WASHINGTON — One of them, an Army Ranger who served three tours in Afghanistan, led a team into a treacherous mountain ravine to recover the remains of 16 American commandos shot down in a helicopter crash. He still remembers how only their boots had been taken off their bodies by the Taliban.
Another, a captain in the Oregon National Guard, held a town in the southern Afghan province of Helmand with a ragtag Afghan Army unit for three chaotic weeks in 2006, only to see the Taliban sweep back in after he got orders to move on.
A third, a supply sergeant with the 10th Mountain Division, spent more time than she ever expected saluting coffins as they left Bagram Air Base near the Afghan capital, Kabul, for the last trip home.
Such are the experiences of some of the soldiers who have lived through the American policy permutations of an Afghan war now entering its ninth year, from the deployment of the 2,000-strong force that helped oust the Taliban from power in 2001 to President Obama’s decision to escalate a stagnating conflict to 100,000 American troops in 2010.
As the first of Mr. Obama’s 30,000 reinforcements arrive in Afghanistan, four men and women, whose lives have been shaped by the war — grass-roots experts as opposed to big-picture policy makers — expressed mixed feelings in recent interviews about the president’s new strategy. They said that they supported sending additional troops, that time had been wasted and the buildup was overdue. But some were skeptical, particularly about the value of training the Afghan security forces.
Even the most optimistic said there was no guarantee that Mr. Obama’s plan would work.
Maj. Kevin Remus, 33, arrived in Helmand in the summer of 2006 when the southern Afghan province was, in his words, “no man’s land” — a Taliban stronghold where British and Canadian troops were stretched thin. A 1998 West Point graduate, Major Remus had left active duty and joined the Army Reserve in 2004. He was called back two years later to lead an 11-man Oregon National Guard training team responsible for fighting alongside a 35-man unit of the Afghan Army.
There were 20,000 American troops in Afghanistan at the time and almost none in Helmand. “We didn’t know what we were up against,” said Major Remus, then a captain in the Guard.
He spent part of that July and August with his unit, holding as best it could the town of Garmsir, on the Helmand River. The Taliban had captured it when the local Afghan police fled. The Canadians had just retaken it, and Major Remus was left with confusing orders from the top. “Somebody in our chain of command said, ‘You guys stay and work with the Afghan police,’ but they had just run away,” Major Remus said. “That’s the reason the Taliban had the town to begin with.”
Major Remus and his small band of Americans and Afghans made a circle of Humvees in a walled area near the town’s government center, which consisted of a few partly burned buildings. They stayed there for three weeks, aware that the Taliban had retreated only about 500 feet to the other side of a nearby canal. Once Major Remus was ordered to leave, fighting over the area resumed. It was not until United States Marines swept through in May 2008 that Garmsir was out of Taliban hands. Today, a fragile calm has taken hold.
Major Remus, now a student at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that he did not consider his effort in Garmsir futile — “we did a good job on a tough mission” — and that the bigger frustration of his yearlong deployment was getting members of his Afghan unit to show up and fight. Mr. Obama’s focus on building up the Afghan Army and police is misguided, he said.
Feeling Forgotten
First Lt. Kristen L. Rouse, 36, of Brooklyn, was at Bagram Air Base in the spring of 2006 keeping track of equipment and supplying body armor to troops when Iraq was grabbing all the headlines.
“To tell you the truth, we felt really forgotten,” said Lieutenant Rouse, who was a supply sergeant in the 10th Mountain Division at the time.
That June, a soldier in her unit was killed in a convoy, “which really stopped all of us in our tracks,” she said. It turned out to be the worst month in 2006 for American casualties in Afghanistan: 18 Americans killed, according to icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths. Lieutenant Rouse knew firsthand because as the coffins arrived at Bagram en route to the United States, announcements would come over the loudspeakers for anyone available to line the main drive and salute.
“It was a regular feature of our lives,” she said. “It didn’t happen every day, thank God, but I can’t tell you how many fallen comrade ceremonies I stood there and saluted at. And all of that is going on, and you see nothing of the reality we lived reflected in the news.” At the time, she said, “the U.S. really had a very cheap commitment to Afghanistan.”
Now, she said, “for people to wake up and say, ‘Hey, we haven’t accomplished anything in Afghanistan, let’s pull out,’ my gut response is, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
Lieutenant Rouse is now training with a unit of the Vermont National Guard at Camp Atterbury in Indiana and will be heading back to Afghanistan sometime in the coming months to provide support for an infantry battalion. She said she believed the president’s plan was “very doable,” but “had we done it right the first time, we wouldn’t have had to do it a second time.”
‘No Guarantees’
Maj. Pat Work, 36, a member of the elite Army Rangers, helped build a remote base on the Afghan border with Pakistan in early 2002, moved on foot in the bitter cold of the northeastern mountains trying to gather intelligence about insurgents in late 2004 and was part of the recovery team for a failed mission to capture or kill a Taliban leader in the summer of 2005.
Three of four members of the Navy Seals died in that mission, a story told in a best-selling book by the lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell. Eight more members of the Seals and eight other Special Operations personnel who were trying to rescue the original four were killed when their helicopter was shot down. When Major Work and his team found the bodies of the 16 after searching a heavily forested mountainside, he had a grim insight into the resourcefulness of the Taliban.
“What I learned that day was that the Taliban took nothing off of our deceased other than their boots,” he said. “Boots was something very practical they could use at 10,000 feet in August.”
Throughout his three tours, he came to see the Taliban as “a violent extremist movement that provides jobs.” He also learned how hard it was to get villagers to divulge information about insurgents to American troops. “There’s very little incentive for a local who knows you’re going to leave to talk,” he said.
Major Work, who also served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, is now working full time on a graduate thesis at Georgetown. He wants to go back to Afghanistan, and said that the president’s new plan finally linked the kind of small-unit commando operations in which he took part to a larger strategy of intelligence-gathering and protecting the Afghan population. But will it succeed? “There are no guarantees,” Major Work said.
A Soldier’s Journal
Sgt. First Class Jeff Courter, 52, spent much of 2007 on a remote base in Paktika Province, hard on the edge of Pakistan, where he was the chief officer of a small Illinois National Guard unit charged with training the Afghan border police, or A.B.P. At the time, he called the conflict the “Kmart War” because he felt the United States was fighting it at a discount.
He taught the border police how to use weapons, went on joint patrols, held meetings with Afghan elders and gave away hundreds of pounds of food to villagers. But as he wrote in a journal he self-published on his return, “We didn’t get rid of the Taliban; we didn’t elevate the A.B.P. to a much higher level than they were before we arrived; we didn’t get schools or clinics built.”
Sergeant Courter concluded that his progress had been in “baby steps,” and did some soul-searching as he left for home. “I am still trying to figure out what we are trying to do here, what we have accomplished, what is or should be our goal and whether or not we can succeed,” he wrote in his journal on Jan. 17, 2008.
Sergeant Courter, now a National Guard recruiter in Kankakee, Ill., said that Mr. Obama had finally given American commanders in Afghanistan the tools to do their jobs, although he predicted no quick victory.
“I believe that progress is inevitable and the Taliban are doomed because they’re on the wrong side of history,” he said. “The question is, how long will that take?”
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