Intel Wars by Matthew M. Aid Read Free Book Online Page A

walkie-talkie transmissions warning a village farther down the valley that an American patrol was on its way. The Taliban commander ordered the immediate evacuation of all of the village’s women and children, and the village’s men were to “prepare for battle.” According to an army intelligence officer stationed in the Korengal at the time, “My battalion’s intelligence officer said that if there were women and children in the village, the Taliban almost always would not attack. These were their wives and children. But if ICOM [walkie-talkie] chatter indicated that the women and children were running into the hills, then we knew that an attack was imminent.”
    Not only did the Taliban’s spy network make surprising the insurgents next to impossible, it also meant that the Taliban usually surprised the U.S. troops. According to an intelligence officer with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, “Finding the Taliban in the valley wasn’t hard. Eight times out of ten, they found you before you found them.”
    Within days of General McChrystal taking command in Afghanistan in June 2009, the Pentagon began putting pressure on the general to provide a clear-cut victory to show that President Obama’s Afghan surge was working.
    The problem was that the understrength and badly overextended U.S. forces in Afghanistan were having difficulty defending the territory they were responsible for, much less going on the offensive against the 27,000 Taliban guerrilla fighters they were now up against.
    In fact, all over Afghanistan, the Taliban had the momentum. On September 8, 2009, several hundred Taliban guerrillas ambushed a hundred-man patrol of Afghan troops and U.S. Marine advisers outside the village of Gangjal in Kunar Province, killing five marines, eight Afghan troops, and an interpreter. Less than a month later, on October 3, 2009, three hundred Taliban fighters attacked an exposed army base in Nuristan Province called Combat Outpost Keating, killing eight U.S. troops and wounding twenty-two others. On October 24, 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that Khost Province, located just to the south of Kunar Province, which the Pentagon only a few months earlier had heralded as “an American success story,” was now largely controlled by the Taliban despite the presence of 2,400 American troops in the province.
    The attack on the Keating outpost was the last straw. In late October 2009, McChrystal decided to cut his losses and pull U.S. troops out of all the isolated outpost areas in Nuristan and Kunar provinces in eastern Afghanistan that, in his staff’s opinion, were not worth fighting for. The hardest decision that General McChrystal had to make was whether to abandon the Korengal Valley or not. It took several months, but in the end McChrystal concluded that the valley was a lost cause. The Taliban were too deeply embedded among the valley’s inhabitants, and the cost of rooting them out had proven far higher than what the bleak valley was worth in terms of blood and treasure.
    On April 14, 2010, the U.S. Army pulled all of its troops out of the Korengal as part of what General McChrystal described as a “strategic redeployment of forces.” Many army commanders vehemently disagreed with McChrystal’s decision to abandon the Korengal. An angry U.S. Army officer, who served two tours of duty in the Korengal with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, voiced an opinion shared by many of his fellow officers: “For years we were told that the Korengal was the anchor of our defense, and that it had to be held at all costs. Then one day, we get a directive telling us that we had to abandon it because some shithead in Kabul decided that holding the valley was no longer essential to the war effort. What a load of bullshit!”
    For all the anger felt at abandoning the Korengal, there was also some relief. An army helicopter pilot from the 3rd Combat Aviation