A Gloomy Assessment of How the War in Afghanistan Is Going

Scenes From the Forgotten War America Is Losing

September 14, 2014

The Islamic State, known by the acronym ISIL, is dominating the headlines. Perhaps we’re serious the second time around in Iraq, but I’ve heard the same rhetoric before.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban is close to conquering the key district of Sangin in Helmand province, which could lead to the fall of southern Afghanistan and erase the gains made by coalition forces over the course of the 13-plus year Afghan war. President Obama has promised to withdraw most of our troops this year, and all of our troops before he leaves office. The war in Afghanistan, already seemingly forgotten, might follow Iraq and also be lost.

But politicians aren’t the only ones to blame. The strategy of trying to build a nation while Pakistan provided a sanctuary for our enemy was a monumental strategic error by our top generals. Would any sane military commander repeat our Afghan strategy? When our grunts are sent forth to do battle eyeball-to-eyeball, they deserve an achievable mission clearly set forth by leaders determined to win. Since 2001, that has not been true.

So why are we again bombing in Iraq? How does one tactic—be it killing on the ground or from the air—fit into a strategy for eliminating Islamists from Iraq, Syria and, yes, Afghanistan?

I’ve seen the mistake—sending forth strong men armed to cover up for a dizzying lack of strategy—from up close for too long. Over the past decade, I have made more than 20 extended visits to Iraq and Afghanistan, embedding with more than 60 units at the grunt level. I am as disappointed in our household-name generals as in Presidents Bush and Obama. The Marines fought because they were marines, not because the strategy made any sense.

Below is an excerpt from One Million Steps, describing a typical patrol. What was achieved by such valor? Patriotism—yes. Grit—yes. A satisfactory end state—judge for yourself.

In early 2011, I flew to Helmand Province for a fourth visit and met with Col. Paul Kennedy. For the past decade, I had embedded about twice each year with our frontline units. The Army and Marine grunts comprise a small community. In 2004, I had embedded with Kennedy’s battalion in Iraq. When I again met him at his headquarters south of Sangin, he was as terse as ever.

“You’d be bored and ignorant up here at regiment,” he said. “I’ll drop you off where the fighting is.”

I arrived at Patrol Base Fires in the farmlands of Sangin in time to join the morning patrol.

By way of greeting, Lt. Vic Garcia, the commander of 3rd Platoon, handed me two straps.

“You know the drill,” he said. “One’s for you. If you have to use the other one on someone, twist the knob until he screams. And stay inside the bottle caps. We don’t want to carry you back.”

Like the horse stirrup or the bicycle, the modern tourniquet is so simple that it took centuries to invent. Cinch the strap around a mangled leg, twist the fist-wide knob tight and the blood stops gushing out. A half century ago, my platoon in Vietnam had used narrow elastic tubing that sliced into the flesh without fully stanching the bleeding. In Vietnam, one in four of our wounded died, mainly from loss of blood. In Afghanistan, one in seven died, but the number of amputations skyrocketed.

The marines on the dawn patrol wore armored vests sprinkled with dried mud, tan camouflage uniforms hard to detect from a distance and weathered, unsmiling faces. A few wrapped tourniquets around their thighs; most stuffed them in their med kits. I unwrapped and stowed a tourniquet in each breast pocket.

Newspapers in the States were reporting the death struggle gripping Sangin. The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment was taking more casualties than any other battalion in the ten-year war. 3rd Platoon had left the States with 52 men; of those, 34 remained, plus 16 replacements. One statistic said it all: One million steps. Each marine walked about two and a half miles a day on patrol. That totaled one million steps in his seven-month deployment, never knowing when he would be shot or blown up.

Garcia kept his distance as the marines fell into a loose line. I noticed the tattered photomap attached to his left hand like a wedding band—the lifeline for calling in fires. At night, he probably used it as a pillow. On patrol, you’d have to cut off his fingers to pry it loose.

The patrol was heading north to sector P8Q, 40 acres of open fields and thick tree lines dotted by a walled compounds and a mosque that sheltered the fighters coming in from Pakistan. The patrol’s mission was to walk for a couple of miles, avoiding mines while waiting to be shot at, hoping in return to light up the shooter. The generals talked about benevolent counterinsurgency, drinking tea with elders and persuading the Pashtun tribes, hurtling headlong into the 9th Century, to support the government. The grunts in 3rd Platoon knew nothing about that. They lost men and killed men. 

We walked by the mortar tubes aligned toward their barber-pole-aiming stakes, left the wire in silence, forded an icy stream and plodded along in sloshing boots. Every patrol got wet, muddy and miserable at the start, so there wouldn’t be any hesitation later. The winter-dead landscape looked like a sepia portrait of Oklahoma farms during the Great Depression. Everything was a lifeless shade of brown—the fields, the furrows, the trees and the walls of the compounds, some clustered together, others standing off alone.

The patrol wasn’t in a hurry. Up at point, Yazzie, the 21-year-old engineer, walked slowly, sweeping his Vallon mine detector back and forth with his eyes on the LED magnetometer needle on the handle. He focused on the dirt inside the length of his shadow, rarely glancing up, while his partner, LCpl. Kyle Doyle, watched out for snipers and dropped the caps of water bottles, marking safe passage for those behind him. The caps traced the zig-zag route of Yaz, a Navajo Indian who had detected 38 IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) in the past four months. He was the platoon’s favorite point man, with a knack for sensing where the wooden pressure plates were buried. The last man in line picked up the bottle caps so the Taliban couldn’t trace the pattern of the patrol. 

We walked with the war’s paradox under our feet—fresh poppy plants. Looking as innocent as lettuce heads, the mind slayers were springing to life in every field. Back in the states, we were fighting an ever-losing war on drugs. Here in a faraway country, we were fighting a war on terror that required toleration of the very heroin we waged war against at home. Afghanistan’s export of drugs created more human casualties than did the fighting. But eradicating the poppy was the surest way to drive the farmers into the ranks of the Taliban.

The farmers had planted them in long, straight lines and we bruised few as we followed our own straight line, guided by the water bottle caps. Behind Doyle came the two-man machine gun crew. Sergeant McCulloch, 24, followed the machine gunners. On a recent patrol, a bullet had nicked the inside of his thigh. Fearing that a second Purple Heart would mean a transfer to the rear, Mac bandaged the wound and refused to have it checked out at the battalion aid station. He walked with a limp, but so far had avoided infection.

The patrol walked in file with no concealment, preferring the open fields to the shrubbery alongside the irrigation ditches where IEDs were frequently hidden. Within eyesight of the platoon’s fort, farm life was normal. Scrawny cows and sheep wandered freely, nibbling at stray patches of grass trampled as smooth as putting greens. Carrying thin switches, male shepherds, ages eight to 40, languidly followed their flocks. Wending north, the patrol walked where possible in the fresh hoof prints of the animals.

A thin man in a dirty brown man-dress and a shabby turban, followed by an old man and a few boys, scampered across a ditch to intercept the patrol. As the marines walked past, he squatted down and extended a piece of paper, his mouth soundlessly agape, displaying enormous front teeth. McCulloch signaled with a clenched fist to halt.

“Turgiman,” the turban man said, asking for an intepreter. “Turgiman.” The card was a standard form for listing war damage. If a marine signed it, with an estimate of the damage, the farmer would collect money at district headquarters. Like most marines, Mac had picked up a smattering of pidgin Pashto. He tried out simple words and gestures until he got the gist.

“Toothy here says we killed his cow,” Mac said. “He wants two hundred bucks.”

“Where’s the cow?” Garcia asked. “Says he buried it weeks ago.”

Garcia dismissed the claim with a wave of his map.

“Dig it up,” McCulloch said, handing the man back his chit, “and eat it.

The patrol zigzagged along, with the rear guard picking up the bottle caps. Each marine had a sector to watch. One glance around, one glance down at the caps. Around, down, around, down, never straying out of line.

Near a footbridge across a canal, Yaz clenched his fist, knelt, and scratched at the dirt. He took out wire cutters, snipped a few wires, held up two small boards wrapped in tape and threw them to me. Glued to the underside of each board was a strand of wire. When a foot pressed down on the boards, the two wires touched each other, completing an electrical circuit connecting a flashlight battery to a plastic jug filled with explosives. Yaz attached a small charge to the IED, blew it up and the patrol continued.

About a mile from the fort, the marines passed women and children running pell-mell from a compound. More than a dozen cut across a field in front of the patrol, casting frightened glances. Over the radio, “Rubber Duck”—the call sign for a radio intercept unit at a nearby forward operating base—warned that two Taliban gangs were getting ready to open fire. Off to the right, three men on motorbikes puttered along a dirt road, paralleling the patrol.

“Dickers,” McCulloch said. “Cheeky bastards.”

It reminded me of a John Wayne western, with Comanche on the ridgeline keeping pace with a line of troopers. The marines seemed indifferent to their watchers.

“They’re not idiots,” Garcia said. “Exposed like that, we’d cut them down in a second. Any shooting will come from up ahead, after the people clear the area.”

Gradually the patrol route diverged westward from the road and the cheeky bikers. Halfway across a field, in a furrow with no discernible difference from a hundred others, Yaz stopped. Head down in concentration, he swept the detector back and forth a few times and raised his right hand, signaling an IED.

That’s what makes the IED so insidious. Most give off only a tiny magnetic signature. Some evade detection, no matter how careful the sweep man is. Plus, the Taliban are sloppy. Fearing overhead drones, they hastily dig in the explosives and scamper away. Marines take extra care at the obvious places, like a footbridge or a trail intersection. But a marine, farmer or cow can step on a pressure plate buried anywhere, with no rational reason why that spot was chosen.

“Some of my engineers freeze up over time,” Garcia said to me. “They know every step could be their last. After a while, they move slower and slower. And some are like Yaz. They keep up a steady pace, patrol after patrol. He never slows down.”

Yazzie trotted back to talk with Garcia and McCulloch. All agreed to get out of there. The Marines were tense. Experience warned them that the area was sown with mines.

“We’ll mark this spot for a sweep by the engineers,” Garcia said. “It’s too unstable for us. The assholes have rigged traps all around here.”

Assholes, pricks, stinkies, fuckers, muj … the troops had no pet name for the enemy. Any term of contempt would do. Rarely did they use the words Taliban or terrorists.

For another half hour, the patrol walked north, with Garcia in the middle of the file, far enough behind the point not to be pinned down, far forward enough to call in fire. Third Platoon’s patrol area encompassed six square kilometers, containing hundreds of compounds scattered across about 2,000 fields. Vic’s treasured photomap, overlaid with waterproof acetate, showed every field and tree line, with each compound stamped with a bright yellow number.

Vic occasionally called out something like “Number 23 at our eleven o’clock.” Various marines would yell back, confirming they were looking at the same compound. If there was disagreement, the patrol took a knee while Vic double-checked and oriented everyone on the same hundred-meter grid. They knew the hot spots, the tree lines and compounds where they were most likely to take fire. If even one marine disagreed or was uncertain about the number of a compound, the patrol halted while Garcia double-checked their location on his GPS. They weren’t in a rush. They had no appointment to keep, and the last thing they wanted was to call for fire support while not certain where they were.

When we reached the northern edge of P8Q, Garcia called out to me. “This is Belleau Wood,” he said, “where we fought on Thanksgiving.”

I looked at the shattered trees to my front and vast expanse of weeds and dirt leading back to Outpost Transformer to my right. A marine lieutenant had been killed here. 3rd Platoon had fought all day to carry his body across the open, while the Taliban had fired furiously from the cover of the wood line. 

In his classic book Battle Studies, French Col. Ardant du Picq observed that even brave men eventually shirk under fire. To overcome this, he urged commanders to instill in their ranks an esprit de corps—a “spirit of the body” that infused the soldier with the heritage of his unit.

At Belleau Wood in 1918, the Marines had checked the German advance on Paris. The 3rd Platoon log entry for Thanksgiving 2011 included the words Belleau Wood. Whoever wrote the log had linked two battles 90 years apart. A “spirit of the body.” Heritage. A knowledge others had it harder before you and didn’t back off. 

Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense and combat marine, has written six books about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This article is excerpted from his latest book, One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War (Random House, 2014). Half the platoon didn’t make it intact to the end of their tour, including some mentioned in this excerpt.