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.
“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.
Eric Schmitt
contributed reporting from Washington, and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul.
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