While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on February 2, 2009.

A friend who has read this series on the small but deadly battle at Wanat last summer suggested that we should consider one more issue -- that is, what this incident might tell us about the war in Afghanistan.

I think the insights of this infantry veteran, who must remain anonymous because of his position, are important. Let him explain:

We are so very exposed in this land-locked country, with no infrastructure, not nearly enough enablers, not enough transport... it's frightening, really.

. . . [R]emind folks that this is an enemy that may in fact look more like Hezbollah in Lebanon 2006 than al Qaeda in Iraq. This is an enemy that apparently has no problem massing force in space and time, and is tactically proficient at understanding our weaknesses. My own view is that we have to employ a properly resourced COIN mission . . . while simultaneously ensuring that those folks out in the hinterland have all the enablers they need. A tough problem.

Not only are his points important but they get at a key problem that the battle of Wanat highlighted: the ongoing, long-running confusion between a counterterrorism mission and a counterinsurgency one. How do the two fit together? The U.S. military, embroiled in two such wars now simultaneously, in Iraq and Afghanistan, would do well to spend more time on that question.

That's all I have. I am sure there are more lessons here. What else should we understand about Wanat?

I heard through the Army grapevine that Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser chose to retire because the company, battalion and brigade commanders were given GOMRs (General Officer Memoranda of Reprimand) in the Wanat matter, but he wasn't, and he considered that unfair. (He had been the overall commander of U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan, which is where Wanat is.) So I sent him a note to ask him if that was accurate.

Yes, he responded, "That's correct."

I was away most of the weekend at a wedding, where in fact I ran into Blake Hall, who has appeared in this blog, and came home to see this comment posted in response to my most recent post on Wanat. I have a lot of time for this father:

You all who write here present as professionals. You all present as wizened participants somewhere, some place in this conversation, regardless of your positions. I have read all of these presentations by TR on the subject of Wanat and I see many passionate view points. May I present mine.

I was, in a past time, a Marine officer. By the nature of the Corps, we were all taught to think and believe as grunts. We all worked our jobs around the "18 year old PFC with the rifle" on the ground. As it was, I was an aviator. My son was a Corporal. He was killed in action in a gunfight in Iraq in 2005. Some shitty little ville on the banks of the Euphrates that needed to be cleared, part of a larger operation to stop the eastern flow of bad guys and material out of Syria. There weren't enough people to do the job in 2005. The borders were never secured in 2003. It was just a continuing series of operations and stop gap crap that was indicative of the whole operation since the inception of OIF.

Friends, we shit the bed from the start, both in Iraq and OEF. Planning and execution was erratic, spotty, piss-poor, political choked and all kinds of other negatives that one could call it, from the beginning.

In the consequence, we lost far too many people doing operations that either should never have been started (Iraq) or should have been completed years ago -- as far as the armed forces of the USA is concerned.

Wanat is but a symbol of every damn thing gone wrong. Arguing about the outcome and who should or should not be held accountable is almost a moot point. Yes, believe me, none of us can bring back those lost. No one can fully rectify an operation that went so terribly lost. Will the Army (and all other fighting services) learn from this, or will this be a continuation of the division that is rapidly ripping apart the country and the military?

Those of you who are active duty and read this: please rescue the institutions that you represent--the uniform that you wear. I personally witnessed the demise of the U.S. military in the '70s after Vietnam and it wasn't pretty. If you all have allegiance to your Service, and the USA, please fix the damn details. Plan to either stay professionally and with a positive purpose or work to retrograde our forces,

My personal plea is to get us out of Moslem lands. 18 year old American gunmen walking those lands is too far stupid. And I'm sick and fu**in' tired of attending funerals."

I forgot to mention that I was on Fareed Zakaria's Sunday CNN show the other day to discuss what happened at Wanat, the small battle in the summer of 2008 that strikes me as representative of the war.

Zakaria struck me as one of the smartest people I've ever met. Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I think he did the best foreign affairs interview I've ever seen with Obama, back when Obama was running for president. 

DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/Getty Images

The Army's study of what happened in the Wanat battle a year ago in eastern Afghanistan is even harder on senior U.S. military commanders than I was in my series on it back in February, saying that they didn't understand counterinsurgency doctrine and also that some of their statements about the fight were misleading at best.

The report, which is still in draft form, contradicts a few aspects of the accounts provided by some of the senior officers involved, implicitly raising integrity questions. That's especially significant because two officials at Fort Leavenworth have told me that the Army inspector general's office is investigating how the Wanat incident was reported and reviewed. I also hear that congressional interest in the situation is growing.

The report, which has not been released and was written for the Army's Combat Studies Institute by military historian Douglas Cubbison, finds multiple failures by the battalion and brigade commanders involved, Lt. Col. William Ostlund and Col. Charles Preysler. The core problem, Cubbison writes, is that the battle resulted from "a failure of COIN [counterinsurgency] manifested in a major combat action that although a marked tactical victory, became an operational and strategic defeat." Indeed, the report concludes that the unit's attempts at counterinsurgency were so badly implemented that they "were more likely to foster hostility than reciprocity from the local population."

That finding on the failure to properly carry out a counterinsurgency campaign is to my mind the most significant part of the Cubbison report. He flatly concludes that, in sharp contrast to their predecessors from the 10th Mountain Division, the commanders in the Wanat area mishandled their COIN campaign, both in the long term, over several months, and in the days preceding the Wanat fight. In sum, they alienated the population, failing to protect it and treating it as hostile. They then compounded the problem by instituting a "clear, hold and build" COIN operation without sufficient troops to clear Wanat, let alone hold it. "A single platoon in the open field near the bazaar lacked the capability of holding Wanat," the report finds.

Those errors came on top of the ones I discussed in my series, such as launching a major new operation even as the brigade was pulling out of Afghanistan, plus failing to ensure that the troops in Wanat had adequate building supplies or any drone aircraft for intelligence surveillance or even enough water. Cubbison also is more emphatic than I was about the fears the platoon in question justly had about their assigned mission.

The brigade commander, Col. Preysler, and the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Ostlund, come in for repeated criticisms. (I e-mailed a copy of this post to both officers yesterday, asking for their comments or responses, but didn't hear back from either.) Preysler, for example, has flatly stated that the Wanat outpost was never intended to be a "full-up combat outpost," or COP. "That is absolutely false and not true," he said after the fight. "So, from the get-go, that is just [expletive] and it's not right." The report finds that statement to be misleading, because, it notes, there were extensive plans for construction of a "permanent COP," with walls, housing and sewage control.

In addition, while Ostlund, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, has stated that he was carrying out a COIN campaign, with a focus on "living with the population," the report finds that statement to be inaccurate. "This was not the case in the Waigal Valley, where the paratroopers occupied only two COPs, and had almost no interaction with the population." The report finds the statement of one machine gunner in the unit to be more accurate: "We didn't interact with them...They didn't come near us and we didn't go near them." Underscoring the hazy grasp Ostlund and his subordinates had of COIN, the report says, they were precise about the number of engagements they had, and even the number of bombs and missiles fired, but were "unable to provide commensurate statistics" for their efforts to actually help the local population.

The report quotes one soldier's view was representative: "These people, they disgust me...Everything about those people up there is disgusting. They're worthless." This is not an attitude that tends to produce productive relationships.

These findings on COIN, by the way, sharply contradict the findings of the Army's 15-6 inquiry into the firefight, conducted by Col. Mark Johnstone, who recommended in Powerpointese, "Continue to interact closely with the local population as per current counterinsurgency doctrine."

Cubbison also writes that, "The highly kinetic approach favored by TF Rock...rapidly and inevitably degraded the relationships between the US Army and the Waigal population." To top it off, a helicopter attack on some trucks just a few days before the Wanat outpost was established wound up killing a good percentage of the doctors and other health care workers in the valley.

Also, while there was every reason to expect an attack on the outpost as it was being established, which had happened with previous outposts, Ostlund didn't appear to be focused on it. As a result, he and his subordinates appeared to neglect repeated signs that a major attack was imminent. "Until it had actually been the target of a major ACM [anti-coalition militia] attack, no senior leadership visited the new installation," the report states.

The report also states that assertions made by officers involved that UAV surveillance wasn't in place because of "weather issues" was "not accurate."

In addition, Cubbison casts doubt on Col. Presyler's assertion that, "The enemy never got into the main position." Rather, he finds, the "defensive perimeter was positively penetrated, and fighting occurred within the OP [outpost] perimeter." At any rate, Cubbison notes, overrunning the outpost doesn't appear to have been the aim of the insurgents, who instead seemed to have been trying to capture soldiers or their bodies. Two of the American dead appeared to have been dragged several yards, probably in a failed attempt to do so, he notes.

Cubbison also makes the important point that the platoon was saved from being overrun mainly by its own discipline and professional competence. They did just about everything they could do to establish the defenses of their outpost, despite being dehydrated from a lack of potable water. They were attacked just as they were doing a pre-dawn "stand to," in which every soldier, despite being exhausted from building walls and digging holes, was awake and fully armed and armored and surveilling his assigned sector of fire. As sergeants fell during the fight, junior soldiers were able to step into their shoes. He also marvels at the skill and courage of medical evacuation pilots and crews who picked up out wounded American and Afghan soldiers even as Apache helicopters were conducting gun runs 30 meters from the landing zone. Of the 20 evacuees, not one died of his wounds.

The report also is in awe of the bravery and persistence of the 42 soldiers and 3 Marines who fought at Wanat, as I am. I knew that some continued to fight after being hit several times. But I didn't know that one continued to pass ammunition even when he was mortally wounded.

I also think the Army deserves praise for having the honesty to have this report done. I am told that the final version will be released soon. Let's hope it isn't thrown out the back door at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon in August.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Okay, I am down to the last couple of posts on this. We will soon return to our regularly scheduled programming. I apologize to those of you who have been bored, or think I have treated this like the 2008 version of Gettysburg. Rather, what I had in the back of my mind was some of the work Bernard Fall did on small actions in Indochina. I think we study the big stuff far more than the small stuff.

That goes for the institutional Army as well. How it handled the Wanat battle may be the most disturbing aspect of this incident. We've seen indications of problems with how the Wanat mission was planned, executed and supported, but no one in the Army seems particularly interested in exploring the issue.

This oddly reminds me of the Army's reaction to the third Armored Cavalry's success in Tell Afar in northern Iraq in 2005-06. What was done there suggested a different path in Iraq-one that the surge eventually implemented-but the Army didn't seem much interested. In fact, Secretary of State Rice picked up on Tell Afar long before Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did, mentioning it in her speeches and congressional testimony.

The Army attitude was crystallized in its responses to a congressional inquiry on Wanat. Sen. Inouye's office asked how it came to pass that a platoon was sent into a light, remote, ill-prepared position, without overhead surveillance or observation posts, when there were indications of a large Taliban band operating in the area. The Army's answer is non-responsive: It explains why the move was made, rather than how it was made.

I've been told lately that the Army's Infantry Center has conducted its own "after action review" of the Wanat battle, including a new series of interviews with soldiers from the unit. (Is it significant that they decided not to rely on the 15-6 report? I don't know.) I am glad this was done. I'd be interested in reading that review, if anyone has a copy.

By the way, I think it is just a coincidence, but I've also learned in the last few days that the Army IG has been directed to look into Wanat.

Lesson that might be learned: Just because something important happens, don't expect the chain of command or the Pentagon to notice it and act on it. In fact, the more significant it is, I suspect the less likely it is that the institutional Army will act on its own. In other words, the more troubling the mistakes, the more likely external forces will be needed to get the attention of the brass, especially when the situation points to lapses in strategic thinking or by senior leadership.

Photo: U.S. Department of Defense

It is striking that the Taliban fighters seemed to know exactly what was going on when they attacked the American outpost in Wanat, in eastern Afghanistan last summer, in a fight that the Army's chain of command doesn't seem to want to talk about, but which some of those with knowledge of the incident have encouraged me to look into.

The enemy had a battle plan ready before the Americans came on the scene. According to the military's internal investigation that I reviewed, the company commander was asked at dinner the night before the attack if there were UAVs operating in the area -- an interesting question to hear from an Afghan local.

As the Taliban began the attack, they turned on an irrigation ditch, so the sound of rushing water would cover the noise of their footsteps and whispers. Their attack was well-coordinated, "a lot of fire all at one time," according to the company commander's statement. They got close enough to locate in the dark Claymore mines meant to defend the American position, and gutsy enough to turn around the mines. When they attacked, they first concentrated on the heavy weapons -- a big mortar, a .50 caliber machine gun and an anti-tank rocket launcher -- that could do them the most damage. And they fought close, so that it was difficult for fixed-wing aircraft to fire at them. They seemed to know they had at least 30 to 45 minutes before attack helicopters would be on the scene.

The obvious lesson: Keep in mind that the enemy is also learning and adapting, especially in Afghanistan, where guerrilla warfare is the national sport. This takes us back to the previous lesson: you probably need more soldiers than you think.

A second lesson: Get surveillance assets overhead before moving in, especially if you've been warned of an impending attack. If the weather is too bad for those aircraft to fly, consider delaying the mission.

U.S. Army/Sgt. Jeremy Clawson

There are many potential lessons learned from the deadly battle last summer in the remote Afghan village of Wanat that claimed nine American lives but has yet to be fully investigated and understood by the U.S. military command. One major question I have, based on extensive review of the official record and conversations with multiple sources, is this: Were the U.S. forces correctly mounting a counterinsurgency operation, or not, when they got drawn into the Wanat battle?

American officers had been talking to village elders for months about establishing an outpost in the village of Wanat. But that approach gave the enemy more than ample time to prepare what was effectively a giant ambush. This isn't a thought original to me: The company commander worried about it at the time. "By negotiating with local people about the location and trying to gain support it allowed the locals to plan with the enemy to attack the base," he told the investigating colonel.

The Army maintains that the commanders were observing counterinsurgency doctrine of meeting with local leaders. "Providing legitimacy to and improving partnership with the district government was determined to be a key component of the on-going counterinsurgency fight," it stated in a response to an inquiry from the office of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii).

But others tell me that Army forces in eastern Afghanistan really weren't conducting a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign, which would mean not only meeting with local leaders and establishing outposts, but also finding and arming some local allies, and building roads and other projects, and, above all, protecting the population from being intimidated by the enemy. It would appear that the U.S. military didn't have enough troops and presence in eastern Afghanistan to do that. Rather, they were in a tough fight and conducting a lot of airstrikes. In other words, it was more Fallujah 2004 than Ramadi 2007.

Likely lesson, I think: Counterinsurgency can't be conducted piecemeal. You are either doing the full-court press -- or you are not doing counterinsurgency. Just dropping troops into a hostile neighborhood is not COIN. The company commander seems to have similar thoughts, saying in his statement that he thinks more of a "gradual push" approach should have been used-that is, an "ink blot" strategy. Instead, the battalion commander appears to have tried to leapfrog into the valley.

But my thoughts are tentative, and I'd like to hear from others on this.

U.S. Army Photo