from Kabul, the country’s capital.
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¶ “There are thousands of isolated mountainous valleys throughout
Afghanistan, and we cannot be in all of them,” he said.
¶ The American military plans to withdraw from most of the four
principal American positions in the valley. For security reasons, General
Campbell declined to discuss which might retain an American presence, and
exactly how the Americans would operate with Afghans in the area in the
future.
¶ As the pullback begins, the switch in thinking has fueled worries
among those who say the United States is ceding some of Afghanistan’s most
difficult terrain to the insurgency and putting residents who have supported
the government at risk of retaliation.
¶ “There is no house in the area that does not have a government
employee in it,” said Col. Gul Rahman, the Afghan police chief in the
Manogai District, where the Americans’ largest base in the valley, Forward
Operating Base Blessing, is located. “Some work with the Afghan National
Army, some work with the Afghan National Police, or they are a teacher or
governmental employee. I think it is not wise to ignore and leave behind all
these people, with the danger posed to their lives.”
¶ Some Afghan military officials have also expressed pointed misgivings
about the prospects for Afghan units left behind.
¶ “According to my experience in the military and knowledge of the
area, it’s absolutely impractical for the Afghan National Army to protect
the area without the Americans,” said Major Turab, the former second-in-
command of an Afghan battalion in the valley, who like many Afghans uses
only one name. “It will be a suicidal mission.”
¶ The pullback has international implications as well. Senior Pakistani
commanders have complained since last summer that as American troops
withdraw from Kunar Province, fighters and some commanders from the Haqqani
network and other militant groups have crossed into Afghanistan from
Pakistan to create a “reverse safe haven” from which to carry out attacks
against Pakistani troops in the tribal areas.
¶ The Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups are all but certain to
label the withdrawal a victory in the Pech Valley, where they could point to
the Soviet Army’s withdrawal from the same area in 1988. Many Afghans
remember that withdrawal as a symbolic moment when the Kremlin’s military
campaign began to visibly fall apart.
¶ Within six months, the Soviet-backed Afghan Army of the time ceded
the territory to mujahedeen groups, according to Afghan military officials.
¶ The unease, both with the historical precedent and with the price
paid in American blood in the valley, has ignited a sometimes painful debate
among Americans veterans and active-duty troops. The Pech Valley had long
been a hub of American military operations in Kunar and Nuristan Provinces.
¶ American forces first came to the valley in force in 2003, following
the trail of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hezb-i-Islami group, who
, like other prominent insurgent leaders, has been said at different times
to hide in Kunar. They did not find him, though Hezb-i-Islami is active in
the valley.
¶ Since then, one American infantry battalion after another has fought
there, trying to establish security in villages while weathering roadside
bombs and often vicious fights.
¶ Along with other slotlike canyons that the United States has already
largely abandoned — including the Korangal Valley, the Waygal Valley (where
the battle of Wanat was fought in 2008), the Shuryak Valley and the
Nuristan River corridor (where Combat Outpost Keating was nearly overrun in
2009) — the Pech Valley was a region rivaled only by Helmand Province as
the deadliest Afghan acreage for American troops.
¶ On one operation alone in 2005, 19 service members, including 11
members of the Navy Seals, died.
¶ As the years passed and the toll rose, the area assumed for many
soldiers a status as hallowed ground. “I can think of very few places over
the past 10 years with as high and as sustained a level of violence,” said
Col. James W. Bierman, who commanded a Marine battalion in the area in 2006
and helped establish the American presence in the Korangal Valley.
¶ In the months after American units left the Korangal last year,
insurgent attacks from that valley into the Pech Valley increased sharply,
prompting the current American battalion in the area, First Battalion, 327th
Infantry, and Special Operations units to carry out raids into places that
American troops once patrolled regularly.
¶ Last August, an infantry company raided the village of Omar, which
the American military said had become a base for attacks into the Pech
Valley, but which earlier units had viewed as mostly calm. Another American
operation last November, in the nearby Watapor Valley, led to fighting that
left seven American soldiers dead. | u***r
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