The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (94 page)

Soldiers die in war. Sometimes troops are lost in battle, and sometimes they’re killed by the terrain. Sometimes they die because of carelessness or accidents, and sometimes because of wind and trees, random twists of fate, the nature of life. Aircraft carriers that haven’t seen any action at all may nevertheless return to port with fewer sailors on board: some fell overboard, some contracted illnesses.

The ephemeral desires of generals for control of specific territories—the drive to claim particular plots of land that will soon enough lose their importance, if indeed they ever had any to begin with—inform a mindset that is long-established. Its existence doesn’t make casualties any less tragic, of course; it simply makes them unsurprising to any soldier.

And yet, there is no sugar-coating the tragedy of Combat Outpost Keating. In 2006, the U.S. Army went into this particularly dangerous part of Afghanistan and set up, throughout the region, small combat outposts, observation posts, and provincial reconstruction teams that quickly became ripe targets for a strengthening insurgency. The bases were frequently small, generally difficult to defend, and sometimes quite far from any available air support. The troops who fought there often felt as if they were on their own. And in some ways, they were.

Once Colonel Nicholson committed to sending troops into Nuristan, the Army had an obligation to make sure they received enough support to accomplish their mission. I do not see evidence that the men of Camp Keating, throughout the lifespan of the outpost, ever got that level of support. From the outset, President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not send enough troops or resources—not even close—to succeed at the counterinsurgency, the “nation building,” that was becoming the goal in the Afghanistan war. (President Bush has since admitted as much, however little attention that part of his legacy—his reluctance to listen to the generals who suggested that the war would cost more money, and require more manpower, than predicted in initial projections—may get in his presidential library and in the history books.) Then, when President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates finally did surge troops and increase resources in Afghanistan, General McChrystal was still forced to ration critical assets. The closure of Combat Outpost Keating was delayed because most of the available helicopters in country were devoted to Barg-e-Matal. Squadrons and battalions were chronically undermanned; while the Pentagon investigation pronounced Melvin Porter of 3-61 Cav “weak” as a leader, we might do well to recall that his commanders were themselves so understaffed when it came to captains that they kept him in place for three extra months because they had no one to replace him with.

By October 3, 2009, President Obama had been commander in chief for eight months, during which period top officials in his White House had been consumed by the politics of their squabbles with the Pentagon, with both the politicians and the Pentagon brass feeding a beast of dysfunction that did not serve U.S. troops with the professionalism and urgency they deserved. The generals, for their part, were confused as to precisely what the president wanted them to do in Afghanistan and how he saw this war upon which he’d pledged to place a renewed focus. President Obama’s first national security adviser, Jim Jones, would ultimately leave his post in 2010 amid grumblings from senior officials over his lack of success in improving relations between the White House and the Pentagon.

That said, no president—neither President Obama nor President Bush before him—could be expected to focus on battle maps of Kunar and Nuristan in order to discern what might be best for the troops in a specific area of operations. The Ranch House, Wanat, Bari Alai—all of these disasters preceded the assault on Combat Outpost Keating, and all followed the same pattern, in which an overwhelming Taliban force attacked a small, remote U.S. base. It has been said that the United States did not fight a ten-year war in Vietnam; rather, it fought a one-year war ten times in a row. Perhaps the same will one day be said of Afghanistan.

It is not only with the benefit of hindsight that McChrystal’s lack of urgency about closing Combat Outpost Keating might seem tragic. George and Brown had been planning for the withdrawal for nearly a year, but McChrystal refused to take the request as seriously as he should have. And while the lack of air assets would become an obstacle by July, McChrystal’s initial considerations were political: he was worried about getting ahead of President Obama, and then about upsetting President Karzai. Realpolitik is not an ideal; it is, instead, the absence of one.

I did not write this book to convey lessons to be learned. I wrote it 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. There are far superior military minds that can judge what went wrong and what policies might be formulated to guard against future disasters, future Combat Outpost Keatings. But one conclusion I cannot escape is that the saga of Combat Outpost Keating illustrates, above all else, the deep-rooted inertia of military thinking. Instead of seriously reconsidering the camp’s location, the Army defaulted to its usual mindset: We’re already there, let’s just fortify the camp a little more. That might be a fine way to go about establishing, say, a new Starbucks in a sketchy neighborhood, but it’s beyond glib in this context.

It was easier for me to get
to
Forward Operating Base Bostick than it was to get back. The military system is more interested in moving men to the enemy quickly, less interested in pulling them out. Such thinking—“easy to advance, difficult to retreat”—is burned into the military brain. Hence, the outpost was originally put in its precarious location so it would be near the road to facilitate resupply, but it stayed there even after the troops all but stopped using the road, within months of Lieutenant Ben Keating’s death. This was a symptom of what President Obama, in May 2012, would refer to as the “How are we going to solve this problem?” mindset, the one that avoids asking instead, “Boy, why is this such a disaster?”

Unfortunately, the military doesn’t have much concept of irony, since the actual definition is so often the opposite of the literal definition of so many actions (a dynamic perfectly captured by Joseph Heller). But naming an outpost after a soldier whose very death exemplified why the outpost should not have been there in the first place? That would seem to qualify.

Why, then, did the camp remain where it was? One reason was that the commander who stopped using the roads for resupply, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Kolenda, led an effective force in the region. Although he and his lieutenants discussed moving the outpost up the mountain to a more secure location—as Observation Post Fritsche was; no one was killed there either on October 3, 2009, or before—Kolenda ultimately ruled that the relocation would have rendered his men more vulnerable than they already were. Perhaps that was a fair judgment at that juncture, given the command with which 1-91 Cav controlled its area of operations, but for a different unit, at a different time, under different leadership, the ruling could be second-guessed.

So why did the successful efforts of the 1-91 Cav ultimately prove so ephemeral? In part because, as is true of politics anywhere in the world, the tides of history in Nuristan were turned by individual leaders—men such as Fazal Ahad, who was killed in 2007; Lieutenant Colonel Kolenda and Captain Joey Hutto, who left Afghanistan in 2008; and Captain Rob Yllescas, who was killed later that same year. The vacuum Ahad left behind took time to be filled. Yllescas was never truly replaced; however hard Pecha may have worked, his predecessor’s assassination had an impact on the way he led. It also, and perhaps even more significantly, drove a larger wedge between the troops of 6-4 Cav and the citizens of the surrounding area. As one Kamdesh resident told me in November 2011, Kamdeshis always felt stuck between the Americans and the insurgents; the one thing they knew for sure was that the latter would be there long after the former were gone.

And here, Lieutenant Colonel Brown’s question becomes salient: Where was the Afghan government in all of this? Why didn’t it at least try to fill the shoes of Ahad, the Hundred-Man Shura, Kolenda, Hutto, or Yllescas? And if there really was no Afghan capable of assuming a leadership role in Nuristan, then was America always destined to fail there, no matter how many Rob Yllescases were sacrificed at the altar of counterinsurgency?

All that I can tell you with certitude is that the men and women of 3-71 Cav, the 1-91 Cav, 6-4 Cav, and especially 3-61 Cav deserved better. They are heroes, and they have my appreciation and eternal gratitude. I wish they had a command structure and a civilian leadership that were always worthy of their efforts.

—Jake Tapper

July 2012

Acknowledgments

[TK 2 Pages]

About the Author

Jake Tapper is the senior White House correspondent for ABC News. He is the author of
Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency.
He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, daughter, and son.

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Glossary and Military Terms

Operational Units of the U.S. Army:

• Field Army (comprising three to five corps)

• Corps (two to five divisions)

• Division (four brigades, or approximately ten thousand to eighteen thousand soldiers)

• Battalion or Squadron (three to five companies, or five hundred to six hundred soldiers)

• Company or (for Cavalry) Troop (three to four platoons, or one hundred to two hundred soldiers)

• Platoon (three to four squads, or sixteen to forty soldiers)

• Squad (four to ten soldiers)

OFFICERS:

• General (four or five stars)

• Lieutenant General (three stars)

• Major General (two stars)

• Brigadier General (one star)

• Colonel

• Lieutenant Colonel

• Major

• Captain

• First Lieutenant

• Second Lieutenant

NONCOMMISSIONED:

• Sergeant Major of the Army

• Command Sergeant Major or Sergeant Major

• First Sergeant or Master Sergeant

• Sergeant First Class

• Staff Sergeant

• Sergeant

• Corporal or Specialist

• Private First Class

• Private E-2

• Private

1-32 Infantry—
 The 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, is part of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division. The unit served in Regional Command East in 2006–2007 and again in 2009–2010.

1-91 Cav—
 The 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment (Airborne), is a light airborne reconnaissance squadron based out of Schweinfurt, Germany, and part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, based out of Italy. Bulldog Troop was assigned to Combat Outpost Keating from 2007 to 2008.

3-61 Cav—
 The 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment, is part of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, based out of Fort Carson, Colorado. Black Knight Troop was assigned to Combat Outpost Keating in 2009.

3-71 Cav—
 The 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry Regiment, is part of the 10th Mountain Division, based out of Fort Drum, New York. Able Troop was assigned to Combat Outpost Keating (then known as PRT Kamdesh or Combat Outpost Kamdesh) in 2006, after Barbarian and Cherokee Troops had helped establish the outpost.

6-4 Cav—
 The 6th Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, is part of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, and was at the time based out of Fort Hood, Texas. Blackfoot Troop was assigned to Combat Outpost Keating in 2008.

10th Mountain Division—
 a light infantry division of the U.S. Army designed for quick deployment and harsh conditions, based out of Fort Drum, New York, and assigned to Regional Command East in 2006–2007.

A-10 Warthog—
 A single-seat straight-wing jet aircraft with superior maneuverability at low speeds and low altitudes, designed specifically to provide close air support for troops on the ground. The Army says Warthogs are primarily used for the cannon on the front, but the aircraft has the ability to be outfitted with precision munitions.

Afghan Border Police (ABP)—
 a division of the Afghan National Police that is responsible for securing the country’s more than thirty-four hundred miles of borders as well as its airports, and also for overseeing immigration. As of 2009, the ABP boasted some twelve thousand troops.

Afghan National Army (ANA)—
 the primary military branch of the Afghan government, supervised by the Ministry of Defense in Kabul. Training ANA soldiers has been one of the greatest challenges of the war for the coalition, and statistics regarding precise troop strength and ability have proved to be extremely unreliable. As of 2009, there were roughly ninety thousand ANA soldiers.