The battle of Wanat took place 10 years ago today, costing the lives of nine paratroopers from TF Rock, 2-503 Infantry. I've spent a lot of time digging into this battle for a book so here is a thread on its significance w/ a decade of hindsight.
First, an aside: we call it "Wanat" because that's the way it wound up being transliterated on US military maps via a game of linguistic telephone, from a Waygali name to a written Pashto/Dari form to Russian to English. The town's real, native name is Want, short for Want-Sor.
The fact that Americans shed blood there has basically given the town a new name as far as English-language history is concerned, kind of like how in a US context we know what's actually the Jhangjin Lake only as the Chosin Reservoir.
Nine paratroopers were killed at Wanat/Want at a time when the Afghan war was pretty low-profile relative to Iraq, and underresourced. The grueling battle resulted in a lot of high-valor awards, and also a lot of investigations, by the 173rd, CENTCOM, and the Army.
The investigations asked a lot of specific questions about timelines, resources, drones, construction equipment, water, weapons, etc., but the basic implied question was: Whose fault was it that a bunch of guerrillas were able to kill nine Americans in the middle of nowhere?
The CENTCOM investigation recommended charges against the company, battalion, and brigade commanders. The company commander essentially got a Silver Star for his actions during the battle and an allegation of dereliction of duty for failing to prevent it from taking place.
(There is a historical echo here not many Americans know about. There is a little village on the other side of the Kurbagh Sar mountain from Wanat called Kunyak where the Soviets had a similar drama, also resulting in scandal & charges of dereliction of duty. Not on US maps.)
One common perspective on the investigations is that their findings were a necessary check on arrogant, careless commanders. The division commander, who passed up a promotion to 3-star and left the Army in part because he felt his subordinates were treated unfairly, disagreed.
“This is not a ship running aground,” the division commander objected to the Marine general in charge of the CENTCOM investigation during his testimony. “This is a thinking, living, flexible enemy that knows the area better than we do.”
The Army eventually took the division commander's view in a third inquiry and declined to formally censure the officers CENTCOM recommended charging. "In battle," the Army report chided, "casualties are inevitable. Regrettably, they are often the price of victory."
It's true that in a very narrow tactical sense Wanat was a victory. The attackers never got inside the wire of the main outpost, only the satellite OP, and the defenders killed a lot more enemy than the nine they lost, although we really have no solid idea how many more.
What none of the Wanat investigations looked at was the longer-term significance of the battle—how it fit into the larger picture of the war in Afghanistan or America’s involvement in the northeastern part of the country. They came too soon after the fact to be able to.
If the investigations had taken that longer view, they might have distributed the blame far more widely—onto CIA, SOF, and 10th Mountain officers who helped get the 173rd where it was in July 2008, and onto the whole way the US campaign in Afghanistan was set up.
A catalog of deeper failings in the US war effort helped bring the battle of Wanat about and affected its course. Frequent shuffling of generals in Kabul made development/COIN in Nuristan a top priority one year but a low priority the next.
That, in turn, exacerbated the problems of the unit rotation system, which both locked incoming units into the “footprints” of outgoing ones and limited the ability of newly arrived commanders to understand the nuances of their predecessors’ approaches.
Chronic underresourcing had created a situation where most of the time, just two Apaches were aloft over a mountainous three-province region the size of New Jersey. (In Baghdad, meanwhile, four or more Apaches often flew at once over the 15-square-mile district of Sadr City.)
A steady drumbeat of civilian casualties in the Waygal valley going back to October 2003 (when a CIA-directed airstrike mauled a respected Waygali family) up through a botched Apache strike nine days before the battle, also contributed. People in the Waygal were fed up and angry.
Even though the Wanat attack had been in the works weeks before the Apache strike, Waygal residents later explained to me, the militants who planned and commanded it took the opportunity to swell their ranks with angry local men they recruited at the funeral for the victims.
In this larger context Wanat was not a victory. Nobody planned for Wanat to be the high-water mark of US involvement in the Waygal and Pech, but that's how it panned out—and the enemy, and the people who live there, obviously noticed.
The game of "musical outposts" that led up to the battle was driven in part by the battalion commander's desire to scale back US involvement in the Waygal without looking like the US was retreating. But after the battle that's what it looked like because that's what happened.
“When the Americans left Aranas and Want, we hugged each other,” one Waygali shura leader told me last summer. “But what came after them was the Taliban and al-Qaeda and Daesh who were not there before. That was the outcome of the American presence.”
“Leaving strengthened the enemy and gave them good propaganda,” said a Waygali interpreter who worked for 2-503 and its predecessors. “When the Americans left Wanat, people thought, My God, the Americans have run away from the Waygal valley.”
Plenty of Americans involved saw this bluntly at the time, even though the 173rd and ISAF were trying to downplay any idea of retreat or defeat. “Strategically, did the enemy probably win? Yes, because we pulled out of that area," 2-503's battalion XO told the CENTCOM team.
The battalion command sergeant major, who was angry about the pullout when it happened, saw the optics plainly. As he put it to the CENTCOM team, “The thing with not staying—we are the last superpower in the world and we get pushed out by the Taliban?”
The battalion commander did not like hearing it put that way at the time of the Wanat battle, but he said much the same thing to CENTCOM. “I think it was a tactical win and a strategic defeat up there,” he told the generals investigating his conduct. “I really do.”
A decade later the US military is still involved in the Waygal—now through a years-long drone campaign led by JSOC. The most recent one I'm aware of was in January. Now they target ISIS-K, not AQ. As one veteran of the area put it, "There will always be dragons to slay up there."
(...That veteran was you, @LorenCrowe, in case you don't remember.)
