NEW VIDEO: STALEMATE IN KORENGAL VALLEY AFGHANISTAN: A VIEW FROM INSIDE

The American counter insurgency in this Taliban stronghold in Kunar Province has been at a bloody draw for years now. War reporter C.J. Chivers explains the fight from the inside.

By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: May 13, 2009
KORANGAL OUTPOST, Afghanistan —
http://tinyurl.com/r7ov4n


The helicopters landed in blackness before the moon rose. The infantry company rushed out and through waist-high vegetation and into forests on More..an Afghan ridge.Over the next 40 hours, more than 100 soldiers from the First Battalion, 26th Infantry, swept Sautalu Sar, the mountain where members of the Navy Seals were surrounded in battle in 2005. They were looking for weapons caches and insurgents.

They labored uphill through snow until daybreak, when the company broke into smaller patrols above 9,200 feet. They descended the next night through gullies and shin-deep mud and staggered back to their outpost without having yet slept.All the while, the insurgents watched.

Why fight the Americans when the Americans were ready and strong?Afghanistan is to be President Obama’s war, and the Pentagon is retooling its efforts here in ways it hopes will undermine a sprawling insurgency.

But as soldiers on the ground await reinforcements, this American operation showed that an old axiom of guerrilla warfare still applied: Where conventional soldiers mass, insurgents usually disperse.Even the means were familiar. In the Korangal Valley, the insurgents have spotters on ridges. When the Americans send out a patrol, or launch a helicopter assault, spotters relay word up and down the valley. Then they decide what, if anything, to do.What is the way through? The United States once talked of winning here. Now it speaks, more carefully, of succeeding. How success will be defined remains any soldier’s guess.Will it be enough to ensure Afghanistan is not a launching pad for attacks against the United States and its allies — in other words, to ensure it is not a national security threat?Or will success be declared when Afghanistan aligns with the more ambitious vision projected by the Bush administration? In that plan, Afghanistan, one of the most traditional lands on earth, becomes a nation remade along at least faintly Western lines.

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