The village of Kamdesh in Nuristan province is almost as deep as one can go into the Hindu Kush yet still be in Afghanistan. The Taliban siege of a joint outpost this past weekend left eight American soldiers and two Afghan police dead, with20 policemen taken hostage and likely to be executed. The Kamdesh attacks echo a similar siege with similar results about a year ago in the village of Wanat, which provoked multiple U.S. military investigations and has been the subject of several extended media reports — the day of the Kamdesh attacks, The Washington Post splashed its version of the Wanat story across the front page.
The emerging narrative of Wanat and, if initial “analysis” reports are any indication, Kamdesh is that U.S. and NATO forces have been spread too thin in Afghanistan.
French forces have been ambushed in a like manner, and the British army’s agonies in taking and finally holding the town of Musa Qala in Helmand province made for an epic saga. In sum, these kinds of struggles have been and almost certainly will remain part of the inherent risk of fighting in Afghanistan. Particularly in regions near Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan — eastern Nuristan, the area around Kamdesh and Wanat, is very close to the “border” — it will be very difficult to avoid this kind of exposure.
But it is important to remember why U.S. units ended up in such far-flung valleys: It is an extension of the larger success they have enjoyed in “Regional Command-East,” the official designation of the long-standing American sector of the NATO International Security Assistance Force. The region’s main population center, the city of Jalalabad, was the first target of sectorwide counterinsurgency operations that began several years ago. By Afghan standards, Jalalabad is relatively secure, and is a pretty good example of the kind of protect-the-population approach that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal preaches.
Success in Jalalabad encouraged U.S. forces to expand the “ink spot” of security outward into Jalalabad’s hinterlands. The city stands at the intersection of the Kabul and Kunar rivers; the Kabul River connects it to the Afghan capital to the west while the Kunar flows from the mountains in the north. Over time, U.S. and Afghan forces pushed up the river valley, which essentially defines that section of the border with Pakistan, through Kunar province and thence to Nuristan. The outposts at Wanat and Kamdesh stood along tributaries of the Kunar River. Both are a long way from Jalalabad, but Wanat also represented an important position vis-a-vis the town of Asadabad, the capital of Kunar and home to an ISAF provincial reconstruction team.
So there was a strong tactical and operational logic for being in Wanat and Kamdesh. Nor is it that much of a surprise that the units at the far end of the stagecoach line have to take a go-slow approach to mingling with the local villagers; at best, these outposts are in no man’s land and often as not they are a step or two into Injun country.
It is said that McChrystal intends to rearrange the ISAF “footprint” to concentrate force, especially in southern Afghanistan in Helmand and Kandahar provinces but also in the north and west, in key towns and villages. This makes great sense, but only because, by contrast to the U.S. sector, NATO forces in these key locales have been far too small to hold the places they clear. McChrystal is judiciously rebalancing the force.
But that won’t eliminate such risks. Nor would adopting a Joe Biden-like “counterterrorism” strategy; such a posture would actually increase the dangers and likelihood of Taliban swarm attacks while leaving local populations more exposed to the tender mercies of Taliban control. As long as U.S. and NATO forces are in Afghanistan, there will be the lurking possibility for desperate days like those at Kamdesh, Wanat or Musa Qala. And as McChrystal rightly observed in his now-famous assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, ISAF is already too fixated on force protection.
The real question is not how to minimize the risks of such an attack but how this one will affect the mood of the Obama administration and especially the commander in chief. Ironically, the Kamdesh battle occurred on Oct. 3, the anniversary of the storied “Black Hawk down” fight in Somalia, which led to the withdrawal that convinced Osama bin Laden that America was a “weak horse.”
Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is one of four defense experts who contribute monthly columns to The Washington Examiner.
