Inside an Afghan battle gone wrong (V): Neglecting the misgivings of those given the mission

Painting any as prophets after a tragic battle is flattering only until the prophet’s record of misgivings is checked.

That's important. You have to compare to the times things went right. You can't just look at the time things went wrong.

But that tends to call into question the whole approach of looking closely at this incident.

So, one approach is to look at what was different about this particular mission from the many successful missions, to see whether those differences were important.

Another approach is to look for things that are routinely done wrong, that people usually get away with. In industrial accidents as well as warfare, it usually isn't just one thing that causes a disaster. There's the one problem that the backup doesn't catch because something else is wrong, and that leads to something else failing because of a third flaw. Each of the flaws is usually no big deal. The standard practice usually works fine, and it's a giant effort to move toward best practice.

This time you had the poor communication with the locals, that left our side uncertain even whether they were against us. There was the bad weather that kept the UAV down. There was the understrength operation and perhaps inadequate building supplies. Etc. None of it would have mattered if the enemy hadn't chosen to attack at the right time.

It's really hard for third parties to get the whole context. Why was this base important enough to build at that time with those resources? It was clearly necessary to abandon Bella, why was this replacement needed so soon? We might assume it wasn't needed, but given the whole picture it might look like a necessary risk.

Knowing very little about the enemy, I have to consider that maybe this attack forestalled a larger attack against a larger base. One of the enemy units that should have gone further and linked up, instead stopped here....

It would be useful to know more about the enemy. All this talk about tribal splits and fighting -- surely that affects Taliban at least as much as it affects USA. They can't just get all these guys to cooperate. They might tend to have some who're against them just because those guys' enemy joined up first. And without a very clear sense of that we might be having half or more of our firefights against the wrong enemies.

Not being close to it, I find myself imagining us putting out the message "We just want to get the Taliban and we can be friends with anybody else.". But then I imagine chinese army paratroopers in missouri telling the natives "We just want to kill off the Baptists, nobody else, and we'll help the new evolutionist atheist government in Jefferson City turn this place into an earthly paradise.".

It's hard for a civilian in the USA to get the big picture plus a lot of details. It's hard to tell whether anybody has that, or if somebody does -- who listens to them.

But it increasingly seems to me, from the distorted picture that's available, that if our goals in afghanistan require lots of US combat soldiers at the end of that tortured supply line, that something is wrong. Who are our friends in afghanistan and why can't they do most of the fighting? Who is our enemy and why are they so strong?

And I'm starting to wonder about Taliban. At the start they seemed like a government, like a political party that had an army. But recently they've been looking more like Baptists. You can probably kill or capture the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention and disrupt their organization to the point they can't coordinate baptist churches. But if your enemy is "the baptists" how will you know when you've won?

Walking Wounded said:
"Our guys had to 'place a heavy volume of fire on the AAF and all of the buildings in Wanat, to include the Bazaar, hotel and mosque' (p18),"
I hadn't realized that they were being shot at by the town. Doesn't this make it much less likely to be taliban and more likely to be locals? That might jive well with the skills of the attackers, if the Nuristanis there still have memories from the soviet days.

" just to barely stay alive in the town they were hoping to be protecting and connecting to the national gov't."
Well, at least thats a way to know for sure that they don't want any part of the central government. Guess the decision on whether to destroy the town or not rests on how vital the central government is to the overall strategy.