Among the most noteworthy of the recently leaked military logs from the war in Afghanistan are the harrowing communiques from the battle at Combat Outpost Keating. The far-flung outpost was established in 2006, in the Nuristan Province, which borders Pakistan. In essence, the isolated outpost's fate was sealed the day it was built: Keating sits in a bowl, surrounded by mountains, exposed to high ground on all sides. Likewise, the road to Keating was similarly exposed, making ground travel in and out of the outpost nearly impossible. That was Keating. Isolated. Vulnerable. Under-resourced.
By autumn of 2009, General McChrystal had decided to close Keating, as part of a broader strategy of redirecting all available manpower to Afghanistan’s most populous areas. But on October 3, 2009, before the outpost could be closed, tragedy struck.
In the early morning hours before dawn, a force of more than 300 insurgents attacked the outpost, which was defended by less than 60 American troops. As the New York Times and dozens of other publications have reported, armed insurgents broke through the outpost’s defensive perimeter. The message went out on all channels:
"Enemy in the wire at Keating."
If those words are not haunting, I don’t know what is. If this scene is not emblematic of the war in Afghanistan, I don’t know what is. If the tragedy at Keating doesn’t give us pause, then nothing will.
There, in the furthest, mountainous regions of Afghanistan, 8 soldiers died, and 23 others were wounded, defending an outpost that had – as the military brass later concluded – "no strategic value." To this day, Keating's original mission remains vague and unclear. To this day, nobody understands how or why we left 60 soldiers out there at Keating, isolated, in a bowl overlooked by the mountains, vulnerable to attack at any time, with no contingency plan.
Keating, it seems, is a microcosm of the entire war. We have some of our best young men and women, over in Afghanistan, fighting a war where the mission is vague and unclear. In spite of the tremendous cost of the war, both in terms of blood and treasure, it is undeniable that we are fighting the Afghanistan war on the cheap. Given the size of the country, the nature of the terrain, and the nature of the enemy, providing for long-term security and stability in Afghanistan would require a force of more than five times the US force currently stationed there. That's not an exaggeration. "Winning" in Afghanistan would take at least half a million troops on the ground for 5, 7, 10 more years.
In this, the bloodiest month in Afghanistan since the war began, it seems appropriate to stop and ask ourselves why; at what cost; for what goal. We send these brave men and women off to Afghanistan to fight and die, and in the end, its unclear what we've accomplished. Kind of like Keating.