Military Resistance 10K11
“Jake Tapper’s Book About The War In Afghanistan As Experienced In Combat Outpost Keating On Its Northeastern Frontier Announces His Conclusion”
“It Was Madness” “That Is A Really Awful Place For A Base” “It Doesn’t Make Any Sense”
“In 600 Pages Packed With Detail, Mr. Tapper Lays Bare The Poor Decision-Making That Shattered Dozens Of American Lives In The Pursuit Of An Ill-Conceived Goal”
Book Review:
The Outpost
By Jake Tapper
Little, Brown, 673 pages, $29.99
Combat Outpost Keating Photo; Bob Strong/Reuters/Corbis
Without a fundamentally different U.S. approach to the deeper dynamics of the conflict, more troops or more helicopters wouldn’t have improved the outcome in Afghanistan.
The U.S. forces in Afghanistan were spending their effort and prestige to prop up a government that was at best ineffectual, and at its frequent worst, abusive and criminal toward its own citizens. That reality isn’t the troops’ fault; they follow orders.
November 9, 2012 By SARAH CHAYES, Wall Street Journal [Excerpts]
Ms. Chayes, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, lived and worked in Afghanistan for eight years and served as special adviser to two International Security Assistance Force commanders and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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The first sentence of Jake Tapper’s book about the war in Afghanistan as experienced in an outpost on its northeastern frontier announces his conclusion: “It was madness.”
A young intelligence specialist’s superior orders him to make slides depicting the site where the ill-fated camp is to be built.
“But sir,” he demurs, “that is a really awful place for a base.”
The refrain is repeated as successive officers, choppered into the camp, stare upward at the mountains that dominate it on all sides.
“This Whole Thing Is A Bad Idea,”
“This is retarded.”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
In 600 pages packed with detail, Mr. Tapper lays bare the poor decision-making that shattered dozens of American lives in the pursuit of an ill-conceived goal.
The protagonist of “The Outpost” is a place: Combat Outpost Keating, named for a U.S. officer killed there.
Mr. Tapper follows the fortunes of the base, its defenders and their families from its conception in the summer of 2006 until Oct. 6, 2009, when B-1 bombers dropped multiple tons of ordnance to obliterate it.
Like the troops it describes, the book toggles wrenchingly back and forth between the crags of Afghanistan and the home front, where wives, parents, and children are depicted awaiting, and dealing with, terrible news.
Photographs and emails they and surviving troops shared with Mr. Tapper are scattered through the book, adding to its intimacy.
Most of “The Outpost” is taken up with vividly written battle scenes, peppered with accurate military jargon.
In one, a giant dual-rotor Chinook helicopter is dropping off troops and supplies by night: “At 10:09, (Chief Warrant Officer Eric) Totten tried to stick a landing for the third time from south to north. As he lowered the aircraft, the Chinook’s tail swung to the left, and the rear rotor hit that gnarled tree that the men from 3-71 Cav had worked so hard — but to such little effect — to cut down.
“The back blade exploded and came off the chopper. The soldiers at PZ Reds started diving for cover as thousands of pieces of shrapnel sprayed all around them. . . . Tree-branch parts flew.”
The helicopter pitches off the precarious landing zone, igniting “into a huge fireball” on the rocks 150 yards below.
Such incidents expose glaring deficiencies in intelligence gathering; others spotlight the counterproductive expenditure of aid dollars.
By quoting from conversations among officers, and by examining the contrasting styles of various commanders, the author presents a key debate of the Afghanistan war: the value of a counterinsurgency approach, which emphasizes contact and relationship-building with the local population, as opposed to offensive operations.
As Mr. Tapper shows, counterinsurgency successes are often ignored and not built upon. Former Lt. Col. Chris Kolenda, for example, established a rapport with community leaders; American deaths fell dramatically on his watch. Yet he receives little praise for this achievement from his superiors.
Mr. Tapper tells us that he wrote the book so that “you as a reader (and I as a reporter) might better understand what it is that our troops go through, why they go through it, and what their experience has been like in Afghanistan.”
Other books have preceded “The Outpost” in this endeavor, most pertinently Sebastian Junger’s “War,” which follows a single platoon deployed near Combat Outpost Keating during the same time period covered in “The Outpost.”
Mr. Tapper clearly read “War.” He borrows Mr. Junger’s patented technique of interrupting heart-thumping narrative with an almost clinical explanation of a key phenomenon — for example, what adrenaline does to the body: “When . . . released, it can constrict air passages and blood vessels, increase the heart rate, cause tunnel vision, relax the bladder, and prompt the nervous system’s fight-or-flight response.”
Despite its abundant detail, and the lengths to which Mr. Tapper goes to interview protagonists and cross-check their accounts, “The Outpost” lacks one key element: authenticity.
Mr. Junger embedded, repeatedly, with his platoon. He knows what the soldiers went through because he went through it, too. Dialogue that Mr. Junger put between quotation marks actually happened. He has it on tape. That shared experience adds an unrivaled power to Mr. Junger’s writing.
“The Outpost,” by contrast, feels formulaic. Mr. Tapper gathered most of his information from his office in Washington, conducting some interviews in person while others, he concedes in a section on sourcing, were done by phone or email. And while Mr. Tapper handles conversations and chaotic events with proficiency, quotations and thoughts and scenes presented as fact are at best reconstructed—in at least one case I have checked, inaccurately. The overall effect is voyeuristic, the empathy ersatz.
Another problem with this style, as common as it has become, is that it dangerously blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction. The author of a novel is entitled to state events as truth, because he or she is in effect God: the creator. But situations as multidimensional as those that Mr. Tapper describes can never be nailed down with such omniscience. By keeping his sources — and thus their perspective s— out of his prose, where they might interfere with the tempo, Mr. Tapper has written what could best be considered a docudrama.
Several men he interviewed once or twice bear little resemblance to the officers I knew and worked with in 2009, when I served as a special adviser to the commander of international troops in Afghanistan. But the group that gets the shortest shrift is the Afghan people. Inhabiting a “mythically untamed” land, and frequently evoked alongside repulsive images, like the flies on the rice they offer the Americans, or described as drugged, feckless, or prone to greed and murder, Afghans are the stick-figure villains of this tale.
Their consistent denigration by the author helps explain why Mr. Tapper missed one of the key flaws in the U.S. policy he set out to criticize.
Mr. Tapper correctly questions the decision to scatter bases out into the far reaches of eastern Afghanistan, where population is thin and the head-spinning terrain erases Americans’ comparative advantage. He accurately points out the vast disproportion in effort, focus and resources devoted to Afghanistan compared to Iraq, an imbalance he blames for much of what went wrong.
But without a fundamentally different U.S. approach to the deeper dynamics of the conflict, more troops or more helicopters wouldn’t have improved the outcome in Afghanistan.
They might have made Combat Outpost Keating easier to defend. They might have saved the lives of some of the men we meet in “The Outpost.” But they wouldn’t have altered the grim prospects now facing the region.
Some clues to the greatest weakness of U.S. policy can indeed be found in “The Outpost” itself.
We see an Afghan National Army commander stealing his troops’ salaries and trafficking in reconstruction projects on the American base.
We hear how Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s promises to elders who worked constructively to resolve local conflicts went unfulfilled.
We watch the decision to “recapture” the far-flung district of Barg-e Matal fatefully delay Col. Randy George’s plan to close Combat Outpost Keating.
We hear of electoral fraud in 2009, and of how Barg-e Matal’s 128 voters cast some 12,000 ballots. But these dots are never connected.
I happened to be on Col. George’s base the day he got word that Barg-e Matal, population about 1,500, had been “overrun” by insurgents.
Col. George argued, convincingly, that the tiny district had minimal strategic value, and that his men had seen no signs of a battle.
Back in Kabul, I urged my boss, the newly arrived Gen. Stanley McChrystal, not to overreact to the Barg-e Matal threat. But Mr. Karzai had ambushed Gen. McChrystal at a security meeting with a tirade about the reported attack. The Afghan defense minister threatened to resign if U.S. troops weren’t sent.
For the sake of his relationship with the Afghan president, Gen. McChrystal ordered the operation that set back the closure of Combat Outpost Keating, deploying almost as many U.S. troops to the district as there were inhabitants.
I was sure that Mr. Karzai, whom I had known for years, was playing the new U.S. commander.
One reason Mr. Karzai was so adamant in demanding a U.S. presence in Barg-e Matal, it turned out, was to ensure that unfrequented polling stations remained open so that his acolytes could stuff the empty ballot boxes — to facilitate electoral fraud, in other words.
Confronted with the Afghan army commander’s theft of salaries and reconstruction funds, Lt. Chris Briley “figured the concept of ‘skimming’ was so ingrained in Afghan culture that there was nothing he could do to change it” — even though numerous Afghans had complained about it.
Mr. Tapper has Lt. Col. Brad Brown muse that “the Afghan authorities had made no meaningful effort to take over” the role of working with local elders.
In other words, the U.S. forces in Afghanistan were spending their effort and prestige to prop up a government that was at best ineffectual, and at its frequent worst, abusive and criminal toward its own citizens. That reality isn’t the troops’ fault; they follow orders.
But Mr. Tapper never imagines that this collusion may explain why some Afghans react negatively to Americans.
He only touches on the question of abusive governance in his second-to-last paragraph. Presumptions that Afghans are congenitally venal reduced it to an afterthought—for him as for U.S. decision makers.
By failing to consider and evaluate the motivations of Afghans as if they might just be rational, Mr. Tapper falls into the very errors of the U.S. policy he decries.
He focuses in compulsive detail on military tactics and numbers of men in uniform and bypasses the factors that have truly determined the course of this war.
AFGHANISTAN WAR REPORTS
Foreign Occupation “Servicemember” Killed Somewhere Or Other In Afghanistan Monday:
Nationality Not Announced
November 12, 2012 Reuters
A foreign servicemember died following an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan today.
Foreign Occupation “Servicemember” Killed Somewhere Or Other In Afghanistan Tuesday:
Nationality Not Announced
November 13, 2012 Reuters
A foreign servicemember died as a result of an explosion on a military camp in southern Afghanistan today.
Officer Killed By Afghan ‘Ally’ As He Played Football At Own Base
13 November 2012 by CRAIG BROWN, Edinburgh Evening News & 12 November Ministry of Defence
A Scottish soldier was shot dead by a rogue member of the Afghan army as he played in a football match on Remembrance Day, it emerged last night.
Captain Walter Barrie was playing in a match on Sunday between British soldiers and members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) at his base in the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand province when he was shot at close range, the Ministry of Defence said.
Capt Barrie, from Glasgow, had been mentoring and advising a brigade of the ANA to take over security in an area of southern Afghanistan.
The soldier was shot at Forward Operating Base Shawqat.
POLITICIANS REFUSE TO HALT THE BLOODSHED
THE TROOPS HAVE THE POWER TO STOP THE WAR
Resistance Action
A hole in the wall of a house caused by a rocket attack in Kabul Tuesday. Omar Sobhani / Reuters
11.13.12 NBCNews.com
A rocket landed near the Afghan intelligence agency in Kabul and two others struck near the airport highway and a private television station early Tuesday morning, security officials said.
At least one person was killed and two wounded, Kabul police chief Ayoub Salangi said. Insurgents shot the rockets from positions on the eastern outskirts of the city, he said.
SOMALIA WAR REPORTS
Al Shabaab Insurgents Attack Ethiopian Military Occupation Convoy:
Fighters Escape After The Attack
Nov 12, 2012 Garowe Online
BAIDOA, Somalia
At least 10 people including civilians were killed after an ambush by Al Shabaab insurgents on a Ethiopian military convoy traveling in the outskirts of Baidoa capital of Bay region, Garowe Online reports.
The clashes sparked after an Ethiopian convoy was hit with a roadside bomb planted by Al Shabaab fighters who attacked the foreign troops with heavy artillery near Awdinle outside of Baidoa.
According to local sources, the clashes lasted for many hours after Ethiopian troops answered with their own artillery. At least 10 people were killed 3 of who were civilians, according to Baidoa authorities.
There were three other injured although the Ethiopian casualties were not confirmed.
Some reports indicate that Ethiopian forces fired indiscriminately in the town of Awdinle after the ambush killing civilians.
Chief of Police for Bay region, Col. Mahad Abdirahman Adan, stated that civilians took the brunt of the devastation.
“Many civilians were injured and some killed in the clashes, they were innocent of crime,” said Col. Adan.