Why were so many more American troops being killed? To find out, I spent much of the fall in the Korengal Valley and elsewhere in Kunar province alongside soldiers who were making life-and-death decisions almost every day - decisions that led to the deaths of soldiers and of civilians. The sheer tonnage of metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds between January and September of 2007, compared with half a million in all of 2006.Īfter a few days, the first question sparked more: Was there a deeper problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? More than 100 American soldiers were killed last year, the highest rate since the invasion. I went to Afghanistan last fall with a question: Why, with all our technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes? As of September of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, NATO was causing alarmingly high numbers of civilian deaths - 350 by the coalition, compared with 438 by the insurgents.
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But while these flying war machines are saviors to the soldiers, they cannot distinguish between insurgents and civilians. The soldiers don’t hesitate to call in Big Daddy (who, in today’s military, often flies in with the voice of a female pilot). NATO’s military advantage in such a war is air power. The insurgents specialize in ambushes, harassing fire and hit-and-run attacks. On their hand-held radios, the old jihadis call the Americans “monkeys,” “infidels,” ‘’bastards” and “the kids.” It’s psychological warfare they know the Americans monitor their radio chatter.Īs far as “the kids” are concerned, the insurgents are ghosts - so the soldiers’ tactics often come down to using themselves as bait. The Korengal fighters are fierce, know the terrain and watch the Americans’ every move. The rest are Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks the area is close to Pakistan’s frontier regions where Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda figures are often said to be hiding out. The Korengal Valley is a lonely outpost of regress: most of the valley’s people practice Wahhabism, a more rigid variety of Islam than that followed by most Afghans, and about half of the fighters confronting the U.S. Dan Kearney, were predicting their own Yaka China doom. And as Halloween approached, the soldiers I was with, under the command of 26-year-old Capt. American troops have tended to avoid the place since a nasty fight a year or so earlier.
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It was a known safe haven for insurgents. Yaka China was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the Americans’ small mountain outposts, but the area’s reputation among the soldiers was mythic.
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Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks.
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WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside.